Career Quizzes Won’t Save You (Here’s What Will)

If you’re a burned-out teacher wondering how to leave teaching but you don’t have clarity yet, this episode is your nervous system’s permission slip to slow down and get oriented—before you start “fixing your resume” for a job you don’t even want.

Vanessa connects Brendan Fraser’s comeback story to something teachers know in their bones: you can’t self-care your way out of an unsafe, unsustainable system. Healing starts with safety—then the energy returns, the fog lifts, and the next step becomes visible.

In This Episode, We Cover

• Brendan Fraser’s return and what it looks like when a person starts to feel safe again
• The real problem with “just practice self-care” advice (hint: your nervous system has to be able to receive it)
• Clutter as stress—and how teachers carry “clutter” mentally and emotionally, not just physically
• The EBB + FLOW framework for career transition momentum:
  • EBB = Evaluate, Breathe, Build 
  • FLOW = Focus, Leverage, Own, Win 
• Why “fix your resume” is the wrong first step when you don’t have direction yet
• Vanessa’s driverless car analogy for career-quiz sites and AI tools: helpful assistants, terrible drivers
• Introducing SCOUT: an AI-supported tool that helps translate your teacher stories into real-world skills and language

Key Takeaways for Burned-Out Teachers

• If rest doesn’t feel like rest, it’s not because you’re “bad at self-care.” It’s because your system has been bracing for too long.
• Clarity comes before the resume. Otherwise, you’re packing for a trip without a destination.
• AI can help you organize and spot patterns—but you still have to choose the direction (and the life) those patterns serve.

Mentioned in the Episode (Links & Resources)

• SF neighbors dealing with Waymo cars honking at night (ABC7 / KGO). (ABC7 San Francisco)
• Austin incident where a Waymo vehicle blocked an ambulance response (Texas Tribune; additional local coverage also exists). (The Texas Tribune)
• Happier in Hollywood — Episode about “ebb and flow.” (Happier in Hollywood)
• Peter Walsh — Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? (Oprah)

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 Connect with Vanessa

• Email: Vanessa@TeachersinTransition.com
• Voicemail/Text: 512-640-9099
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• LinkedIn: Vanessa Jackson (Teachers in Transition)
• Bluesky: @beyondteaching.bsky.social
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• Facebook: Teachers in Transition (official page)

Transcript

If you’re a teacher who’s thinking about leaving—but the unknown feels overwhelming—you’re not alone.   Leaving the classroom can feel like walking into unfamiliar territory… and it’s hard to move forward when you can’t see the path—or worse, when you feel like you’re stuck in a hole.

I’ve been there.

That uncertainty? That hesitation? That’s normal. but you don’t have to navigate it alone.  I’m Vanessa Jackson. I spent 25 years in the classroom, and I’ve also worked inside the hiring world—helping people get jobs and understanding how those systems really work. Now I help teachers just like you navigate that in-between space—so you can move out of burnout and into a career outside the classroom that actually fits.

This is Teachers in Transition.
 Let’s get you out—and into what’s next.

Hi! Welcome back to Teachers in Transition!   I’m Vanessa.  I worked as a teacher in mostly band and orchestra but also some other things for 25 years before I left education and worked with a company that specialized in helping people get jobs. So, I know what it’s like on BOTH sides of the hiring table!  Now, I take that knowledge and I work with teachers considering leaving teaching. I am really happy you’re here today!  Today on the podcast, we’re showing Brendan Fraser some appreciation, we’ll talk about driverless cars, EBB and FLOW,  and I’ll debut SCOUT – our new tool in the Find Your Bearings program. Let’s start today’s adventure!

I saw a video featuring Brendan Fraser at what looked like a convention panel and I have to talk about it a little bit. 

If you were anywhere near a big screen in the 90s, you know exactly who I’m talking about. The Mummy, George of the Jungle… and my personal favorite, Blast from the Past, which is just a delight of a movie.

He had this energy about him. He was funny, a little goofy, very human. You just liked him, and by all accounts, he was a really nice guy. 

And then… he disappeared.  Just disappeared from Hollywood completely.   As the stories broke in Hollywood about how studio executives abused their power, more of his story came out.  And we started to understand why.

What he experienced behind the scenes—particularly with people in power—was not just “oh, that was a hard time.” He went through systemic abuse that was bad enough to drive him out of the industry entirely for a long time.  This is the kind of thing that changes how safe you feel in the world. And when your sense of safety is disrupted like that, it doesn’t just live in your thoughts.  It lives in your body.

