3 Decisions You’ll Regret Not Making Before August

The Weird First Day Back

You know that first morning back. You walk in your office in August, or in my case, unfortunately, July, and you sit down at your desk and something feels off. Something about you feels off. It's a strange thing because you've been gone for months, and yet, in another way, it feels like you never left. So you go through the motions, you check your email, you say hello to people in the hallway, and you look like someone who's starting a new school year. You might even have new shoes. But underneath that, there's something you brought back with you that you were probably hoping summer would have taken care of. The situation with that administrator that you replayed in your mind approximately 400 times over your vacation, the colleague dynamic you told yourself you'd feel differently about now that you're back in August. Or the slow chipping away of your confidence that started sometime around February and never really seemed to slow down. It's all still there, waiting exactly where you left it in May. And that's the thing that nobody tells you about August. I'm releasing this episode about August in May on purpose because actually your August starts right now. The professional headspace that you walk back into is almost never the one you imagine having after your restful summer break. Instead, you end up with the headspace that you're living right now. The unresolved things that you were too exhausted to deal with in the final weeks of school, like the relationships, the resentments, or the questions about am I even doing this right? Those don't go on vacation. They lay latent under all of your pool seshes and the margaritas and the get-togethers with friends, only to resurface the minute you start walking those hallways again. There is solid research on what sustained demand does to judgment. John Sweller's work on cognitive load, which has been replicated a ton, comes to a pretty uncomfortable conclusion. When working memory stays overwhelmed long enough, decision quality drops. Complexity becomes unmanageable. You just default to whatever's easiest rather than whatever's right. And nine months into a school year at a 700 to 1 caseload means that your working memory has been overwhelmed since October. And when you are that depleted, you default. You stop deciding and start reacting. You let the path of least resistance become the path. So by May, you have been making dozens of counseling, relational, and logistical decisions every single day for an entire school year. The question is not whether you are depleted. The question is whether the decisions that matter most for next year get made on purpose or by accident. This episode is about three of those. Hey school counselor, welcome back. We are in the thick of May, which means you are running on fumes and maybe listening to this in your car in the parking lot because you need five more minutes before you walk in. If you've been in a Saturday session with me lately, some of what we're getting into today will feel familiar because we've been sitting with these kinds of questions together. How do we close out the year in a way that actually means something? Or how do we speak up for our roles without things getting weird with admin? This episode is my next step to answer a few more questions like this out loud. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. So the conventional wisdom about May is that you just need to survive it, right? Get to the finish line, push through the last few weeks, and then decompress over the summer. And I get it, you are exhausted, and the end of the school year is brutal. But that just survive it posture has a cost. And that cost doesn't show up until August when it's too late to do anything about it. The cost is walking in on day one and realizing the thing you were going to deal with is still there, but it's unresolved. And now you're carrying it into a new school year instead of starting with a head start. What you carry into August becomes your August. That's the whole thing. And these three decisions look at the things you've been carrying around on your shoulders, but maybe really haven't examined yet. So let's do something with May instead of just pushing through it. Decision one. And are you starting that conversation now before someone else starts it for you? This is something I hear a lot. And I have to admit, I've even said this myself in the past. Something like, I've been at my campus for a while. People know what I do. Like the idea of still needing to actively define your role after years in a building is a little exhausting, maybe beneath you, or like, haven't we already done this? But here's the thing: your campus is not static. Admin turns over, new teachers arrive with their own assumptions about what you do, district priority shift, and every single one of those changes creates an opening, either for you to step in with intention or for the building to fill in your direction without you. Your established presence does not protect you from roll drift, where your job gets changed without your consent. If anything, that established presence can work against you because people assume they already know what you do, so they stop asking. We know a lot of us work in buildings, and really we all work in a profession where the decisions about what we do get made for us rather than with us. That is not an accident. Think about it. School counseling is a predominantly female workforce operating inside of institutions overflowing with hierarchies that were not designed with us in mind. The decisions about how our jobs work, what our caseloads look like, and what we get to handle and what we don't, those decisions get made in rooms where we're often not present. Let me give you my own example of this. On my campus right now, we've been having conversations about behavior intervention response and what that actually needs to look like from the school counseling perspective. And what I've been pushing toward is more consultation on the front end, less in the moment de-escalation as a default. More of me working with teachers and admin to build systems and approaches before the kid gets dysregulated in the hallway. And less of me being the person who gets called to manage the hallway situation itself. Because that's a reactive role that honestly pretty much any trained adult can fill. And my counseling skill, when I'm allowed to use it, can have leverage in a completely different place. Now, that kind of shift doesn't happen because I wished for it when August came around. It happens because I'm thinking about it now, in