The Stuckness Is An Opportunity

Career coach Laura Litwiller on the "muckiness" of teacher career transitions, the importance of playing with possibility, and the excitement that comes with career clarity

I’m very excited to bring you Leaving Teaching’s first specialist interview! I came across Laura’s website simply by Googling “teacher career coach” (the power of a regularly updated SEO-optimized blog, y’all!). I was intrigued by her unique approach to what she calls “career clarity,” and thought interviewing her would be informative.

You guys—she blew me away! Our conversation felt so expansive and full of possibilities, and her approach to the “muck and confusion” of the teacher career change is so refreshing. (No, I don’t do affiliate links or get paid to say this.) I know like ten teachers I want to send her link to right now.

I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did!

Hello Laura! Start us off by giving a bit of your career background–how you got into coaching and specifically coaching teachers?

Prior to being an independent coach, I worked at a college career center for eight years. The students I worked with were all over the map in terms of what they wanted to do, and just really didn't have a sense of what they wanted. So I had a lot of experience with using self-assessments, and talking about your values, personality and strengths, and how all of that can give you information about what careers might be a good fit for you.

I left that position partly because of Covid and having two little kids at home, and partly because I just wanted something new. First, I started [coaching] midlife career professionals. I noticed that a lot of teachers were finding me–partly because of the state of teaching at the time but also, I think, because of my background [in education]. My husband is a high school history teacher. My parents were both teachers. I taught briefly, very early in my career, high school Spanish. A lot of my friends are teachers. I'm kind of steeped in education, and surrounded by educators and teachers. So it all converged and made sense to work with teachers. I have been doing that, focusing mostly on coaching teachers, for the past two-ish years. 

The services you offer are a little different than other career coaches who focus on transferable skills, polishing resumes, that kind of stuff. You talk about focusing on the “muck and confusion.” Why did you decide to focus on that?

First of all, it's what I really enjoy. I like getting into it with people and figuring out where the challenges are, where they're getting stuck… 

Oftentimes when people think, Oh, I'm gonna figure out my next job, they skip right over the, What do I want, and who am I at this point in my life? And that just makes it very confusing when you start applying for jobs, because it’s like you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, just seeing what's gonna stick, hoping something will work out… Once you really have a better sense of what you want, it's much easier to network. It's much easier to do the resume. It's much easier to be a competitive candidate for a position.

Oftentimes when people think, Oh, I'm gonna figure out my next job, they skip right over the, What do I want, and who am I at this point in my life? And that just makes it very confusing when you start applying for jobs, because it’s like you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, just seeing what's gonna stick.

So it makes sense as a starting point to figure out those things. I do a lot of work with teachers around their strengths [and personality]... We talk about values, what's most important to you right now? The last time some of them thought about what's important to them was 15-20 years ago, and many haven't thought that much about it since then.

So it's a nice moment in time to pause and figure out what they're hoping for, what they want, who they are, and what they have to offer. Then when they go into a job search—if they decide to, because I also work with teachers who decide to stay—then it's like, Okay, I have the clarity. I need to really focus my job search. And they're much more successful when they do that.

I’m in several Facebook groups for transitioning teachers, and I see a lot of posts where people talk about feeling stuck or trapped, like they desperately want to get out but don't know how. Why do you think so many teachers who want to leave feel trapped in the classroom?

The way teaching is set up, you stay forever. It's just an assumption. It's the way the system is built right, that your pension comes after you've been there for a million years, and your salary continues to to increase. So there's a lot of practical reasons why people feel stuck, because they think they need a certain financial security or amount of income. Or they don't think they will be able to retire without a pension, which sometimes might be true and sometimes might not be true. So I think the education system makes teachers feel trapped.

People don't necessarily see teachers as the multifaceted, multi-dimensional, super sophisticated professionals that they are.

But there's also this narrative that is out there that teachers are just teachers. That’s all teachers do. I think it's reinforced by the fact that in the past, not a ton of teachers have left. Most have stayed, even if they're unhappy, so society at large has the sense that teaching is one of those jobs that you do forever. People don't necessarily see teachers as the multifaceted, multi-dimensional, super sophisticated professionals that they are. They only imagine them in a classroom, and they think they know what their skills are.

Another [reason teacher’s feel stuck] is that it's very hard to imagine yourself doing something else, no matter what career you're in. If you've done one thing your whole career, it's very hard to imagine doing something different. So when a teacher starts imagining, what if I did this, or, could I do that, there's so little information that it's just feels unknown, uncertain, like a scary, huge change. And so then it's like, Whoa, that's too scary. That's too much. I don't know what that is, how that will look, or what it would look like for me.

One of the things I like to do is I have teachers make a list of career possibilities… and then show them different ways to expand the list, to really broaden it. Just to give them a sense of what's out there, so that they're operating from a place of abundance and not scarcity. The abundance mindset and playing with the possibilities is really important.

If you've done one thing your whole career, it's very hard to imagine doing something different. So when a teacher starts imagining, what if I did this, or, could I do that, there's so little information that it's just feels unknown, uncertain, like a scary, huge change.

So I think a big piece of it is you actually have to concretely explore these other possibilities so you don't feel stuck. Because a lot of teachers just assume they can't do other things. But once you actually start gathering that information and investigating a little bit, it starts to crystallize into an actual possibility, and it becomes more real. And depending on your skills and strengths and what you want, you might be like, Well, I could actually do that.

What do you think are teachers’ greatest strengths? When looking toward a career change, what do teachers have going for them? 