Brendan re-emerged in a movie called, The Whale.  And even though he used prosthetics in that movie, people were talking about his weight gain.  Because of course Hollywood did that. We are very, very quick to comment on what we can see, and very, very slow to ask what might have caused it.  We know that survivors of abuse can carry it in physical ways as well as mental and emotional ones. 

But once more of his story came out—once people understood what he had actually been carrying, there was a noticeable shift. There was more compassion. More understanding. More willingness to see the whole person instead of just the surface.

And this is where I want to pause for a second, because this connects to something else I’ve seen before.

There’s a book by Peter Walsh called Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Big?—and yes, the title is a whole thing—but the premise is actually really interesting. He noticed that when people decluttered their homes, they often lost weight.  Not because they went on some strict diet. Not because they suddenly became fitness gurus.

But because clutter is stress.

It’s visual stress. It’s cognitive load. It’s a constant low-level signal to your brain that says, “There’s more to manage. There’s more to deal with. There’s more that’s not handled.”

And when people reduced that load… their bodies responded. Now, I am not saying, “Go clean your house and all your problems will be solved.”  If that were the case, teachers would be the most relaxed people on the planet every August.

But I am saying that our bodies respond to what we’re carrying.  And teachers?  Teachers are carrying a lot in EVERY sense of the word. 

You are carrying lesson plans, and expectations, and emotional labor, and behavior management, and emails, and meetings, and the constant low hum of “there’s something else I should be doing right now.”

That’s clutter.

It may not be physical clutter in your house—although let’s be honest, sometimes it is—but it is absolutely mental and emotional clutter.

And your body does not distinguish between those things very well.

Stress is stress.  Load is load.  And over time, your system adapts.  It holds on, it conserves, it adapts, and it tries to keep you going the best it can.

So when teachers say things like:

“I don’t understand why I’m this tired.”
 “I don’t understand why my body feels like this.”
 “I don’t understand why rest doesn’t feel like rest.”

That’s a system that has been under strain for a long time.

Now, here’s where Brendan Fraser’s story becomes really interesting to me.

Because as he started to come back—as he stepped into spaces where people were genuinely glad to see him—you could see a shift.

Not overnight. Not dramatically. But steadily. And that matters.

Because when your body starts to feel safe again, it begins to let go of what it’s been holding, and when you’re not just surviving - when there is actual joy, actual connection, actual appreciation - you start to take care of yourself again.

Not because you “should.”  But because you can. And because it finally feels safe to do that.

So back to this video!!!

He got to work with Harrison Ford in 2010.  (Harrison Ford!  Star Wars, Indiana Jones.. the man, the myth, and the legend!).  Harrison Ford calls him out of the blue early one morning and says, “How fast can you get to the airport?”

And Brendan Fraser, half asleep, says, “I can leave right now.”

He dresses, and jumps in a cab, he’s racing to get there, Harrison calls him again—“Where are you, kid?”—and he’s like, “I’ll be there in 14 minutes.” And Ford says “Call me when you’re here.”

He gets there, and Harrison Ford takes him up in his plane—because of course he does—and puts him in the co-pilot seat and lets him take the controls.

And Brendan says to the audience, “I was Chewbacca!!!”

And the joy in that moment… it’s real. It’s not polished. It’s not performative. It’s just… delight.  And that’s when I realized that he was finally starting to look healthier again.  And he was starting to sound the way I remembered. 

That’s what stood out to me.  Because joy is not just a feeling. It’s physiological too.  It lowers cortisol.  It signals safety.  It tells your nervous system, “You can stand down now.”

And if you are a teacher listening to this, there is a very real chance that your system has not heard that message in a while.

Which brings me to something that I’m going to say, and it might sound a little uncomfortable.  Society tells teachers to practice self-care like that is the solution. Just tell them

Take a bath.
 Go for a walk.
 Drink more water.

And listen - I am not anti-bath. I enjoy a good bath. I am *very*  pro-hydration. I have an emotional support water bottle that goes everywhere with me. 

But those things are not going to fix a nervous system that has been under chronic stress for years because self-care only works when your body feels safe enough to receive it.

If you are still bracing… still carrying… still anticipating the next demand… You are not going to relax just because someone told you to.  And what I see happening over and over again is teachers being told to “take better care of themselves” in environments that are actively breaking them down.

