Maya Angelou once said, “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do and liking how you do it.” The older I get, the more I believe Maya Angelou was pointing toward something far deeper than achievement.
Success for many teachers has become tangled up with pressure, performance and survival. Which means success can start to look like coping with impossible workloads, pushing through exhaustion, or simply making it to the next holiday. From the outside, someone may appear highly successful, yet internally they feel disconnected, flat or quietly overwhelmed.
What I appreciate about Angelou’s quotation is that she brings success back to something deeply human and personal. She talks about your relationship with yourself, your work and the way you move through life.
That understanding sits very closely alongside what Michael Neill describes in his inside-out understanding. Neill reminds us that our experience of life is not created by circumstances alone, but by the thinking we’re innocently caught up in about those things. In other words, it is not simply the job, the school, the workload or the uncertainty creating our distress. It is the constant stream of thought we experience about those things.
For teachers at a career crossroads, seeing this can be transformational. Many people come to coaching believing they must think harder before clarity will arrive. They analyse every possible option. Stay or leave. Apply or wait. Retrain or persevere. Yet the more they force the search for certainty, the more overwhelmed they often become.
Michael Neill frequently points toward a different truth: clarity tends to appear when our minds quieten, not when they speed up. We all have an innate capacity for wisdom, insight and fresh thinking. It just becomes harder to see when the anxious thinking is loud.
The problem is not that teachers are broken, incapable or lacking resilience. The problem is that stressed thinking can temporarily hide their own clarity from view. I see this often with teachers who feel stuck.
One moment they are trapped in fearful thinking about the future. The next moment, after a conversation, reflection or moment of insight, something shifts. They begin to see possibility again. Not because their circumstances changed overnight, but because their relationship with their thinking changed.
From that quieter place, people often begin making very different decisions. Some rediscover a genuine love for teaching once the pressure in their thinking settles. Others realise they have outgrown the profession and feel ready to explore something new.
Neither path is right or wrong. What matters is whether it feels true to them. Perhaps that is the deeper wisdom inside Maya Angelou’s quotation. Success is not simply achieving more or enduring more. It is living and working in a way that allows you to feel connected to yourself, grounded in your values and alive to your own innate wisdom. And from there, the next step forward often becomes far clearer than we imagined possible.
If you are at a crossroads and everything feels fragile and uncertain right now, please know that you are not broken. You are simply caught up in stressed thinking. And that is both completely normal and completely workable.
Photo by Erda Estremera on Unsplash