In episode 200 of The Teacher Career Coach Podcast, Daphne debunks common myths about career clarity, such as the idea that you must “follow your passion” or wait for absolute certainty before acting. Instead, she emphasizes the importance of identifying transferable skills, exploring new opportunities through hands-on experiments, and embracing strategic self-reflection.
From leveraging teaching experience in roles like curriculum design or nonprofit management to avoiding the trap of endless research, this podcast provides actionable advice for educators at any stage of their career transition.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Teacher Career Coach podcast. I’m your host, Daphne Gomez. At the beginning of this month, I began an experiment in the community with members of the teacher career coach course, who currently are struggling with career clarity. So far, we’ve been getting really good feedback from that experiment that we’re running.
It’s going really well and this is just one of the hardest parts of a career transition, so I wanted to make sure to create some free content as well, because if you are thinking of leaving either in the middle of the holidays or if you’re thinking of leaving at the end of the school year, this is something that probably is weighing really heavy on your mind right this minute.
So going with number one, you need to follow your passion. That is one of the biggest myths about career clarity that I feel like I hear a lot and it’s during the, like first few weeks or months of even just thinking of leaving teaching. You may have gotten this advice from a loved one, or you might have read it somewhere, and I think it’s really.
There’s good intentions behind this sentiment. I don’t want you to be miserable at your next job either. And I’m also not trying to like Poo P on anyone’s dreams here. So if you dream of working at a specific company or a specific nonprofit whose mission you’re extremely passionate about, yes, absolutely working there can be a long-term goal, or if you’re interested in building a business because you’re passionate about a specific thing.
I am here for it. I am rooting you on, but the shorter path with the least resistance is seeing where there’s like a product market fit. If you’re the product, what are people willing to pay for? And then seeing what fits into what you enjoy doing at work or what you have the most experience in that you can leverage for specific roles.
Then you can have hobbies and passions outside of work. The reason why I’m like trying to make this big differentiation between it is it’s just really hard to describe some of the things that I am great at professionally as my passion. I actually really like doing them at work and people will pay for them.
Many former teachers are passionate about kids. They are passionate about creating curriculum or they’re passionate about those really great mission led businesses. And you absolutely can go in any of these directions. You can focus on working in different places that have kids come. Maybe it’s a museum or a nonprofit you can work at a daycare center trying to be a manager, or I’ve met former teachers who are the heads of preschools. Now, you can become a curriculum writer or work at an ed tech company and still work in education in a way that you’re passionate about it. The biggest thing here though, is that passion limits us to the things we know our past lives, the experience that we’ve had, and it’s not necessarily what I want you to do here.
You can discover new things that you are good at, new transferable skills, or things that you enjoy through building new things and mastery, but you’re not gonna discover that you like them before just by looking at like words on a page. They’re all gonna sound kind of boring and foreign to you. So stay curious.
Focus on your unique values, what you really want out of this next experience and what you don’t want out of this next experience. And really think about your skills as much as you think about your passion. A true sustainable career will blend what you enjoy doing at work, with what you’re good at doing at work, and what is valued and paid for in a work environment.
Number two, on the biggest myths. About career clarity is that you just need to take some more advice before you find clarity. You can be absolutely stuck in research mode for far too long before taking action. There’s so many podcast episodes, even the Teacher Career Coach podcast. We almost have 200 episodes right now.
There’s blogs. There’s books. There’s following too many different people on LinkedIn that can pull you in all these different directions. Clarity really comes from getting your hands dirty. It’s from experiments, it’s from side projects. It’s from talking to specific people in roles or volunteer work.
Their advice can absolutely guide you, but it’s not gonna replace your own trial and error, and it often really starts to come from silence and retrospection. Two things that absolutely help me with big decision making and clarity. one silent times, just strategic silence where I can hear my own voice above all the noise, all the clutter outside.
This might come with, I’ve been using this thing that blocks social media apps. It’s called Brick. This is not a paid ad. It’s just something that’s really helpful for me. I find myself as someone who already struggles with ADHD really scattered. If I start my day with social media right now, it’s extremely addicting.
It’s pulling me all over the place, and I know I don’t do my best work on days that I start with social media. So I can use this product, the brick, and I can lock myself out for days at a time and just use my phone as a phone. And on those types of days, I will have three main projects I’m trying to work on.