That’s not care. That’s responsibility being misplaced. That’s some Devil-Wears-Prada level mind games!  Because what Brendan Fraser’s story shows us is that healing didn’t start with a spa day.  It started with safety. It started with support.  It started with being valued again, and from there… everything else followed.  You cannot self-care your way out of an unsustainable situation.

Now, I want to shift gears just a little bit, because this ties into something else I’ve been thinking about. I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts—Happier in Hollywood—and they were talking about the idea of ebb and flow.

And that phrase just started ping-ponging around my brain.  Because everything cycles. The tide goes out. The tide comes in. We breathe in, we breathe out. But when we hit a hard season, we panic.  We assume something is wrong.

“What am I doing wrong?”
 “Why isn’t this working?”
 “Why does this feel so hard?”
 “How Can I fix this?”

And sometimes… nothing is wrong. You’re just in the ebb.  The E B B. 

And when the tide is out, the ocean is not gone. It’s gathering energy for it’s next flow.

And the fishermen are not standing there yelling at the water to come back.  They are fixing their nets. They’re repairing their boat. They are preparing for that flow.
 
 Think of Ebb (the E B B) like an acronym:  Evaluate, Breathe, Build

And I think that is where a lot of teachers are right now. Not stuck – just… preparing.

Because I talk to so many teachers who say, “I don’t even know what I would do if I left.”

And I don’t think that’s because you don’t have enough skills.  I think it’s because you have so many that you don’t know where to point them.

So as we roll into the career transition and job search segment, let’s start with one of the biggest barriers I see for teachers because it is NOT capability.  It’s clarity.

It’s standing at the edge of something new and going, “I don’t even know where to start.”  And the default advice out there is:

“Fix your resume.”
 “Start applying.”
 “Get on LinkedIn.”

And I’m sitting over here going…

For what?  For what job?  For what direction?

Because writing a resume without clarity is like packing for a trip when you don’t know where you’re going.  You can do it, but you’re probably going to pack the wrong things.

I have a little confession to make. I am extremely distrustful of those driverless cars.  I just am.

I saw them in action when I was in Austin for a convention, and people were just getting in them like it was no big deal. And I remember thinking… that is very brave of you, because I cannot do it.

And it’s not because I think the technology is bad.  I actually think AI is incredible. I think it’s a fantastic assistant. I think it’s a powerful tool. I think it’s a great thinking partner.

But I do not think it should be driving the whole thing without human guidance because there are things it cannot do.

There was an article – I'll link it in the show notes - about residents in San Francisco getting frustrated because these Waymo cars were coming back to their parking lot at night, and they were getting confused because they couldn’t figure out how to park. So there was a lot of backing up and re-positioning.  And with backing up comes a lot of LOUD beeping!  Just… beeping at each other because they didn’t know how to get around one another.  All these driverless carez beeping at each other like it was some sort of shorthand swearing code. 

And I believe there was a WayMo in Austin that drove itself into an active police scene and then couldn’t figure out how to leave.

And that’s the moment where I go, “Yep. There it is.”, because AI does really well when everything is operating normally.

It can follow patterns.  It can process information. It can make decisions based on what it has seen before.

But when something unexpected happens—when the situation requires context, judgment, or creativity— It stalls if you’re LUCKY.  Chances are it just fails. 

And that is a huge difference between AI and humans that I don’t think businesses have fully caught up to yet, and this matters for you, specifically, because I am seeing more and more tools being marketed to teachers right now.

My Facebook feed has been flooded with them.

“Take this quiz and we’ll tell you what you can do if you don’t want to be a teacher anymore.”  And I get it.  That sounds appealing.  Especially if you’re tired. Especially if you’re overwhelmed. Especially if you just want someone to hand you an answer.  But I don’t want people taking advantage of my Teacher-Peeps

So I went through one of those quizzes marketed to frustrated teachers.  (To be fair, I was suspicious up front because it didn’t spell words correctly in its effort to differentiate a brand, and I’m not sure that’s a great first impression when marketing to teachers?  Just me? No?)

And you know, it wasn’t bad. As a starting point, it was fine.  Except that I had to pay money and sign up for a subscription to get the results of that quiz. I didn’t do that.  I don’t trust that they’ll let me out of the subscription. And a quick search told me that company had incorporated in January of 2026.  (Here’s where I point out that Teachers in Transition has existed since 2013…)

And then, of course, at the end of it, you’re invited to pay to see more. I’m not even saying that’s wrong. People build businesses. People sell services. That’s normal.

