I Know I Need to Leave, So Why Can't I Move?
Joanne Howard 
You know you need to leave teaching but can't seem to start. Understanding career change inertia, why it happens, and how to break through paralysis.
You know you need to leave teaching. You're not in denial about it. You're not making excuses or pretending everything's fine. You've accepted the reality that this job isn't sustainable for you anymore.
You've done the research. You've read the articles, joined the Facebook groups, bookmarked the career change websites. You've made lists of your transferable skills. You've thought about what kind of work you might do instead. You might have even looked at a few job descriptions and thought, "I could do that."
And yet.
Your CV hasn't been updated. Your LinkedIn profile is still gathering digital dust - if it even exists. You haven't applied for a single role. You haven't had any meaningful conversations about leaving. You're exactly where you were six months ago, a year ago, maybe longer.
You know you need to move. So why can't you?
This is career change inertia. And you're far from alone in experiencing it.
What Career Change Inertia Actually Is
Career change inertia isn't the same as procrastination. Procrastination is when you're avoiding a task you know you need to do. You're putting it off, finding distractions, doing other things instead.
Inertia is different. It's not that you're avoiding the work of career change. It's that you genuinely can't seem to start. You sit down to update your CV and your mind goes blank. You open LinkedIn and feel overwhelmed before you've even begun. You look at a job application and the gap between where you are and what they're asking for feels impossibly wide.
It's like you're stuck in treacle. You can see where you need to go, but you can't seem to generate the energy or momentum to actually move towards it. And the longer you stay stuck, the worse it gets, because now you're not just stuck - you're stuck and you're frustrated with yourself for being stuck.
Why Inertia Happens
Career inertia doesn't happen because you're lazy or unmotivated or lacking in willpower. It happens for much more complex psychological reasons, and understanding them is the first step towards breaking through.
Burnout has depleted your capacity for change. Career change requires energy, decision-making, and emotional bandwidth. But teaching has been draining all of those resources for months or years. You're running on empty. Your brain and body are in survival mode, focused entirely on getting through each day, each week, each term. There's nothing left over for planning a future that feels distant and uncertain.
When you're burned out, even small decisions feel enormous. Choosing what to have for dinner feels hard. The thought of restructuring your entire professional life? That's not just hard - it feels impossible.
The task feels too big to start. Career change isn't a single action. It's a complex series of interconnected tasks, and when you look at the whole thing, it's paralysing. Update CV, optimise LinkedIn, identify target roles, research companies, network, apply, interview prep, negotiate offers and most terrifying of all, navigate rejection. Where do you even begin? And if you do start with one piece, will it even matter if you haven't done the other pieces first?
This is decision paralysis. When faced with too many options or too many steps, our brains often choose to do nothing rather than risk doing the wrong thing.
You're terrified of making the wrong move. What if you leave teaching and regret it? What if you can't find anything else? What if you're throwing away something secure for something that doesn't work out? These fears are completely legitimate, and they can be absolutely paralysing.
Your brain is trying to protect you by keeping you where you are. The familiar, even when it's painful, feels safer than the unknown. This is loss aversion at work - we're wired to fear potential losses more than we're motivated by potential gains. Staying in teaching might be making you miserable, but at least you know what that misery looks like. The potential misery of leaving feels scarier because it's unknown.
You don't trust yourself to figure it out. Years of being micromanaged, observed, and told that your professional judgement isn't quite good enough have eroded your confidence in your own decision-making. You're waiting for someone to tell you what to do, to give you permission, to show you the "right" way to leave teaching.
But career change isn't a lesson plan with clear learning objectives. It's messy and personal and there isn't one correct path. That ambiguity can be terrifying when you've spent years working in a system that values compliance and conformity.
You're grieving, even though you haven't left yet. Part of what keeps you stuck is anticipatory grief. You know that leaving teaching means saying goodbye to things that matter to you - the relationships with students, the sense of purpose, the identity you've built. Even though you know you need to leave, part of you is mourning what you'll lose. And grief, even anticipatory grief, is exhausting and immobilising.
The Inertia Trap Gets Worse Over Time
What makes career inertia particularly cruel? The longer you stay stuck, the harder it becomes to move.