And then I will also go on strategic silent walks when I really need to think, I’ll bring a journal with me. Sometimes I’ll sit down and I’ll just try and trust my gut. When it comes to retrospection, I often talk to a therapist or one of my trusted friends who understands what I’m going through, who’s on the other side of it, or who has accomplished what I’m trying to accomplish.
And I just. After I’ve thought about what my project plan is, I can reach out to them for advice, but too much input, like far too much research can start to drown out your own instincts and your own insights, and it is far easier to let that fear part of your brain talk you out of every single direction. Like if you’re stuck in that phase of collecting things until something sounds perfect.
I want you to trade. What should I do for what can I try next? How can I get my hands dirty? What can I build? What project can I implement while I’m still in the classroom to understand what I like and I don’t like about these different careers?
The biggest myth number three is if you found the right path, it would become immediately clear to you, and that’s gonna come in waves.
You’re going to probably have all of these ups and downs during your career transition. That’s completely normal. The doubt, the learning curves, it’s something that every single career transition has to go through. Rarely does anyone feel 100% certain on day one, and there are absolutely people who have upskilled for a specific role for a long time and been very clear on it.
Then a new opportunity popped up that they applied for, that’s in a different direction that they ended up taking that is potentially going to happen. However, they’re upskilling still had transferrable skills that were able to make them look like a great candidate for the other position. Their clarity around where they might go in three to five years if the position that they got their foot in the door is also something that they take a lot of comfort with.
Clarity’s really just gonna build gradually as you gain evidence from your lived experiences. And I just, I don’t want you to expect it to like hit you in one second, like, oh, I know what I’m doing. Once you have a clear direction that you’re taking, where you’re upskilling towards what you’re applying for, what you really wanna focus on for this particular phase of your career transition, you can still be open to other possibilities.
You can still think about what’s three to five years out after this. It’s not going to be set in stone in the same way where teaching is a forever career. You can still kind of think about, this is something that is going to always be shifting and moving and growing as you grow. This is just gonna get your foot in the door so that you learn a little bit more about these different industries.
You understand a little bit more, but you’re not gonna really have clarity. Until you have that actual lived experience. And that really stinks that it’s hard. But the more you get your hands dirty, the more upskilling you do, the more you can feel confident that it’s not something that you’re really gonna dislike.
And the next is number four, which is clarity is a certain job title. So this is such a hard one because there are so many people who. Get caught up in the weeds of, I’m applying for this specific role. This is, these are the only roles that I’m applying for with this specific job title and a job title is just the label that a hiring manager gives a role.
It doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it’s gonna fit your exact description. There are some times that things are called. Jobs that you may have not thought was a good fit for you. And then you read the bullet points and you’re like, oh, that’s a training specialist role. Like they just for some reason called it something kind of funky.
So. Two people with the exact same job title might have completely different experiences, and that’s also why salary can vary so much from job to job. The real clarity is knowing the skills that you’re trying to use in your role, the preferred work environment. Your values, what you are able to bring to specific roles, how you can stand out for those roles and what you really don’t feel comfortable doing.
The marketing and title. Your of your career clarity might continue to evolve. So anchoring to one specific job title can limit you. I’m not telling you to go in completely different directions like project management and UX designer, completely different jobs, but if you have some components of project management.
That still might be in a office manager position or a training position that requires a lot of project management around training different employees or keeping them up to task with different trainings. You need to really start to think about where do you thrive? Do you thrive in collaborative environments?
Are you like a people person that you really wanna be on a team? Working together, or are you someone who wants to be completely alone, face at a computer left alone? Start to get clarity around your work style and the types of impact that you can have for different companies while you’re focusing on the transferable skills and the skills that you’d like to see in your next role, but not necessarily just like a name.
Lastly, the biggest myth that I see with career clarity is that career clarity must happen before I take action. This is one of the biggest reasons why people procrastinate and they can procrastinate and stay in teaching for years before moving forward, and it makes them so stressed and so unhappy, and I do not want this.
For you or if this is something that you’ve struggled with for a really long time, I want this to be the time that you start to take action and move forward. So as I talked about back in episode 1 95, when I returned to the Teacher Career Coach podcast and I came back and took over teacher career coach is.
