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Thinking of leaving teaching

How I dropped the shame when I left teaching

Written by Hannah Young on . Posted in Real Life and Reflections. No Comments on How I dropped the shame when I left teaching

Leaving teaching was hugely emotional for me.
Admitting I couldn’t cope.
Leaving behind the very best bits – like having a class in the palm of my hand, or sharing an in-joke with my Year 11s.
I felt a lot of shame and guilt around it. And I thought that other teachers would view me differently – see me as a failure, as weak. Particularly because I was staying in the same school, so there was no hiding from it.
But one day I had a conversation with someone senior. They were asking how I felt about my decision – if I’d made the right one. I said that yes, I felt like I’d got my life back. And what they said next has really stuck with me…
They were envious. They said they wished they could do the same. That they fell into teaching and then seemed to fall into promotion after promotion. Now, they were stuck – they couldn’t see any career move that would give them the same salary…and they had a family to support, so couldn’t drop their pay. And that they wouldn’t know what to do next anyway.
That one conversation completely changed the way I thought of myself as a teacher who had left. There wasn’t anything shameful about it. I didn’t need to feel guilty. It was a brave decision I took before I was in too deep. And a decision that probably loads of people wished they could take.
If the thought of leaving teaching comes to you from time to time, no-one is asking you to make the decision today. But if it’s the thought of ‘What would people think?’ that stops you from allowing yourself to consider it, it really doesn’t have to be that way. Book a virtual coffee with me to find out how I can support you to get clarity.
Support for burnout and overwhelm for teachers in Leeds

Thinking of leaving education? These are the struggles I didn’t expect

Written by Hannah Young on . Posted in Real Life and Reflections. No Comments on Thinking of leaving education? These are the struggles I didn’t expect

I left my career in education last year to work full-time on my coaching business. I thought it would be plain-sailing but there were plenty of struggles that took me by surprise. A year in, and I’m still working through some of them.

1. What do I talk about now? Suddenly, I wasn’t that person with all the crazy stories about working in a challenging school. I gave up trying to explain to people that I wasn’t a teacher anymore when I went into pastoral…but when I left altogether I realised how much of myself I anchored around the job.

2. I had no idea how to create a work routine. Erm…I mean, how do people structure their day when there’s no school bell? It took me ages to get used to scheduling based on hours of the day, not lesson start and finish times. And when January hit, I realised I was no longer basing my years on the academic calendar. What.

3. The guilt I feel for being tired. This one I really underestimated. I thought I’d be able to go head-long into building my business, but I crashed pretty quickly. I’d also feel guilty that I hadn’t ‘earned’ the right to be tired. I realised I had this residual exhaustion from over a decade in schools, and I’m still learning that I don’t need to feel guilty for going at a slower pace. My working days and weeks are shorter. But that’s okay. (Really.)

4. My body’s hyper-vigilance for overwhelm. If my calendar starts to fill up, my body screams at me to disappear to a remote place for a week. I reckon this is a result of the lesson it learnt that busyness = stress. So even if my calendar is full of lovely stuff, I still feel anxiety around it.

5. The imposter syndrome I had whilst teaching has returned. Yay. When I was teaching, I used to be plagued by the thought that one day someone senior would see me teach and immediately march me off the premises. That feeling went when I moved into pastoral, but it’s reared it’s head again in my coaching. Except now I’m the one observing and assessing myself – and I’m often super critical.

6. Giving myself an hour’s lunch break. Oh, and a 30-minute afternoon break. I don’t need to say much more about that, do I? I mean. Come on.

7. Accepting that a piece of me lives in education. When I first starting coaching, I wanted to get as far away from education as possible. But it took me nearly a year to come full-circle and realise that I can’t deny how much my time as a teacher and in pastoral has shaped me.

If you’re a woman working in a tough school who’s wondering whether you can sustain it, why not book a virtual coffee to find out how I can support you.

Woman enjoying sunshine and rest after overcoming overwhelm

Happiness in Ordinary Moments: Feel More Grounded

Written by Hannah Young on . Posted in Real Life and Reflections. No Comments on Happiness in Ordinary Moments: Feel More Grounded

Is it just me, or does everything feel a bit off right now?

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the air. And when life feels like that, it’s easy to look outward for something bigger, better, or more certain to hold onto. But more often than not, what steadies us is much simpler than that.

Happiness in ordinary moments is easy to overlook, especially when comparison is constantly pulling our attention elsewhere. We open our phones and within seconds we’re measuring our lives against someone else’s highlight reel. Even when we know it’s not real life, it still has an effect.

So before anything else, it’s worth gently stepping back from that. Not forever, just enough to create a bit of space. Enough to notice what’s already here.

Because when you do, you start to see that your life is not behind. It’s just quieter.

The conversation you spoke up in. The small step you finally took. The way you’re handling things now compared to a few years ago. That is progress, even if no one else sees it.

This is where happiness in ordinary moments really begins to land. Not in big milestones, but in the details you would usually rush past.

Instead of listing the same gratitudes each day, try noticing something more specific. The sound of birds before your alarm. A message from a friend you hadn’t heard from in a while. Even the satisfaction of getting something slightly more right than you did yesterday.

