Daphne shares that this will be the last episode of the podcast for now and what led up to that decision.
Listen to the episode in the podcast player below, or find it on Apple Podcast or Spotify.
Goodbye for now
Daphne:
You probably have guessed it by this episode title what is going on, what I’m going to tell you, but I’m going to cut to the chase. We’re pausing the podcast for the foreseeable future. I hate to say we’re ending the podcast because I like to keep it open just in case there’s something really important we want to share a new episode on, or if in the future it makes sense to start it again, but it most likely will be ended. I wanted to share some insight on why we are making these changes and what we’ve been working on.
But first, I will start with some personal news in case you missed some of my social media announcements. I had my twin girls in early November, so the podcasts that you have heard since about October were all batched far in advance.
And this is going to be hard for me to share and talk about. So, I apologize in advance that I’m just going to keep it super brief. I got sent to the hospital at 28 weeks pregnant and was there in the high risk prenatal unit for a while, and I delivered at 30 weeks exactly. My girls are home now. We spent 79 days total in the NICU, and we are all healing.
I can’t downplay how hard it’s been, and for someone who is usually good with words and really transparent about things that are going on, you’ll know from my past podcast episodes talking about my struggle with alcoholism and other times I’ve shared personal stories, this just feels different. It’s bigger, it’s harder. I can’t and just don’t really want to talk about it with a large audience.
I know the vast majority of you are just checking in out of concern and care, and that is so kind and I just want you to know that I am seeing my therapist weekly. I have a really good support system and we are okay. Even if everything had gone perfectly, I had always intended to keep my babies off of the internet to maintain their privacy, which something that I hope you can all respect. So, I probably really won’t share more details about what my family has been or is going through on a public forum.
Daphne shares how the TCC team made sure everything kept running while she was away
Now, jumping to how that time impacted you. I have heard from many people that you didn’t even really realize I was gone, and that is all due to our incredible team at Teacher Career Coach. That is huge shout-outs to Allie, Abbey and Emily who have gone above and beyond to ensure everyone was taken care of and DMs and inside of the Teacher Career Coach course. And like I’d said, I had worked really long hours batching episodes of the podcast so that they continued to run. So, luckily I had some flexibility.
I used most of the time to put my family first. There were many days during that timeframe that I could not focus on anything except for what was right in front of me and that exact moment, because it was so chaotic. But there was also a lot of quiet time and a lot of time that there was nothing else I could do except for think and plan.
And I’ve come to learn something about myself, that I do enjoy working at least on the parts of the job that I am actually good at, but I especially do like working in these times of stress, where everything else is outside of my control. I can at least sit down and do something that I know I am good at and that helps other people. And so, that is a little therapeutic for me, to still continue to work on Teacher Career Coach and work on resources to help other people.
So, I checked in most days with the team. We still held weekly meetings for the most part. And during that time I continued to think, to listen to this community, and I took a lot of reflection time to plan some big changes that I believe and hope will be incredibly helpful for you and what you might be struggling with right now.
Daphne explains what led to her decision to pause the Teacher Career Coach Podcast
And the first change, pausing this podcast probably stinks in your opinion. If you’re listening to this podcast, it’s because you are a fan of it, but I hope you’re still listening this far into this episode so that I can share more insight into why. And while I wrote this episode at 4 a.m., due to my new sleep schedule, and my voice has been super raspy for the last three weeks, as just like a default right now, this really isn’t just because I have newborn twins at home.
I have been thinking about this exact change for a while and it’s hard to do. It’s hard to stop something that you enjoy doing. It’s hard to stop something that you know other people are listening to or paying attention to, but I know it’s the right move and here’s why.
I’ll start with a short backstory. I started Teacher Career Coach and the Teacher Career Coach Podcast when there were no other resources out there like this. I had transitioned entirely on my own from a classroom teacher to then working in Fortune 500 companies and working for some of the biggest names in EdTech. And I just wanted to create the resource library that I wish existed during my own career transition. It’s 2019, when all of this started, and now you may know anytime you get on LinkedIn, you might be flooded with other people sharing either very similar advice or conflicting advice, or pulling you in a million different directions, all geared specifically for transitioning teachers.
And so, the first main pain point that this community has told me is that the process has already been overwhelming, but now there’s just too much information. It’s too noisy. There are too many directions to go, and there’s too many voices who are saying conflicting things. It’s too hard to figure out where to get the information that you need to get to the next step, and I get it.
