Ep #270: When a Teacher Wants to Quit

Hello empowered principals. Welcome to episode 270. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal™ Podcast, a not so typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host certified life coach Angela Kelly Robeck. 

Well, hello my empowered leaders. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. So happy your little faces are here. I love you guys. All right. If you’re new, I’m thrilled you’re here welcome. Best podcast for educators on the planet. That is my thought and feeling. Okay. I love this podcast so much. I love all of you so much. You’re so amazing. You’re doing such great things. All right, short and sweet today.

We’re going to talk about when a teacher wants to quit. Last week, we talked about negative teachers, didn’t we? This week we’re talking about when teachers want to quit. There are people who are coming into your office, and they’re saying, “I can’t do this. I want to quit.” You’re like no, don’t quit. I don’t have anybody else I need you. Or you’re saying yes, please quit. 

Now let’s talk about it. A teacher comes to you frustrated, upset, overwhelmed, in tears, can’t take it anymore. They’re in intense emotion. Okay, this is happening across the board. So if this has happened to you, you’re not alone. A lot of principals are dealing with teachers who are either new, or they got into the profession thinking it was going to be easy, and it’s not. Or you’ve had some veterans that are like hey, this is not like any other year I’ve ever experienced. I’m out. I can’t do this anymore. 

So it doesn’t matter what level the teacher, what matters is you’ve got teachers coming to you with intense emotion. Their thought is I can’t do this anymore. I’m not qualified, capable, can’t handle this, don’t need this BS, whatever they’re thinking, right? They’re coming to you. Maybe they’re complaining about the kids, or they’re complaining about colleagues or they’re thinking about parents. They’ve got a parent who’s driving them crazy. I’ve got so many clients who are dealing with this right now. It’s insane. 

So I wanted to talk about it because I figured if my clients are dealing with it, many of you are as well. Okay. So it doesn’t matter what—Well, I’m going to talk about that in a minute. It does matter to the stressor. But in the end for you, it doesn’t really make a difference to the particular stress. When a teacher comes to you and basically, here’s what’s happening. They’re in cognitive dissonance, which means what they think should be happening and the reality of what is happening does not match. 

Whether it’s kids aren’t behaving and they should be, right? Their expectation is that kids should behave a certain way, and the reality is that kids are not doing what the teacher expects them to do. Or that parents shouldn’t be harassing me. The reality is, there is a parent who is harassing you. Or my colleague should XYZ, and the colleague is not doing XYZ. Do you see what I’m saying? 

A lot of teachers come with the frustration that another person should be behaving in the way I expect them to. This is called a mental manual when you have a list of ways that somebody should be behaving versus the way they really are behaving, and they don’t match. You can get into a lot of heartache when people don’t behave the way you want them to. 

So in this program, I teach you not to try and manipulate them or coerce them or convince them why they should behave the way you want them to so that you can be happy. What I teach is that people be people, right? They’re gonna go out there and be human and do all the crazy things and do all the frustrating things and all the things that get you worked up. Same is true for teachers. People aren’t behaving the way they want. They’re behaving badly. Whatever, okay. 

So what’s happening is expectations are not being met. So there’s two things you can do. You can either change the circumstance, which is to quit, or you can change your expectations, your thoughts about the circumstance, right? 

So when a teacher says I want to quit, what they’re thinking is if I change the situation, if I leave this classroom or leave this school, or I leave teaching altogether, and I go somewhere else, I’m going to feel better. I’m going to be able to get rid of this frustration, this anger, this resentment, this overwhelm, whatever emotion they’re feeling. 

When somebody wants to quit, what they want to quit on is feeling the emotion that’s coming with that situation. Notice that. They don’t feel like they can handle or that they have the capacity to allow that emotion to be present in their bodies. 

That’s not a problem when they think that because we all have that thought. We all try to avoid negative emotion. We all, when we’re in pain, feel like we can’t take it anymore. We all want to get out of it. I just want you to see that when a teacher is contemplating quitting, they’re thinking about making a decision to change their circumstance, it’s because they think they will feel better. 

Now, here’s the truth. Sometimes, you can change your circumstance. You can go to a new situation, and you feel better. But the only reason you actually feel better if you quit is because you have different thoughts that you had when you were in the job. Now, my coach told me like you’ve got to find a way to be happy in the circumstance you’re in before you leave it. Don’t quit something until you can find the truth of the 50/50. You can be happy in any job 50% of the time. Look for the truth in that. 

That’s what I did in school leadership. I really stuck with it until I found a way to be happy, no matter what. Not happy all of the time, but happy at least 50% of the time. The more that I let myself look for what was happy and good, the better I felt. The less bad the bad stuff felt because now I had perspective, okay. 

So if a teacher comes to you, and they say things like things aren’t working. The kids aren’t making progress. I feel stuck or trapped or we’re spinning in circles. We’re not getting anywhere. This is not what I thought the job would be, right? They’re saying I want to quit. I’m giving up. I want to try a new profession. I want to go to a different position. I want you to know when they walk into your office, you are going to have thoughts about what they’re saying. You’re going to have opinions. You’re going to have feelings. You’re going to have an emotional reaction. 

Now, usually it’s one of two things. They come in and they tell you this and you think to yourself yeah, this is the best news on the planet. I want you to go. You’ve been negative. You don’t want to be here. I don’t like you. You don’t like me. This isn’t working, whatever. You’re gonna have a list of thoughts and opinions and feelings, okay. Just notice.