You start to develop a story about yourself. "I'm the person who can't leave teaching. I'm too stuck. I've missed my chance. Everyone else manages to make a change, but I can't seem to do it."
You see other teachers successfully transitioning out - landing new roles, building businesses, finding careers that work for them. And instead of feeling inspired, you feel worse. Because clearly it's possible for them. They must be more capable, more confident, more organised, more something than you are. You tell yourself you're fundamentally different, somehow uniquely unsuited to making this work. They can do it because they're better. You can't because you're... you.
This story reinforces the inertia, making you believe that being stuck is a permanent state rather than a temporary one. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - you believe you can't do it, so you don't try, which confirms your belief that you can't do it.
You also start to feel shame. You know intellectually that you need to leave. You can see that it's not sustainable. But you're not doing anything about it, and that makes you feel weak, incapable, or broken. The shame makes it even harder to reach out for help or take action, because now you're not just stuck - you're stuck and ashamed of being stuck.
Breaking Through Inertia Doesn't Require Massive Momentum
But there’s good news. Breaking through career change inertia doesn't require you to suddenly become a different person or generate enormous amounts of energy and motivation. It requires something much more manageable: small, structured actions.
Sometimes the first step is healing, not action.
If you're so burned out that even the smallest career change tasks feel impossible, your first steps might need to be about recovery - not your CV or LinkedIn. Building back your energy, setting proper boundaries, rediscovering who you are outside of survival mode. That's not avoiding career change. That's creating the foundation that makes change possible. You can't plan your future when you're barely surviving your present.
When you are ready, start with tiny steps. You don't need to overhaul your entire CV in one sitting. You could spend fifteen minutes writing down three achievements from your teaching career in language that non-teachers would understand. That's it. Not the whole CV. Just three things.
You don't need to apply for ten jobs this week. You could read one job description in an area that interests you and identify which of your teaching experiences are relevant. Small actions reduce overwhelm and prove to your brain that movement is possible.
Focus on one decision at a time. You don't need to know exactly where you're going before you start moving. You just need to know the next step. Not the whole staircase - just the next step. Can you update one section of your LinkedIn profile this week? Can you reach out to one person who's left teaching and ask about their experience?
Career change isn't about making one perfect decision. It's about making a series of small, manageable decisions that gradually build momentum.
Address the underlying fears. Sometimes inertia persists because the fears driving it haven't been acknowledged or explored. What are you actually afraid of? Not the surface fear ("I won't find another job") but the deeper one ("I won't know who I am if I'm not a teacher"). When you can name and examine your fears with support, they lose some of their paralysing power.
Give yourself permission to move slowly. Career change inertia often comes with an additional burden: the belief that you should be moving faster. Everyone else seems to be making swift decisions and bold moves, and you're still here, stuck. But your pace is your pace. Moving slowly and intentionally is still moving. You don't need to rush into anything to prove you're serious about leaving.
You're Not Broken, You're Stuck
If you're experiencing career change inertia, please hear this: you're not broken. You're not lazy. You're not lacking in courage or capability. You're stuck, and being stuck is a completely understandable response to burnout, overwhelm, and fear.
Career change inertia isn't a character flaw. It's a symptom of trying to make a major life change while simultaneously being depleted by the very situation you're trying to leave. That's not weakness. That's just reality.
And those other teachers who seem to be transitioning successfully? They're not fundamentally different from you. They're not more capable or more deserving. They've just found the right support and structure at the right time. What worked for them can work for you too.
The fact that you know you need to leave is significant. Many people never reach that level of clarity. The fact that you're frustrated with yourself for not moving yet shows that you do have the desire and intention to change. You're not giving up. You're just stuck.
And being stuck isn't a permanent state. With the right support, structure, and small steps, you can start to move again.
One Academy member, Bethan, put it perfectly: "If I'd have thought 'I'll just get my head down and get on with it'...I'd still be in teaching now." That willpower approach keeps you stuck. What breaks inertia is support, structure, and permission to move at your own pace.
If career inertia has you feeling stuck and frustrated, the Adventures After Teaching Academy provides the structure, support, and small steps that help you break through paralysis and start moving towards a sustainable career beyond teaching.
Categories: : Psychology of Career Change