In my last blog, I explored the idea that when we’re wrestling with the decision to stay in teaching or move on, thinking harder doesn’t necessarily bring us any closer to an answer. In fact, the opposite can sometimes be true.
But there’s an obvious problem with that.
When you’re lying awake at three in the morning thinking that leaving teaching might be the biggest mistake you’ve ever made, it doesn’t feel like ‘just a thought’. Nor does the possibility that you’ll never earn the same salary again, won’t find anything you’re qualified to do, or might discover that the grass really isn’t greener.
In those moments, our thinking feels very real.
This brings me to something else Sydney Banks* pointed to: Consciousness. Which he described as our capacity to be aware. It’s what allows us not simply to have thoughts, but to experience the feeling of those thoughts.
Our thinking can produce excitement, fear, hope, frustration, curiosity or complete confusion, and Consciousness (our ability to be aware) brings that experience to life for us in the moment.
Perhaps you’ve experienced this yourself.
You finish a particularly difficult day at school and think, “I can’t do this anymore.” At that moment, leaving teaching can feel like the only possible answer. A few days later, something goes brilliantly. A child makes unexpected progress, a colleague makes you laugh or you teach one of those lessons that reminds you why you became a teacher in the first place. Suddenly, staying doesn’t look quite so impossible.
Which version is true? Perhaps neither needs to be.
The circumstances of your career may not have changed significantly during those few days, but your experience of them has, because your thinking has changed, and each version feels completely real in the moment
For me, understanding this matters enormously when we’re making important career decisions.
In my previous blog, I suggested that clarity is more likely to emerge from a quieter mind than from endlessly trying to think our way to the right answer. The reason it is so difficult to remember this when we’re in the middle of uncertainty is because whatever we’re thinking in the moment feels true. The new thinking doesn’t arrive with a warning label telling us that ‘this is simply today’s version of events’ – it looks and feels like the truth, just as the previous version did.
Perhaps that’s something worth noticing the next time your certainty about your career changes.
Rather than immediately asking ‘which version should I believe? we might become curious about the fact that there are different versions at all. The school that looked unbearable on Tuesday can look manageable on Friday. Leaving teaching can feel exciting one week and terrifying the next. Neither change necessarily tells us anything new about the job; it may simply show us how powerfully our moment-to-moment thinking colours what we see.
This doesn’t mean ignoring the realities of our situation. If the workload is unsustainable, the leadership poor or we have simply reached the point where teaching no longer feels like the right place for us, those things matter. But there’s a difference between paying attention to what we know and reacting to everything we happen to feel.
Seeing this can give us permission not to reach a conclusion every time our internal weather changes. We can notice the storm without assuming we need to change direction because of it. And, equally, we don’t need to interpret every sunny day as evidence that we should stay.
Over time, beneath those changing experiences, we may begin to notice something quieter and more consistent. Not an argument we’ve constructed for staying or leaving, but a sense of what feels right when we’re no longer trying quite so hard to work it out.
Which leads to an interesting question: if clarity doesn’t have to be manufactured through more thinking, where does it come from?
That’s something I’ll explore in the next blog.
*Note: Sydney Banks (1931–2009) was a Scottish-born philosopher and spiritual teacher whose insights into the nature of human experience became known as the Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness and Thought.
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