Or you’re going to think no, I love you. You’re a great teacher. You have so much potential. I want you to stay. I don’t have another person. I don’t want to have to hire somebody. I don’t want blah, blah, blah, how it’s going to impact you. Your brain is going to freak out one way or the other. Either you’re going to be like yes, I want them to go, or no, I don’t want them to go. 

Let me, with love, say this next statement. Your opinion of whether you want them to stay or go is not why they’re coming to you. That’s not what they’re coming to you for. They’re not coming to you for your opinion. Now, they might ask for it. But that’s not what’s relevant here. How you feel is completely irrelevant at this moment. 

I know that sounds harsh, but hear me out. If you can keep your opinions out of the equation, and simply focus on the teachers’ thoughts and feelings, you will be able to help them come to their own decision about their career. This is called clean coaching. It’s different than mentoring. 

Mentoring is where your opinion of how they should handle something is included in the feedback to them. That’s mentoring. I do some mentoring. There’s times where people will ask me, and I’ll say this is how I would handle it. Mentoring is having expertise and being an apprentice, right. Showing them how it’s done. Okay.

Coaching, especially clean coaching, is taking all of your thoughts and ideas and suggestions out and putting them on the sidelines and asking them to clarify for themselves what are they thinking. How are they feeling? What decisions are coming up? What is the urge that they have? What decision are they trying to make? How are they going to make this decision? Why are they making this decision? Do they love their reason for that decision? 

It’s not our job as leaders to tell people what to do with their career. It’s our job to help them clarify their own thoughts and give them a space to process and see what’s really going on inside their minds so that they can make their own decision about their own career. Coaching them from a clean space is not trying to convince them that you know what’s best or to try and kind of move the conversation in a way that gets them to do what you want them to do, whether you want them to stay or go. That’s not what matters here. 

They need to understand why do they want to quit. What thoughts and emotions are they having? Then play that out. Let’s talk about what would it look like for you if you were to leave right here, right now? Let’s roll that out just so you can have an understanding. If you break your contract, what is that going to mean for the district? What’s it going to look like for your paycheck? Where are you going to go? Do you have a plan? What will that entail? 

Maybe they’re okay with some short term pain for a longer term benefit. Maybe they have a different vision, and they have a different passion, and they’ve already thought it through. That’s perfectly fine. You just want to help them explore that and make sure they’ve thought about it. 

Because a lot of times when teachers come to us in that intense state, they’re in like the heat of the moment. They’re in that heat of emotion, right? What do they call it? The passionate crime or whatever, right? They want to make decisions on impulse because they feel so bad, and they want to get out of that emotion. 

You want to help them neutralize the emotion just enough where they can get back into their prefrontal cortex so they’re not in fight or flight. They can be like oh, yeah. Let me think this through. Yeah. No, I hadn’t really thought about that. I just was so upset, so frustrated. Then you say tell me about it. What’s going on? Just share with me what happened today. They’re going to tell you. This parent this or these kids that or my colleague this. Let them brain drain. Let their brain have that emotional reaction, and let that rush of adrenaline go through. 

Then they can go back into their prefrontal cortex and say okay, are you making this decision based on how you feel right now? Is this how you always feel? Have you been considering this for a while? Is this a career move you want to make? Do you want to make it now? Do you want to make it at the end of the year? What would that look like for you? 

Let’s roleplay this out if you stay and if you go. Because I just want you to look at all the angles because this is your career and your decision. I care about you, and I care about you making decisions from a place that you love. You have to love your reason for whatever decision you’re making. 

I talk a lot about decisions in my program with my clients. Because the way we make decisions in one area of our life is the way we tend to make decisions in other areas. We have a decision making process that we use. We want to understand how we make decisions. Do we do them impulsively? Do we take a lot of time and research? Do we have to ask a lot of people? Do we do the math? Do we have pros and cons? Like there’s a lot of ways that people make decisions. There are different approaches.

But at the end of the day, all that I care about for any of you and any of my clients is that you love the reason behind your decision. That the decision making process that you have chosen that works for you is one that you love, that makes sense, that feels aligned to who you are, and to your personal and professional values. 

So when someone’s coming in hot, and they’re in high emotion, you’ve got to hold space for them so that they can pause and take a breath and talk about what’s going on for them. Is it an ongoing thing? Was it a today thing? Is there something they need help with? What do they think the solution to feeling better would be? Is there a way we can get them the support they need? 

Do you see that? It keeps your opinion out. It empowers them to make their own decisions, and you just open up and invite them to be honest and give them a space without jumping in the pool with them, without putting your opinion into the mix. They don’t need that right now. What they need is to get clear in their own mind about who they are and where they’re going and what decisions they’re making and why they’re making them, and if they believe that’s the best decision for them. Okay.

So if you’ve got teachers out there who want to quit, I know that can be scary. If you don’t have people or you have the thought I don’t have another teacher. How am I gonna find other teachers? Now I have to interview. It’s going to impact me. Do not let your thoughts and your fears and what’s going to bother you get into the middle of this while you’re talking to the teacher. Keep those separate. All right, my friends. Have an amazing week. I love you. You’re doing great work. Talk to you next week. Take good care. Bye. 

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