A deeply personal episode, Daphne explains why she walked away 16 months ago, and what her vision is for the future of Teacher Career Coach now that she’s back.
Trigger warning: this episode talks about birth injuries and children with complex medical histories. You may want to skip this episode if those are topics that are distressing for you.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Begin Transcript
I’m your host, Daphne Gomez, and yes, it is me. Yes, I am officially back in charge of teacher career coach after about 16 months that I walked away. I have actually been back since about mid August of 2025. I just. Had a really difficult time making myself record this podcast episode. I knew that it was gonna be a really hard one to get through.
An important one that I wanted to do, but I used the time, since I’ve been back to work on new content, do a lot of research, start reaching out to CEOs, hiring managers that I know, and start creating a project plan for myself to, Start making some big changes here and if you are newer to the space and you don’t know me.
Hi. I am the, original founder of Teacher Career Coach, and I exited, to take care of my family and myself in May of 2024. I know that during the time that I’ve been gone, many of you have also been carrying really heavy loads in both your personal and your professional life. Teaching has changed.
The job market has drastically changed, and so while the first half of this podcast is gonna be focused on sharing where I have been, I also plan to share what changes I’m going to make in an effort to better support you and what my vision for the future of teacher career coach is. Okay. A big trigger warning before we get into it.
If hearing about birth injuries or kids with serious medical conditions is hard for you, or if you have kids in the car and you just wanna shield them from hearing a story like that, you’ll probably wanna skip this episode or just skip to the very end of it. When I’m just talking about the business changes, it probably will be like after 15 minutes in the episode.
Okay, so to catch you up to speed, if you missed my departure announcement back in May of 2024, here’s an overview of what I shared. My twin daughters were born extremely premature at 30 weeks. Exactly. And we spent 79 days overall in the nicu, which by itself is a very traumatic experience that I would not wish on any parent.
We left our daughters behind every single day. Not knowing when we’d be able to bring them home. In my announcement, leaving teacher career coach, I explained that while both girls were finally home from the nicu, we were still going through difficult times. We had serious health complications and juggling everything had really become too much for me and I couldn’t handle it all.
So I kept it vague, and for the most part, people were really respectful about my request for privacy, and also for the most part, people were extremely understanding about my decision to step away. I also was so moved by the outpouring of love. from this community. When I made that announcement, I got so many dms and comments specifically from other teachers or former teachers who had NICU stays or complications or hard diagnosis for their own children, and I just really needed.
That at that moment I needed to hear other stories of people who were experiencing something and understood what I was going through. So thank you for those of you who are vulnerable enough to share and reach out. And I wasn’t ready to share more at the time, and we were still going through a lot of it.
When I stepped away, but I’m ready to talk about what happened. Now, I might talk fast. I’ve recorded this episode a few times and I’m just trying to get through it. So I apologize on the hardest parts. If I go a little fast or I sound a little shaky. At 26 weeks pregnant, we discovered that one of my daughters had a serious heart defect and would require open heart surgery.
So obviously we were. Very overwhelmed and, worried during the time that we were going in and out of the children’s hospital kind of figuring out what that meant. I started to have even more complications and I was unexpectedly hospitalized at 28 weeks where I was sent to stay on emergency bedrest in a high risk prenatal ward until I delivered the birth was extremely traumatic, and it’s something that I cannot talk about.
I still have PTSD from this. What I will say is that it was described by our doctors as one of the hardest deliveries of their entire career, and, four days old. Our daughter, the one that also has the heart defect, was rushed in an ambulance from a NICU to the local children’s hospital after they realized her legs had stopped moving, and that is when we found out that she suffered a spinal cord injury at birth and her legs would be permanently paralyzed.
For a really long time, I couldn’t talk about any of this. I was. In shock from everything that kept being thrown at us, and I was in an extreme state of grief. So I wanna acknowledge that while I’m better about talking about what happened, sharing our story and even what’s happening in our current day-to-day requires a really delicate balance to also maintain my daughter’s right to privacy.