These moments are easy to dismiss, but they are often the ones that stay.

The same goes for the things we think we need to upgrade. We’re used to chasing the next version of everything, but the feeling rarely lasts. What does last is a quieter kind of contentment. The kind that comes from realising what you already have is enough, for now.

And maybe most importantly, the relationships that don’t look perfect on the surface are often the ones that matter most. The ones that pick up where they left off. The ones that don’t need constant attention to still feel solid.

So if things feel unsettled at the moment, come back to what is steady.

Happiness in ordinary moments is not about lowering your expectations of life. It’s about noticing that your life is already happening, in ways that are easy to miss if you’re always looking for more.

And when you start to see that, things don’t feel quite so off after all.

Hand reaching into light beam - Hannah Young Life Coaching there must be more to life passion and purpose

‘There must be more to life’

Written by Hannah Young on . Posted in Real Life and Reflections. 1 Comment on ‘There must be more to life’

‘There must be more to life’

This is something I used to say to myself pretty much every day. I’d wake up, pull myself up to sit on the edge of the bed, feeling exhausted and lacking motivation.

And even though, on paper, I had nothing to complain about, something just felt ‘off’.

The tick list of life, but we want more

Sometimes we fall into the trap of treating life like a tick list. The house. Tick. The car. Tick. The marriage. Tick. The job. Tick. We have it all, but life somehow feels draining, not uplifting.

This is where passion and purpose come in.

Passion and purpose

I’ve heard it said that if you have a passion and turn it into something that impacts others, that’s your purpose. But for many of us, this seems like a pipe-dream. Right now, you might not even have the time to spend on your passion, let alone turn it into purpose.

But this is where life coaching can help.

In life coaching sessions, we uncover exactly what it is about your passion that you love, and work on ways to bring an essence of this into your life as it is right now. Say, your passion is creating art but you have no time for it right now. We’d ask what it is exactly you love about creating art. You might say that you love getting lost in the paint, the colours, the form – for you it’s a form of meditation. So, we take that idea of getting lost, of flow, and find a way to bring it into your daily life. Let’s say, with 5 minutes of meditation each day. Over time, this 5 minutes might become 10 minutes with a sketch pad, and so on.  Then, if you start selling your sketches or giving them away for others to enjoy – there’s your purpose.

So if life feels ‘off’ right now, life coaching could be a great place to start. Book a free no-pressure chat to find out how life coaching could change everything for you.

prioritising happiness and emotional wellbeing

A life lesson on happiness and emotional wellbeing – from flowers

Written by Hannah Young on . Posted in Real Life and Reflections. No Comments on A life lesson on happiness and emotional wellbeing – from flowers

Here’s a little reminder if you’re prioritising happiness and emotional wellbeing at the moment…

 

The other day, I was having a bit of a mindful moment arranging some flowers, and I remembered a time when this simple pleasure would completely pass me by…

 

There was a time when I was so burnt-out that if someone bought me flowers, there would be a part of me that resented the time it would take me to arrange them into a vase.

 

That seems absolutely crazy to me now – to think that I was so exhausted, so disconnected from myself and the world around me that I was so ungrateful for a moment like that. Prioritising my own happiness and emotional wellbeing was way down on the list.

 

Now, the experience is totally different: I make space in the kitchen, carefully unpack and organise the stems into groups; clip the leaves and the stems and take my time thoughtfully arranging my new blooms into an abundance of beauty and colour (and yes….sometimes I might talk to them too!).

 

When we feel frozen in the moment – overwhelmed, unable to make decisions, feeling unlike ourselves; it’s so often part of a wider story – a story of self-neglect, defensiveness, survival…living life in high alert.

 

That’s why it’s so important to reclaim the slow moments in our lives – just like arranging flowers – if we want to truly feel connected to ourselves and our own happiness.

 

If you’re looking for holistic life coaching that doesn’t overlook the significance of moments like this, book a chat to find out how we can work together.

life coaching for women for transformation and growth

A reason, a season, or a lifetime

Written by Hannah Young on . Posted in Real Life and Reflections. No Comments on A reason, a season, or a lifetime

When we are on a journey of growth and self-development, whether through life coaching for transformation or through our own self-study, the process isn’t always easy. In fact, it can raise real areas of tension: perhaps we have to face the cold, hard truth of how much we have been neglecting ourselves. Maybe the deeper reasons for why we behave and think as we do come to the surface and pinch. And, what happens more often than not, is we realise we are outgrowing certain people in our lives.

The people could be friends, romantic partners, and even family members who we never imagined living without. But as we step into transformational growth, this can often spotlight ways in which we are no longer aligned some of the most important people in our lives.

Although this can feel uncomfortable, it’s important to remember your own agency in this; you are not forced to stay in relationships that drain you; or friendships you invest in but get nothing back.

If we can acknowledge that is our choice whether we hold on or move on, we can take back control and learn to let go with nothing but peace, love and gratitude.

And in all this, I’m reminding of the saying, “People come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.”

It’s perfectly okay to loosen the grip on the ‘reason’ and ‘season’ relationships.

If you’re on the growth journey, and are wondering whether life coaching for transformation, book a no-obligation call with me to see how I can help.