Over my last two blogs, I’ve been exploring a different way of looking at the uncertainty that can accompany the decision to stay in teaching or move on.
We’ve looked at Thought and the possibility that thinking harder isn’t always the best route to clarity. And we’ve looked at Consciousness, which helps explain why whatever we happen to be thinking in the moment can feel so convincingly true. This brings me to the third of Sydney Banks’ Three Principles…
We’ve all experienced what we call a ‘light bulb’ moment, an answer appearing seemingly from nowhere. Perhaps you’ve been struggling with a problem for hours, eventually given up and gone to bed, only to wake the next morning knowing what to do. Or an idea has occurred to you while driving, walking the dog or standing in the shower, when you weren’t consciously trying to find it.
Banks used the term ‘Mind’ to name this phenomenon. Mind is the universal intelligence behind life, the source of our capacity for fresh thought, insight and wisdom. You don’t have to understand or even agree with this definition of the word to recognise the experience Banks was pointing towards. It’s that moment when something new became available when you stopped searching for it.
I see this frequently in coaching conversations. A teacher may arrive convinced that they have no idea what they want to do next. We talk, explore and become curious, but rather than trying to manufacture an answer, we allow some space around the question. Quite often, something begins to emerge, an interest they’ve overlooked, a possibility they hadn’t considered or simply a quiet recognition of what matters most.
Banks’ understanding of Mind suggests that this capacity for fresh thinking isn’t something reserved for particularly intuitive or insightful people. It’s something we all have. For someone at a career crossroads, I find that enormously reassuring.
You may not currently know whether you want to stay in teaching, seek a different role within education or leave altogether. If you decide to leave, you certainly don’t need to know immediately what the perfect alternative career might be.
Not knowing doesn’t mean the answer isn’t available to you. It may simply mean it hasn’t appeared yet. When we have a sense of direction, even a tentative one, action tends to follow naturally. A conversation we want to have. Something we’re curious to explore. A step that simply makes sense from where we’re standing now.
Across these three blogs, that’s really the idea I’ve been exploring. Our thinking can sometimes obscure our view; consciousness can make that thinking feel completely real; and yet, beneath all that mental activity, we retain an extraordinary capacity for something new to occur to us.
Career clarity isn’t always something we need to force. Sometimes, we simply need to give clarity the space to find us.