And my feelings about this are complicated. They continue to adapt as I grow as a parent and as a disability advocate. I know that so many people have really, good intentions, and this is something that’s extremely rare and they wanna learn more. My current standpoint is that she never signed up to be the ambassador of pediatric spinal cord injuries, If this is something that you have follow up questions about and that you’re just wanting to learn how you can better support this community, as I’m recording this, it is spinal cord injury awareness month one nonprofit I would happily direct you to is the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation, which is an amazing resource.
And so just sharing my perspective from the viewpoint of a parent of a disabled child, what I was grieving from that moment on was the inaccessible world that wasn’t built with her in mind. The barriers that I knew that she would face, the extra fights that I know that we’d have to fight as a family, and I was grieving a society that tries to put limitations on this limitless potential of a child.
It’s also, I think, really important for me to address that I was already burning out running teacher, career coach before any of this happened, but under normal circumstances, the problems would’ve been, as Marie Furlough says, figureoutable, I had been. Working with different consultants and building out projects and working on plans to get us back to a more sustainable place by simplifying our operations.
But, you know, pregnancy, brain, high risk, pregnancy, brain. And then after the girls were born and we went through all this, I did not have an inch of extra bandwidth to focus on anything outside of what was right in front of me. I tried for. A couple of months and the smallest problems could set me over the edge, and I, really, I hit some of my lowest points and wasn’t in any position to lead.
During that time, I couldn’t make any hard decisions, and truthfully, I was not in the position to help anyone. I didn’t have any optimism inside of me during that time. So when I made the announcement to step away, things were still extremely scary. They were really uncertain for my family and just for our future.
At that moment. I never planned on coming back into the public spotlight, and that wasn’t for any other reason than just I wasn’t able to plan any future with any certainty, and I didn’t wanna let people down by leaving it open-ended really truthfully, at that time, I wasn’t taking it. A day at a time, just most days.
I was taking it minute by minute and after months of really scary ups and downs. the doctors made the call that we knew was gonna happen, but no parent is ever going to be ready for, they needed to perform open heart surgery. And while she hadn’t grown to the size that they were hoping for, just based on safety, it was time.
And this surgery actually happened about five days after my exit, and I am so incredibly grateful to share that everything went well and continues to go well in regards to her heart. After that surgery, there was a big part of me that thought. Maybe I should just get back to work, start focusing on what changes I can make, start focusing on you and never really sharing more about what we had gone through.
And I landed on not doing that. And the reason why is I think that it’s really important for you to know that I have gone through a large transformation since the last time we talked. There are a lot of parts of me that are the exact same. My morals, my values, but I am absolutely changed on the other end of this.
And I’m in a chapter of my life that has a lot of twists and turns and unknowns, and I like you also have far more that makes me a whole human beyond just my career.
So as months went on, things started to get more stable and we had a lot of time to start navigating this new normal. I have really grown to hate phrases like Time heals all wounds and everything happens for a reason. And while I know that they are said with. Good intentions. I really think that they can minimize traumatic experiences, the kinds that have memories so painful that you will never truly heal from.
But that being said, in the last few months, things have really gotten a whole lot better for us as a family. I personally have had far more happy days than sad or hard or bitter ones, and that is really not hard to do when you are raising two of the stinking, cutest girls in the world right now. They’re.
A couple months shy of two, and they’re really sweet and silly. They love to hold hands. They hug each other just sometimes a little bit too hard. They give us soft little kisses on the cheek. They’re obsessed with dogs and Miss Rachel, and they ask to hear the song La Bamba like a thousand times a day.
And they’re really determined and independent. And really smart, and I just feel so grateful that I was chosen to be their mom, that I was given the privilege to watch them grow and to be a part of their story. And I’m also extremely grateful for Jonathan, who’s an amazing dad and an amazing husband, and he just helps me figure this whole parenting thing out.
And he also plays lab Bamba for them on the guitar anytime they ask. For a really long time, I had to silence that part of my brain where I correlated my career with my self worth. I really had to stop putting any pressure on myself to do anything more than survive or grieve or give myself memories of normalcy as a mom and take care of these babies the best that I can.