I would say two things. One of their greatest strengths is that they are so multi-faceted. A teacher has so many roles. They're definitely a classroom teacher, but they're also a relationship builder. They're an advocate for their students. They're like a politician when they're talking to parents. They’re presenting. They're creating content. It's like all these different jobs wrapped into one, so I think one of their greatest strengths is that they can do all these different things like. Their scope is broad.

But then they're so super sophisticated with each individual student that they can read what that student needs. They can get down to the nitty-gritty and the lesson plan for the next day, about how many minutes it's gonna take. So there's this broadness, but there's also depth and narrowness, when it comes to like individual students and the the details of the work. So I think that combination is brilliant. 

I like thinking about what [teachers] have to offer, but I also like thinking about what you have to offer, you as an individual, and that really varies.

The other thing I would say is that teachers are all so different that one teacher's strengths are going to be completely different than another teacher's strengths. I think of it as, teachers have a lot of similar skills, and skills are things that you might have to build. They might not be things that come naturally to you, but you have to build the skills in order to do your job. But then your natural strengths, the things that come easiest to you, are uniquely yours. So certain parts of teaching that are super easy for you might not be super easy for your neighboring teacher in the next classroom.

So I like to think of strengths as unique to each person, because then it's like, Oh, I don't just have a teacher skill set. I have a much broader range of strengths that I can bring to the table that are me as a human, me, as an individual, not a teacher. And so I like thinking about what [teachers] have to offer, but I also like thinking about what you have to offer, you as an individual, and that really varies.

What types of coaching services do you offer?

I offer one one-on-one coaching, which is very customized to the teacher. We very much start from: what's your career narrative right now? What are your thoughts about career and what's possible for you? We shine a light on the pieces of that narrative that might be helpful in moving you forward and getting clarity, and the pieces that might actually be holding you back. Then we move through a process, a combination of self reflection and self assessment of those strengths, values and interests, as well as active exploration of other career possibilities. I call myself a career clarity coach. I'm a career transformation coach. I'm not a job search coach.

What's your career narrative right now? What are your thoughts about career and what's possible for you? We shine a light on the pieces of that narrative that might be helpful and moving you forward in getting clarity, and the pieces that might actually be holding you back.

I also just opened my Teachers At A Crossroads online course in community for enrollment. This will be the third iteration of that, and it goes from September through April. It's a group cohort that moves through up the process I described earlier together—all the self assessment, plus the career exploration—so that by next spring, they know if they want to leave the classroom, and they have a clear direction for where they want to take their career. [The course] doesn't cover job search stuff, but it gets you right up to the point where you can easily launch into a job search and be more likely to be successful.

Do you have any particular success stories that come to mind?

One student from my first iteration of the course comes to mind. She had already left teaching, so she was more in the the category of trying to figure out what was next for her. She had taught all different kinds of all different levels and subjects, and was later in her career, but didn't know what she wanted to do with the final chapter of her career. (Because most of my clients, I would say, typically have like eight to 20 years of teaching experience.)

She was just very open to all kinds of possibilities, and very willing to think outside the box. She told me that the course was the first time that she was given permission to play with all the possibilities, rather than feeling like she had to like narrow it down right away, or to choose the option that felt most practical.

I feel like that’s such a beautiful part of the course, because it's maybe the only time in your life that you get to just write down possibilities. Maybe ones you’ve never even said out loud, but you've been intrigued by. Some people go more of the traditional path and stay education-adjacent if they leave the classroom, but there are students who will go off in a different direction. And she is now a grief recovery specialist. She works with organizations, but she also is a self-employed coach, and does her own coaching around grief recovery. 

She and I have also talked a lot about how grief plays a role in a teacher's experience of career transition. Because you're saying goodbye to this part of your life that you really thought was going to be forever, or that’s such a huge part of your identity. It's not a word that most teachers probably use to describe those feelings, right? It might be, Oh, I feel like I lost my community, or, I miss my students, but there's a grieving that comes along with such a big change. And especially for people leaving not totally by choice, because if the circumstances had been different, it might have worked right. So there's a sadness in like what you're missing and what you're leaving behind. 

Grief plays a role in a teacher's experience of career transition. Because you're saying goodbye to this part of your life that you really thought was going to be forever, or that’s such a huge part of your identity.

She and I have talked a lot about that. I just really appreciate her willingness to play with possibility and her excitement for what's next. Often, people think of career confusion and the stuckness as a problem, or something that we have to get over and get through in order to move on to the next thing. I like to think of it as an opportunity. The stuckness is an opportunity; the not knowing is an opportunity… I think that the teachers who do best in the course are the ones who really see this phase as, yes, really hard and they want to have clarity, but they’re also excited about what they might learn about themselves, in the process of figuring out what's next.

That's such an exciting way to reframe it: that it's an opportunity, even though it's really uncomfortable.

So uncomfortable! And at times a total drag, you know. But I also think it's less of a drag if you've got that clarity about what you want. So then, when you go into the job search and you have to do the resume, and you have to write the cover letter, at least it's like, Okay, but I know this is what I want. There's no doubt if this is really what you want…

Often, people think of career confusion and the stuckness as a problem, or something that we have to get over and get through in order to move on to the next thing. I like to think of it as an opportunity. The stuckness is an opportunity; the not knowing is an opportunity.

Clarity just gives a lightness to the process. Which is why I call it an exploration process, because you're discovering, you're learning, you're exploring. And it just has a whole different kind of energy than what you read in those Facebook groups, where there's so much frustration and feeling lost and uncertain. All of that's true–and it can also be a really exciting journey.

You can find Laura’s coaching services here.

You can find Laura’s online course community here.

This interview was edited for clarity.