Existential Coaching for Teachers : Find Meaning and Prevent Burnout
Teacher burnout is at an all-time high. In the UK, six out of every 1,000 teachers are leaving their jobs each year, and vacancies have doubled since 2020 (Woolcock, 2024). Many teachers begin their careers with a sense of passion and purpose, only to find themselves overwhelmed by increasing workloads, administrative pressures, and lack of resources. It’s no wonder so many feel disillusioned.
This raises an important question: how can teachers be supported not just to perform better in the classroom, but to live more fulfilling professional lives? One answer may lie in existential coaching—a form of coaching that focuses on meaning, freedom, connection, and purpose.
Beyond Professional Development
Most professional development for teachers focuses on techniques, lesson planning, or classroom management. These are useful, but they don’t always reach the deeper issues that lie beneath burnout. Teachers often wrestle with questions like:
Am I making a difference?
Do I feel connected to my students?
Is this career aligned with my values—or am I just going through the motions?
When such questions go unanswered, motivation slips away. Existential coaching offers a space to reflect on these challenges, not by prescribing solutions, but by helping teachers reconnect with their personal values and sense of purpose.
What Existential Coaching Offers Teachers
Existential coaching is rooted in philosophy and focuses on the human experience. Rather than concentrating only on performance, it explores how we make sense of life and work. For teachers, this means asking questions about freedom, responsibility, connection, and meaning.
Philosopher and psychotherapist Emmy van Deurzen describes existential coaching as a way to live with greater awareness and understanding. For teachers, this could mean rediscovering why they chose education in the first place and identifying how to stay connected to that sense of meaning even in the face of systemic challenges.
Freedom and Agency
Teachers operate in environments where external pressures often restrict their freedom. Standardized testing, curriculum demands, and administrative oversight can leave little room for creativity or autonomy. Yet freedom and agency are essential for wellbeing.
Existential coaching helps teachers notice where they still have choices, however small. It may be in how they structure lessons, how they connect with students, or how they bring their unique personality into the classroom. By reclaiming a sense of agency, teachers can feel less trapped by the system and more empowered in their daily work.
Connection and Meaning
Teaching is at its heart a relational profession. Students thrive when they feel seen, supported, and connected, and teachers flourish when their relationships with students and colleagues feel meaningful. When these bonds are weakened, the work can quickly feel empty.
Existential thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Viktor Frankl remind us that connection is central to human resilience. Coaching can help teachers reflect on where they feel isolated, where they feel supported, and how they might strengthen their connections in ways that restore motivation.
A Practical Framework: The Four Worlds Model
One tool often used in existential coaching is the Four Worlds Model, created by Austrian psychotherapist Alfried Längle. It encourages people to reflect on four dimensions of life:
The physical world: health, energy, and environment
The social world: relationships and community
The personal world: identity and self-understanding
The spiritual world: meaning, values, and purpose
For teachers, working through these dimensions can highlight areas of imbalance. Perhaps the social world feels neglected due to lack of support from colleagues, or the physical world is strained by exhaustion. Identifying these imbalances can provide clarity and direction, even within one or two coaching sessions.
Why Now?
We live in a time of uncertainty, with global challenges filtering into the classroom. Students are grappling with questions of identity, belonging, and purpose, and teachers are expected to guide them through it. If teachers themselves feel disconnected from meaning, the task becomes even harder.
Existential coaching does not remove the systemic pressures teachers face. What it does offer is a human-centered, holistic way of supporting educators—helping them reflect, reframe, and reconnect with what matters most.
Final Thoughts
Teachers are not just deliverers of curriculum. They are human beings with values, hopes, and struggles, deserving of the same care and attention they offer their students.
Existential coaching provides a space to explore meaning, freedom, and connection in a way that can prevent burnout and sustain motivation. For teachers feeling disillusioned or overwhelmed, it offers not quick fixes, but a deeper invitation: to rediscover purpose and to live—and teach—with greater authenticity.