Yeah, but it did. It did creep in a lot that question, what comes next for me and my career? But I knew that we had this one last daunting challenge on the horizon for my family before I had any ability to fully commit to anything. And that was that my daughter was accepted into an inpatient therapy program, and it specializes in pediatric spinal cord injuries.
But because this is something that’s so rare, we did have to relocate to live at a hospital across the country, away from our friends and our family, or any bit of normalcy. There was just no way that we could have full-time jobs until we were on the other side of this, and our family would also be separated for the entire month.
It would be one parent living in the hospital and another with her sister at the Ronald McDonald House. And because we were separated at night and our kids go to bed pretty early, we spent that entire month thinking about what comes next. And at night I had a lot of worries about my family, about my future, about.
Things that were impacting us specifically, but I also, like probably many of you doom scroll during that time and just continue to read about all of the different laws being passed, budget cuts that could potentially devastate families like mine. I am really worried about the state of education, about democracy, about so many of the vulnerable populations in our country right now.
And I was inspired to take some of the anger and pain that I’ve been carrying and channel it into something meaningful to try and do some good. A quote that really inspired me during this time was, I think it’s Joan Baez. It’s action is the antidote to despair. I’ve phone banked to help constituents leave voice messages to fight for Medicaid.
During this time, I also was able to use an office in the hospital space that they have for parents to use who are working. And I spent time there volunteering with nonprofits, consulting with them on marketing strategy and operations. And at the exact same time, my husband and I started brewing up a small business idea that would serve our local community.
And time went by and towards the end of our stay, actually just a few days before our discharge, one of the hospital staff members that I got close with said something that completely caught me off guard. She said that she knew who I was about teacher career coach. She just hadn’t said anything for the past, like 20 something days.
She said that the first day that we came into her department, her colleague recognized me, but. She was not going to say anything to me. They both work in the Child Life department of the hospital, which makes a lot of sense that former teachers would be there, but still, this just really caught me off guard.
Not only because we were just overwhelmed with the whole process of getting into the hospital, but also just to this day, I never really have gotten used to people recognizing me in public anyhow. She told me, she thought before I left, I should know how much teacher career coach meant to her coworker, but that she didn’t plan on saying anything to me, and I asked her why, and she said.
She just wanted me to be able to be a parent. I know it’s a really simple concept, but that sentence hit me like a ton of bricks, and I’m really happy that I was able to go and find her and introduce myself before I left. But yeah, she was 100% right. If I would’ve known that someone was there that recognized me in any way, I would’ve probably been more self-conscious about things that were really meaningless at that moment, like my looks or my demeanor.
for a month I wore the same dirty clothes. I slept on a couch in a hospital room. I barely took any showers unless I was at the Ronald McDonald House, and there were plenty of times that I had. Really big feeling days where I did not feel capable of making any small talk with anyone. And I just wanted to make that month as normal as possible for my daughter to help her be as happy and comfortable living in that hospital as possible.
And she just wanted me to be able to do that. And she was obviously great with the kids, but of course. Of course a former teacher would know instinctively how to also prioritize a parent’s needs. We were talking about how surreal it was Jonathan and I towards, I think we were like driving to the airport and how surreal it was that we were helped by someone from the teacher career coach community.
What a full 360 moment. It was a. Just for our life and reflecting on this community in general. And we also talked a lot about the concept of karma and how this moment reinforced how we wanted to make sure the next thing that we did was doing more good things for others. And that’s not because we want good things in return, it’s more just.
About the desire to make the world a nicer and better place that is filled with good people in it. A short while after we returned home, all the stars aligned and conversations started about me taking back over a teacher career coach when I was pregnant. Everybody gave the advice to find your village.
Every mother needs a village. And during the hardest moments of our life, we were showered in love and support by our friends and our family, our village. But some of our strongest village members ended up being strangers. It was the kindest NICU nurses. There was social workers and physical therapists.
It was the other families at the Ronald McDonald House. It was parents in the spinal cord injury community, nonprofit founders who spent hours on the phone with me just to talk to me about my daughter. It was even business mentors who listened to my rambling ideas of how I wanted to help people and what I wanted to build.