But here’s where I want you to be careful. Because when you’re in that space—when you’re tired, when you’re burned out, when you’re trying to figure out what comes next - You are vulnerable to anything that promises a quick, clear answer. Those tools are designed to feel like clarity, but they’re not actually doing the deeper work.

That “other’ site exactly like getting into a driverless car.  It might get you moving, but if something doesn’t fit… if something feels off… if you need to pivot or rethink or go in a slightly different direction…

It’s not going to be able to navigate that with you.  In fact, it might not let you out.

Because it doesn’t know you. It doesn’t know your story. It doesn’t know the nuance of what you’ve actually done.

And this is where I want you to hear this clearly.  AI is very, very good at gathering information and organizing it. It is not good at thinking creatively outside of what it has been trained.  And one of the strongest skills you have as a teacher is exactly the opposite of AI.

You think on your feet. You adjust in real time. You solve problems that nobody warned you were coming.  That is not something to dismiss. That is something to build on.

So if you’re using tools—and I think you should—use them like a tool. Not like the driver.

You are still the one making the decisions. You are still the one steering because your career is not a straight, predictable road.  You are about to head off-road into unfamiliar terrain. 

And the moment something unexpected happens - you’re going to want a human at the wheel.

So I built a thing.  I build a smaller program called Find Your Bearings which focuses on the Clarity piece of a career transition. That transition being Decide, Clarify, Build, Refine, and Attract. 

And the whole point of it is exactly what it sounds like.

It is not overwhelming. It is not let’s-fix-everything-in-your-life-in-three-weeks.

It is: let’s slow down just enough to figure out where you are and where you actually want to go.  And I want to acknowledge something here, because this matters.

One-on-one coaching can be expensive.  There’s no way around that. It is time-intensive. It is customized. It is high-touch, and for a lot of teachers, that’s just not accessible.

You shouldn’t have to sell an organ on the black market to figure out what you want to do with your life. (And if you do, we need to have a different conversation because we make jokes about things like that – we don’t actually do that, but side note:  give blood wherever you can.)

So Find Your Bearings is designed to bridge that gap on this adventure into the great unknown outside the classroom. It gives you structure, it gives you guidance, and it gives you a place to start that is not overwhelming and not financially out of reach.

And inside of that, I built an AI tool called SCOUT.

And SCOUT is a tool that does something that I think is really important. It takes your stories - the things you’ve actually done as a teacher and helps translate them into skills that make sense outside of education.  And it’s as simple as just talking into the space. 

Because the problem isn’t that you don’t have skills. It’s that you’ve been speaking “education-ese” in a world that speaks something else.  Translation matters, y’all.

Because “I managed a classroom” inside education only means that you’ve given those above you on the food chain a reason not to tell you what you’re doing wrong. 

Outside of it? That’s leadership. That’s operations. That’s conflict management. That’s project management.  But if you don’t translate it… it gets missed

AI is a tool. It’s a good tool. It can help you see patterns. It can help you organize your thinking. It can help you get unstuck.  But it is not the driver.  You are. 

Find Your Bearings is not a quiz. It is not a “click a few buttons and we’ll tell you who you are” situation. If it were that simple, you would already be done, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation or nodding along with this podcast. This is a process, and it needs to be a process, because you are not simple. You are not a set of multiple-choice answers that can be sorted into a tidy box like some sad state standardized test.

You are a human being with years - sometimes decades - of experience, and most of that experience lives in stories. Not bullet points. Not job titles. Stories. And stories are messy. They don’t fit neatly into dropdown menus, and they don’t translate cleanly on the first pass, which is exactly why this has to be done differently.

Find Your Bearings is three sessions, and each one has a very specific job. The first thing we do is not move forward - we step back so we can get the big picture. Not “what job should I apply for,” not “how do I fix my resume,” but “what have I actually been doing all this time?” Because there is a massive difference between saying, “I’m a teacher,” and actually unpacking what that means in practice.

When you really start pulling that apart, you realize you’ve been designing systems, managing people, solving problems in real time, communicating with multiple stakeholders, and adjusting constantly based on changing conditions. That’s not small work. But if you don’t slow down long enough to name it, you default to the smallest version of what you do, and that’s where people get stuck.

This is where SCOUT comes in.  SCOUT is not there to tell you what to do with your life. It’s not there to spit out a job title and call it a day. It’s there to help you see what is already there by pulling the patterns out of your own stories.

It looks at the kinds of problems you solve, the roles you naturally step into, the places where you light up versus the places where you’re just grinding through. And that’s useful, but that’s not the whole picture. Because then we take that information, and we work with it. Together.