When I left, I had a full breakdown midlife crisis, some of the worst things that a family could go through, and a lot of reflection and a lot of soul searching. I truly during that time did not know that I was coming back to teacher career coach. So there was 16 months where I got to sit and think, and for the first probably 12 months of it, if you listen to that episode, I did not have bandwidth to actually think I just was like focused on my family.
During that time, I did not really think about my career whatsoever, but towards the end, the last two, three months is when I really started to like, okay. Time for me to get career clarity. I had a few different directions that I was considering during that time, and I can say with confidence that like I know all the steps to take to start evaluating where I want to go next, but it doesn’t mean that I like, didn’t face the same imposter syndrome and struggles that you are facing right now because pivoting and changing jobs is intimidating.
I did a couple different things during that time. I called and met with some of the other business owner and consultant friends that I knew had experience just to feel out some of the few paths that I was considering and I got their feedback and they were all so kind and really helped me figure out what would work, what wouldn’t work with my specific needs.
I also tried these like tiny experiments, like I did freelance projects, I did some marketing freelance work. I also volunteered at nonprofits and did their marketing so that I could understand if marketing in a nonprofit like communications was a good choice for me because I’ve nev, I’ve volunteered at nonprofits before, but I don’t have experience with fundraising transparently.
There’s like a good chunk of it that I would wanna learn a little bit more about. And it really helped me start to find clarity. Most people, including myself, gain that clarity through the action, not before it. You can write down on paper a lot of different things that you think you would like doing, but until you start to do them, before you start to test them.
You don’t really know. You can’t really think your way into certainty, with some of the things that you’ve never actually done before. So the last part is thinking about your mindset and if you have the bandwidth to do this, because what if it fails? What if you do put in this extra work and what if it isn’t the right direction for you?
And you know, my response to that is that knowing with clarity what you like and don’t like about different roles outside the classroom is gonna make you a better candidate. So when they, in interviews ask you why you are confident that customer success is the right role for you, you can with confidence say.
What I know about my personality is that I thrive in this specific type of work environment. These are the types of things that I’m really strong at and I really like. And there are also some roles that I did consider that I realized weren’t a good fit for me because of X, Y, and Z, and that’s gonna actually alleviate hiring managers fears because you’ve put in so much work and research into this process and taking action.
Not just sitting in research mode can actually help you with your confidence and your motivation. There was a 2016 study on resilience that found that having autonomy significantly predicted higher resilience in the face of stress. And it suggested that when individuals feel a sense of agency that their actions can influence different outcomes, they start to cope better with uncertainties.
And it, the findings had a consistent theme, which was that. Autonomy supports motivation, confidence, and resilience, which is so invaluable during transitions like this that can be so uncertain. Recapping everything that we learned in today’s episode. Clarity is what is going to tell you which skills that you plan to use the most in your new roles outside of the classroom, which opportunities you may want to apply for and which ones to ignore so that you don’t burn yourself out applying to absolutely everything.
Which types of roles will light you up and not drain you. So clarity gives you a firm direction. It gives you enough signal to start to move forward even if your career path isn’t 100% fully mapped out. So please do not wait to have it all figured out. Take the first step that is in front of you. Use this week to start to explore your different options or to.
Sit in strategic silence and think about what you enjoyed about your teaching position, what skills you like using and what skills might be similar that you can potentially try to learn over the next few weeks. That’s it, just. Try and move one step forward and let clarity start to fall in place along the way.
And if you are interested in joining the Teacher Career Coach course, you’re not yet a member. I know we mentioned it up at the beginning of the show because we’re having that career clarity experiment where people are. Finding out the different paths that are really interesting to them in our private community right now.
Well, right now as I’m recording this, it’s October, 2025, so we’re on a short enrollment closed window, which means that you’re not able to join us. But if you are listening to this at a different date, or if you ever want to check if it is open for enrollment, just go to teacher career coach.com/course.
You can either enroll if it’s open for enrollment or get on the wait list there. Thank you so much for being a listener of the Teacher Career Coach Podcast, and we’ll see you next week.
RESOURCES
- If you are struggling right now, please seek help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 802-273-8255
- Get the template! Writing a Teacher Resignation Letter to a Principal
- Take the FREE QUIZ: What career outside of the classroom are you qualified for?
- If you know it’s time to start your transition and are looking for resources and guidance, check out the Teacher Career Coach course today!
- Join our growing community (and connect with Daphne) on Instagram @teachercareercoach.