And that’s the thing about your village. It isn’t always the people that you know best. It’s the people who consistently show up when you need them the most. When you go through a major life event, especially something traumatic, your perspective starts to shift. You question your identity, your purpose, your life.
You really start to reevaluate all those priorities. And when I was doing all that soul searching, staying up by myself at night on a hospital couch. I knew that there were a ton of directions I could go with my experience. I kept thinking about all my strengths, like I know that I’m good at building things.
I know I’m good at educating others, creating online resources that teach. And during that time, I even built a website that I was so close to launching specifically to help nonprofits during this time. But for right now, all of that is on hold. Sorry. You know, sorry to get all woo. But the universe kept pulling me back here, and I know that this is where I can use my unique strengths to do the most good in this particular moment in time.
This experience taught me that sometimes the people who understand your struggles the most aren’t the ones that know you the best. They’re the ones who are walking similar paths. And that’s exactly what the teacher career coach community is. It was one of my favorite places on the internet for over five years.
It’s a community that is built with big hearted people who continue to do good and make a huge impact on the world with whatever path they choose. And it’s teachers and former teachers supporting one another. It’s good people making it easier for other good people who are navigating a really hard situation.
That being said, I know that there’s a lot of work to be done now that I’m in charge to better support you, and that’s why I am implementing some changes that will not only make it more sustainable for me as the leader, but also making better improvements and hopefully making a better impact on your life as well.
One big change that I’m just going to talk about upfront is with the Teacher Career Coach course in general. So since 2019, the Teacher Career Coach course has been open for enrollment year round, and after a lot of internal debate, I have decided to change this model, and the enrollment windows will only be during certain timeframes.
Now, this isn’t gonna impact you at all if you’ve already purchased it. It just means that new members can’t join when it’s not an enrollment period. And yeah, I really struggled with this decision. I don’t wanna say no to anyone who wants to join, but ultimately I know that this is the right choice for this particular moment.
Closing the course during specific Windows of time just helps me better support everyone, people inside the course, and people outside of the course by simplifying operations and giving me months where I can really focus on. Making improvements, building content, and taking calls with CEOs and hiring managers.
I also just personally don’t want anyone to join out of last minute desperation. I want it to be a proactive choice, that joining the course as a long-term project that you’re ready to start. And so I think that this change. Can help. That being said, if you know that you want out midyear and you wanted access to those materials, the doors are going to close Tuesday, September 9th, and the goal is to have the next enrollment window in November.
We’ll remind everyone of the open cart dates once they get closer via email, so if you’re on our newsletter, you’ll find out about it then. But this big change is going to help me create stronger, better content, more actionable resources, and make more timely updates to the Teacher Career Coach course to help address some of the changes in today’s job market.
And if you don’t plan on joining before September 9th, please don’t worry. There’s still going to be free resources coming out for everyone in this community.
I wanna stop and just say that I’m really grateful for the entire team at Aspire Ship, especially Elizabeth, for continuing the work and especially hosting this podcast while I was away. Elizabeth is actually still going to continue to conduct former teacher interviews so I can focus on writing content, including new deep dive solo podcast episodes.
And address some of the biggest issues that teachers are facing right now, and not all of the issues that you are facing is going to be completely new. Some of it is your resume, your strategy, but a huge factor right now is simply just the job market itself. As I’m recording this in September of 2025, and if that is your concern about changing careers, it’s an extremely valid concern.
Even people whose entire careers are just to predict that the job market are kind of uncertain about what’s ahead. What I do know is that funding cuts have impacted some nonprofits, some ed tech companies and other sectors that you may be targeting, and that’s why I’m just head down in research and creation mode.
And these aren’t gonna be easy questions to answer. But I know that you are here because you’re not looking for easy answers or quick fixes. You’re looking for honest answers. And so as I’m researching, I plan to keep you updated regularly, whether or not the news is good or bad. And this doesn’t mean that there are no jobs out there.