AI can identify patterns, but it doesn’t know which ones matter for you. It doesn’t know which ones line up with your energy, your values, your actual life. It doesn’t know the difference between something you can do and something you want to keep doing, and that distinction is where everything lives. Miss that, and you risk building a whole new version of burnout somewhere else.

So Find Your Bearings sits right in that middle space. It’s between “I have no idea what I’m doing” and “I guess I’ll just apply and see what happens.” It’s where you get oriented. It’s where you figure out what you’re actually good at, what you actually enjoy, and what kind of environment you need to function well as a human being.

And then—and only then will we start looking outward. We look at roles, at industries, at possibilities, but now you’re not guessing. Now you’re filtering. Now you’re making decisions based on something real instead of throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks.

Because once you have that clarity, everything changes. Job descriptions start to make more sense. You stop trying to force yourself into things that don’t fit. You start recognizing where your skills actually belong, and you move differently. Not faster. Better.

And I want to say this part out loud, because it matters. This is not about finding the perfect job. That’s a myth, and it will keep you stuck longer than anything else. This is about finding a direction that is sustainable, something that actually works for your life instead of draining it.

Because the goal is not to leave one situation where you are exhausted and walk directly into another one with a different title and the same problem. The goal is to build something that fits, something that lets you breathe a little, something that you can actually stay in.

And this is where we come back to that idea of momentum as flow.  After the E.B.B. comes the F.L.O.W.  Once you’ve taken the time to evaluate, to breathe, to build—now you’re ready to move. Now you’re ready to find, leverage, own, and win, and you’re doing it from a place of clarity instead of panic.  

You Focus where your direction. Not in a vague, “this sounds nice” way, but in a way that actually makes sense for how you work and what you want.

You leverage what you already have. Because you are not starting from scratch, no matter how much it feels like it. You are bringing years of experience, and those skills translate—you just have to know how to use them.

You own your story. Which, for teachers, can be harder than it sounds. Because you’ve been in a system that tends to minimize what you do. And part of this process is recognizing the value of your work and being able to speak to it clearly.

And then… you win.

Not in a flashy, overnight success kind of way.

But in a, “I found something that fits, I can breathe again, and this actually works for my life” kind of way.

That’s flow- Focus, Leverage, Own, and Win!  

And if you’re listening to this and something in here is hitting a little close to home… if you’re sitting there thinking, “Okay… I know I can’t stay where I am, but I genuinely don’t know what comes next…”

I want you to know—that’s not a failure. That’s the moment right before things start to make sense. But only if you don’t rush past it.

So instead of jumping straight into applications or trying to force a decision, give yourself the space to actually figure out your direction. That’s exactly why I created Find Your Bearings. It’s a short, focused process designed to help you step back, look at what you’ve really been doing all these years, and start translating that into something that fits your life outside the classroom.

If that sounds like what you need, you can head over to teachersintransition.com. That’s your one-stop spot - you’ll find links to the podcast, resources, and direct links to Find Your Bearings, along with everything else we’ve talked about today. SCOUT is only available to my clients.

Because it’s a new program, there is introductory pricing on Find Your Bearings  right now, and that will not last forever. It will expire before the school year does. So, if you’ve been thinking about doing something different, this is a really good time to at least go take a look and see if it’s a fit.

And if this episode helped you—if it made you feel seen, or gave you a little bit of clarity – Please support the podcast. You can do that by sharing it with someone who needs it, leaving a review, or heading over to the Buzzsprout homepage and supporting the show financially for as little as $3/month for my little indie podcast which is written, produced, and edited by me. 

But this podcast exists because of you. And the more support it gets, the more I can keep showing up and having these conversations in a real, honest way.

You are not behind. You are not broken.

You are in the process of figuring it out.  And you are not alone. 

(also?  I think I am going to go pull out my VHS copy of Blast from the Past and enjoy that movie about authenticity and earnestness in the form of Brandan Fraser one more time.)

👋 CONNECT WITH VANESSA

• 💌 Email: Vanessa@teachersintransition.com
• 📱 Call or Text: 512-640-9099
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That’s the podcast for today! If you liked this podcast, tell a friend, and don’t forget to rate and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Tune in weekly to Teachers in Transition where we discuss Job Search strategies as well as stress management techniques.  And I want to hear from you!  Please reach out and leave me a message at Vanessa@Teachersintransition.com  You can also leave a voicemail or text at 512-640-9099. 

I’ll see you here again next week and remember – YOU are amazing!