Since 2019, we’ve put out 50 articles and 145 podcasts in addition to the bestselling course, the Teacher Career Coach Course. Now, talking about just this podcast alone, it would take you 70 hours to listen to every episode, and we all know that as teachers, you already have extremely full plates. And one big concern that I had was how do we streamline all of these articles and all of these podcasts, update them with all of the new things that we’ve learned over the last five years, trends that we’re seeing, new market trends that we’re seeing, and just really great information that we’ve gotten from former teachers that we’ve worked with and we’ve coached into finding new roles, how do we make all of these changes in a really well-thought-out way so that you can now find the best resources in the shortest amount of time?
And to do that, I wanted to bring in an expert who worked in product and UX design. And so, I hired someone who started coming in earlier this year, and we are doing a quarter long project where we’re streamlining, simplifying and updating our content throughout 2024.
Daphne lays out why the existing 70 hours of episodes are a great resource
My goal with this podcast is that you can find the best episodes quickly and then supplement with the career paths that you’ve chosen or career paths you’re interested in, instead of listening to all 145 episodes. We’d really like you to kind of pick and choose the best ones that fit you, but if there’s new ones coming out on a weekly basis, those best ones get pushed further and further and further back. And so, what we’re doing is we’re creating a playlist so that you can find all of our best resources and listen to those to help you if you are just getting started on your journey.
So, if you are a brand new listener, and this is the first episode you have ever listened to: Hi, I am Daphne, and I am sorry. This podcast episode in general is more focused on company updates than actual actionable advice, but you should check out our playlist that we just talked about, that I just talked about. It’s going to be a great resource so that you can find our best of episodes and get started there. So go to teachercareercoach.com/playlist and you will find it.
Now, during the process of working with the user experience designer and product consultant, we came to another huge realization of a pain point that we wanted to help solve for this audience, and that is about half of you have indicated that you have been stuck, just fully stuck deciding whether or not you even want to leave. Some of you have been following for years, all the way back to 2019, but never fully decided whether or not you plan to leave. That means you are maybe throwing out applications year after year and listening to all the podcast episodes and reading all the blogs and reading all the articles, but then you’re feeling unhappy year after year that it’s not happening for you, but without the full commitment. And another half of you might know for effect you are probably going to stay in the classroom, but watching other people live their lives and are going into new careers makes you feel lesser than.
And I’ve mentioned this on the Teacher Career Coach Instagram recently, that if following this page or these resources is impacting your mental health, please feel free to unfollow. This is meant for people who knew for a fact that they were going to leave the classroom, and that’s not our intention behind what we’re doing, because there are so many great resources out there for teachers who plan to stay, but this was the only community at the time that could help teachers who planned to leave, but many people did not self-select that they wanted to stop listening because they weren’t 100% sure. They still were on the fence of whether or not they were going to leave.
Now, this isn’t that surprising. This has always been a really huge decision, and it’s not one that you should take lightly. But talking to many teachers, I feel like this exact feeling, of being on the fence, of feeling overwhelmed is something that is impacting their day-to-day and that their mental health, and it is something that I felt like we could help solve.
Daphne announces TCC’s new mini-course that will launch March 29
That is why we decided to create a mini course. It’s called Off the Fence, and it’s going to help you weigh your options and get down into the nitty-gritty so that you can get over analysis paralysis and start moving a little bit more confidently in one direction. It doesn’t mean either direction is going to be easy, but at least you can put your mental energy into one single direction.
Being stuck in the middle is really hard, especially over this extremely long prolonged period of time that I found many of the audience members had been in, and this could impact you in totally opposite ways as someone else. There are some people who are prone to making extreme, quick decisions without thinking out the consequences when they’re overwhelmed and they’re kind of pulled in two directions. And then, there are other people who start to feel more numb and less feelings of happiness or joy. They just become more apathetic and they kind of don’t care about anything. Both of those might be popping up in your life right now if you’re listening to this and you feel like you are still struggling with this big decision, and our goal for the program, Off the Fence, is not actually going to be to steer everyone to leave.
There are a lot of problems with the education system, and I know that people are not shy about talking about them right now, but there are also people who are in situations where there are non-negotiables, that staying in teaching is making the most sense for them right now.