There are absolutely former teachers still getting hired. And I don’t want this podcast episode to be the reason why you stop working towards your goals if you know that it’s truly what you want. This doesn’t mean put your long-term plans on hold while you weather the storm. You can really start planning right now to be prepared for when the storm lifts.
But yeah, if you’re in a rush, it might mean shifting your strategy. If you are not in a rush and maybe being more cautious, learning about the roles and building experience for your resume while you wait for things to start shifting. And it also means that probably many of you will also decide to stay in the classroom, and my goal has always been to help you make the best decision for your specific needs and try to help you find happiness in that decision.
There really isn’t a one size fits all answer for any of this, and my priority is creating content that’s relevant to your needs right now. So my strategy for content that means social media podcast emailing, is to prioritize creating longer pieces of content with more substance behind them. So yes, you’ll still see quotes and former teacher spotlights from me, but I also hope that you notice.
Higher value posts and emails that are more specific to what you need in this moment. There’s gonna be some pros and cons to this approach because I’m not optimizing for algorithms or trying to go viral. These posts actually might not show up in your feed as often, so you might need to seek them out or make sure that they get into your inbox.
And my most thorough content pieces are going to be on the Teacher Career Coach podcast, solo episodes via email, and then the updates that I make inside of the Teacher Career Coach course. And while I am excited to be back, teacher career Coach has never been about me. There’s not one person who has the answer or knowledge base for every single job out there.
The reason why teacher career coach is so great is because of all of you. I take my role as researcher, motivator, connector, organizer, and builder really seriously, and I’m really extremely proud of the work that I’ve done in the past here. How many people that our team has helped over the last six years.
I think it’s time for us to leverage this huge community to solve problems specifically for others who are struggling Right now, the biggest issue I see with general AI tools is that it pulls from broad, generalized data, or it just makes up stuff to please you. I really wanted to figure out how to.
Research and relay insights back that are specific for transitioning teachers, which is why I created a 2025 job market survey. So if you’re a former teacher and you’re listening to this, please take my survey. I wanna find out, not just if you found a job. But how your years in the classroom translated to your starting salary, if you feel like the role is still sustainable long time, especially as AI continues to reshape the job market.
And I am just gonna make some assumptions that if you are a former teacher and you made it this far in this podcast, I just assume that you’re here to hear my personal story, that you may feel like we helped you in some way. And in that case, I’m, asking this as a personal favor. And if you’re thinking of leaving teaching, your answers are gonna help shape the content that I create.
It’s gonna tell me where I put more energy and focus, and it also is going to help me know what I can do to be the most supportive to you, and especially areas where I need to improve. Please go to teacher career coach.com/survey to take this survey and if you know any other teachers or former teachers who would be interested in helping, please pass this along.
I’m gonna be collecting and analyzing all the survey responses over the next few weeks, and I plan to report back with key findings on October 9th via email, podcast, and social media. I really don’t wanna mislead you here. I’m not going to be able to solve every problem. There’s always gonna be these huge factors outside of our control.
My main goal here is to share a clear, honest reflection of what patterns we can detect to help other people make the best, most informed decision for them. And to get an accurate picture, we need as many answers as possible. So please take five minutes to answer the survey@teachercareercoach.com slash survey your perspective, your experience, your story.
It matters so much to paint a complete picture here. If there is one thing that this entire journey has taught me as that we do not have to navigate uncertainty alone. And we also just don’t have to wait for perfect conditions to start building the life that we want. I am so excited to be back to serve you again and to be given the opportunity to try and help solve some of these big new challenges together.
And last note, I really couldn’t figure out where to put this in this podcast episode, but I had to share a resource that really helped me during some of my darkest days. It’s called Special Antidotes to the obsessions that comes with a child’s disability. And it was exactly what I needed at the time.
If you are going through something similar or you know another family going through something similar, I would consider checking it out. Just a disclaimer though, it does have a lot of four letter words in it. And last, I just wanna say thank you for being part of this community. Thank you so much for letting me be a human, for letting me step away when I needed to.
And thank you so much for welcoming me back. I’m really sorry that it’s been so long. Talk to you next week.
