Moving Beyond Fear When Leaving Teaching
By: April Brown
If you’ve been thinking about leaving teaching, you probably have a lot of mixed emotions. If fear is one of them, you’re not alone. So let’s explore some strategies for moving beyond fear to possibility.
Growing up, I spent a lot of time where my mom taught. She worked at a center-based special education school and the demands of her job were so exhausting that you could find her (most days) asleep in the recliner by 5pm. Even so, my mom spoke passionately about ways to reimagine education. These conversations inspired me to follow in her footsteps.
After teaching special education in Michigan, and holding a variety of teaching and leadership positions in Belize, my husband and I were ready to start our family. But it was obvious that working from 7am-7pm wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
When I became pregnant, I took the risk to found a small homeschool cooperative in Belize. This decision allowed me to create a more realistic schedule, put my innovative ideas into practice, and focus on my wellbeing.
Taking a risk to start something on my own was my first taste of moving from fear to possibility and leveraging my skills as an education entrepreneur. Since then, it’s been my mission to find ways to cultivate a sustainable and joy-filled life where I spend the majority of time with my family.
If you’re dreaming about life beyond the classroom, it’s possible you’re feeling a lot of fear about your next career moves. That fear is totally normal, but it’s important to not let it hold you back from reaching your dreams. So, what does moving past fear actually look like?
Moving Beyond Fear in 4 Steps
Here are four tips for moving beyond fear and stepping into your brilliance:
Disrupt the “just a teacher” mentality.
When teachers join the Educator Forever community through one of our programs, our first goal is to guide them toward a massive mindset shift. After years of being told that they are “just teachers” it’s no wonder that the message is internalized. Everyone has a different experience as a teacher, and some folks truly are given the opportunity to flex their brilliance, but more often than not, teachers are exploited and belittled.
Before moving beyond fear, it’s important to remember who you are.
Try this simple practice:
Brainstorm all of the things you’re proud about, or things you’re really good at. If you struggle to do this, think about what other people say about you.
As you brainstorm, tune into your feelings.
What felt good about talking about yourself positively?
What felt challenging or elicited feelings of discomfort?
Repeat this practice to increase your confidence!
So often, we talk about the importance of shifting from a deficit-based to a strength-based lens when it comes to our students, but what about ourselves? The only way we can find the courage to take risks (including leaving teaching!) is if we truly believe we can do hard things.
Being a classroom teacher is one of the most challenging jobs of all, and you already do that! Now it’s time to remember that you are a teacher, among so many other things, and that it’s something to celebrate.
Allow yourself to dream.
When we work within a toxic environment, we might experience diminished imagination as a trauma response. It’s a pretty significant loss, considering that our creativity, passion, and outside-the-box thinking is what influenced our decision to teach in the first place.
When we identify that the inability to dream is a root cause of our fear, we can be more intentional about providing ourselves with opportunities to listen to our heart. This can make moving beyond fear a little easier.
Try this simple practice:
Close your eyes and allow yourself to dream.
Ask yourself, “If I could do anything, what would I do? Who would I spend my time with? What would my day look like?”
Sit for a few minutes in this creative space, and tune into your body and the thoughts that arise.
Open your eyes and write down the words, phrases, and thoughts that came to your mind. If you’d prefer to draw or color, use markers or crayons to create a visual representation of your dreams.
Come back to this practice again and again. Over time, it will feel natural to you.
If you’re looking for other ways to boost your creativity, check out this article for daily activities.
Speak your dream into existence.
Instead of keeping your ideas to yourself, find a friend, family member, or community of support to share your ideas with. By speaking about your dreams and aspirations, the impossible becomes possible, and you will gain insights from others who want to see you succeed!
Sometimes just voicing what you are afraid of (and what you hope to achieve by leaving teaching) is a critical part of moving beyond fear.
Try this simple practice:
Set an intention at the beginning of every week. Your intention might be focused on building skills (e.g., I will work on my resume and curriculum sample) or your intention might be focused on mindset (e.g., I am worthy of a joy-filled life).
Place your intention somewhere that you frequent often. For example, on the fridge, mirror, or a laptop.
At the end of the week, reflect on your intention.
If you wanted to accomplish something, how did it go? If it didn’t happen, what got in the way?
If your intention was mindset-related, how are your feelings about yourself shifting? How are you experiencing self-doubt or limiting beliefs? How can you practice self-compassion and self-love moving forward?
Do the thing.
The most important way to show up for yourself when thinking about leaving teaching is to confront your fears head-on and do the thing that scares you. It’s so easy to listen to our mind machine spiral out of control about all the reasons we shouldn’t do this or that, but the only way to get past fear is to keep moving.
By taking action, you’ll gain new skills, build courage, and rewire your brain to focus on all the things you can do instead of being afraid to take the first step. Your newly gained confidence and expertise will help you in whatever new endeavors you tackle!
Get Support With Moving Beyond Fear
If you’re reading to leave teaching and find more flexible jobs in education, getting support is key for moving beyond fear.
When you join Educator Forever’s Beyond the Classroom program, you get access to more than just an online course. You also join a growing community of teachers and former teachers who have been in your shoes.
Whether you want to work in curriculum development, want to take on freelance jobs in education or are dreaming of starting an education business, joining a supportive community of educators can help you reach your goals.
Contact Educator Forever to learn more.
About The Author
April Brown (M.Ed) is Educator Forever’s community facilitator and a curriculum coach for the Curriculum Development Foundations program. In 2015, April began designing curriculum and writing articles for an EdTech company as a side gig while she was teaching in Placencia, Belize. After having her daughter in 2016, April was eager to use her unique experience teaching and leading in mainstream and alternative settings in the United States and internationally to work remotely while still making a difference in education.
The Beyond the Classroom course empowered April to leverage her skills as a compassionate disruptor and out-of-the-box thinker to excel as an instructional/well-being coach, adjunct instructor of a Trauma Supportive Schools course, curriculum developer, and writer for publications such as PBS SoCal, Education.com, and Britannica for Parents. April is an advocate for teachers and students – inside and outside of the classroom. You can find April in rural Vermont spending time with her husband, two beautiful daughters, and charming rottweilers.