So, what this program can help you do is analyze your starting salary requirements, help you calculate your pension to 401(k) conversions, share example roles that fall within different salaries, and our goal is to empower you with all the information that we’ve learned from five years of helping teachers transition, so that you can make the best, most well-informed decision for yourself and your family. The course will give you a realistic view of what life looks like for a variety of former teachers and a variety of industries and a variety of different salaries, and you can decide what are the most important factors to your decision-making, and this might be what summer looks like to childcare options, to risk of layoffs in different industries, or perceived risks of working in specific industries from the teacher’s perspectives, and we’re just going to share as much data and research as we can to help you figure out if what is holding you back from making a decision is just fear or something that is actually figureoutable, as Marie Forleo would say, or if it is for reals, a firm non-negotiable.
And then, you make a decision and you can put all of your effort and your heart into that direction. You won’t have to be pulled in multiple directions anymore. My goal is to help you find happiness with whatever decision you do end up taking, and if you do end up wanting to leave the classroom, we’ll have all the resources here on the podcast. You can go back and listen to them. There’s always the Teacher Career Coach Course. There’s articles and there’s newsletters.
Daphne explains that pausing the podcast will allow the TCC more time to support this audience in other ways
Speaking of that, we’re not discontinuing free support by any means, even if we stop the podcast. It just means that we’re streamlining our resources. For those of you who know that you need out, just make sure you’re watching our newsletters. You can sign up for that on our website. We’ll be sending out weekly emails with our best tips. We’re going to send out the updated articles and any other company updates or news.
I never really want to say never about this ending of the podcast, but I would say that there is a very good chance this is our last episode ever. So, I am going to end being a little bit self-congratulatory and celebrating the podcast milestones.
It’s been just wild for us to look back on everything that’s happened in 145 episodes. This podcast has hit one of the top four on Apple Podcasts in the education category, which was wild to me. We’ve had shout-outs on NPR. We’ve been in Wall Street Journal. But most importantly, this podcast alone has helped thousands of teachers transition outside of the classroom. It was 145 episodes right now, which means that it took about 1,450 hours of work to get these episodes out on the air, and I could not have done this without a huge team.
First, my husband, Jonathan. He’s believed in me throughout every part of my career journey, throughout every part of Teacher Career Coach. He started the show with me as a pandemic project in our one bedroom apartment, where I would record in the closet, and he made the intro and the outro music. Morgan, his good friend, is the voiceover artist who is the actual intro voiceover narrator, and I want to thank her. I also want to thank Allie, Abbey, Emily, all from team Teacher Career Coach. I want to thank the Podglomerate team, our podcast network that we’ve been on for a while. Our other editing team, Hatch. And everyone who has listened and shared this resource with others who are looking to transition out of teaching, thank you so much. I also want to thank you for listening to this entire episode and for your continued support and what we’re doing and the mission that we have with Teacher Career Coach.
We are looking forward to this year, with all of those updated resources, and hoping to make it easier for you to find the support that you need and hoping that our new program can help if you need clarity on your next year’s goals, if you’ve been struggling with the decision.
I also want to say thank you to all of the moms in this audience who reached out after my birth announcement. They shared. . . So many of you also have similar NICU stories and just wanted to make sure that I knew that I was not alone in what I was going through, and this community has always blown me away. It has always been absolutely amazing. You are all incredible people, you are amazing people, and it makes it so hard to say goodbye to this really huge part of it, and I don’t really know what to say at the end of this. It’s weird to not say, “I’ll see you on the next episode,” so I’ll just end it with: I’ll see you at teachercareercoach.com. I’ll see you in our DMs or our emails. I’ll see you inside of the Teacher Career Coach Course or in our new mini course, which you can find at www.teachercareercoach.com/offthefence.
I’m wishing you the best, and I hope that everything works out the exact way that you wanted to this year. We’ll be there rooting for you on the other side of the screen. Thank you.
Mentioned in the episode:
- TCC’s new mini course “Off the Fence” goes live March 29th. Pre-order it here: www.teachercareercoach.com/offthefence
- Our career path quiz at www.teachercareercoach.com/quiz
- Explore the course that has helped thousands of teachers successfully transition out of the classroom and into new careers: The Teacher Career Coach Course (If you are a Teacher Career Coach Course member, you can also sign up for our one-on-one Career Clarity calls.)
