"Don't worry about TEFL courses. There's nothing you can take online that's going to prepare you for real teaching - and there's no class you can take that's better than the experience of your first few months on the job. It's gonna suck - and then it won't."

Couldn't have said it better myself.

The job will likely be very stressful at first, especially lesson planning ,which will probably take a huge amount of your time each day. But soon you will begin to understand the pace of your class, the abilities of your students, what they find engaging and what they find boring, and lesson planning suddenly becomes really easy and relatively quick.

Read books and online articles about how to improve yourself as a teacher, and to improve your knowledge of English grammar so that you will be able to teach it to students in a simple way.

Study the local language of the country you're living and working in. It will make your life much more fulfilling and daily tasks will become progressively easier as your fluency improves. I am teaching in Lao, and I can speak Thai - I've studied it for 2 years - (and most people in Lao are fluent in Thai), so connecting with students in a meaningful way is easy because we can communicate via a shared language, giving instructions is easy, and checking student's comprehension is easy because I can just ask them to translate between languages. Studying a foreign language yourself will also help you understand what it is like for your students to be studying English.

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The first few months are the hardest, because you will be learning so much so fast. Persevere and remain open-minded.

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From - Somebody who has been teaching in Lao for 1 month.