May, while the school year is still going, while I still have the receipts from 10 months of showing up, and while conversations about next year are already happening. And I am in those conversations instead of finding out about the decisions after they were made. So, what's one thing about school counseling on your campus that you would change if you could? Maybe it's something structural, how behavior referrals are routed, what you're expected to do during testing, whether you have protected time for case conceptualization. Maybe it's something smaller. Maybe it's something like how your door policy works and what happens when someone tries to barge in when you're working with a student. Whatever it is, write it down. Type up a paragraph, write it on a piece of paper, sketch it out on a post-it note. I don't care. But what would it look like? And who needs to be part of that conversation? And then start having the conversation. Not when you get back in August after admin has been in the building for six weeks cooking up ideas for you without you, but now. Because if you don't define your role before summer, there is a decent chance that you'll spend August defending decisions that you never actually got to make. Your contract ends, theirs does not. So be in that room before summer starts, or at least be in the email thread. Decision number two. Which one professional relationship are you going to do something about before you leave for summer? Now, we're not talking about all the people on the campus that annoy you. We're talking about just one, one person. And you probably know the one I'm talking about. There is a coworker, an administrator, a dynamic on your campus that costs you more energy this year than almost anything else you dealt with. And right now you are so ready to be done that every part of you wants to lock your office door and let summer take care of it. But y'all, summer does not take care of it. I'll tell you mine. A few years ago, I had a change in campus administration. And no one ever showed up to really tell me to do anything differently, but pretty soon the comments started coming. They were subtle, sometimes sideways, sometimes they even felt backhanded. There were suggestions that implied maybe I wasn't doing my job in quite the right way. They were always insinuations, right? Never direct. I was a pretty seasoned school counselor, and here's this new person who's never done my job making me question myself. And suddenly I'm sitting in my office wondering if I've been getting it wrong the whole time. That's the belief, right? Maybe they are right. Maybe I've been doing this wrong and I never realized it. Or sometimes we think something like, I've been doing this right all these years, but now I have to prove it all over again to someone who just got here. Either way, we fall into the same overthinking spiral. And the problem here is what most of us do inside that spiral, which is just replay it over and over again. We rehearse what we wish we would have said. We imagine the conversations we haven't had. That's rumination. And it feels like processing, but it's not. Susan Nolan Hoaxima spent decades studying how people respond to distress. What she found consistently is that rumination makes things worse. It prolongs the emotional state, it interferes with problem solving, it keeps you stuck without moving you through. You're spinning your wheels, you're not processing. And full disclosure, I used to think replaying was processing. Like if I thought about it enough times, I'd eventually arrive somewhere different. Turns out there was a word for that, and it was not progress. So, what actually works? There's a framework out of rational emotive behavior therapy, REBT, developed by Albert Ellis. You probably remember that from grad school. And it gets at exactly this situation. The core idea is that it's not the event that drives the emotional response, it's what you made the event mean. In my situation, the event was the sideways comments. What I made them mean was something about my competence, my standing, and all my years of work. I couldn't control whether the comments kept coming, but I could challenge what I made them mean. Those are two completely different problems, and only one of them was mine to work with. So here's an exercise for you. Get a piece of paper or your phone notes, whatever works. Write down the situation, and then write down what you made it mean. Then ask yourself three questions. Is this belief actually 100% accurate? Is holding it in my brain helping me to do anything useful? And what would a more honest, more grounded version of this sound like? Now, I want to be honest with you about something. This is not a 15-minute fix. And I want to be really clear about that because I don't want to give you the wrong impression. We know as counselors that this kind of cognitive work, challenging a belief about your professional worth, about whether you're seen, about whether all your years of experience count for anything. That process can take months, sometimes longer, especially when you can't control whether or not the jabs keep coming. You can do the work, you can get to a more grounded place, and then another comment comes sailing in and you feel it all over again. And so you have to work through it again. And then maybe the next time it's a little bit faster. And eventually, if you put in enough reps, the belief starts to lose its grip on you. It doesn't completely go away, but it feels a lot lighter. And that's the goal, right? It's not complete resolution, just that it feels lighter. So before you leave for summer, make one call about the relationship that you identified. Have the conversation, set the limit, say it out loud to someone who needs to know, or genuinely let it go. Any of those could be the answer. But what's not the answer is deciding to do nothing and calling that moving on. And then as an aside for the moment when one of those comments comes sailing in and you don't have any time to think, or a piece of paper, I'll tell y'all, this is what I actually do. I have a mantra. It lives on a post-it inside my desk drawer. And it is absolutely not fit to repeat on this podcast. But for one particular person I'm thinking of right now, it has carried me through more interactions than I can count. So find your version, write it down, and keep it somewhere you can see it when you need it. Decision number three. What is the one professional thing you're going to protect this summer? And what do you need to give yourself permission to not do? Let's start with the second part because I genuinely do not think we talk about this enough. Rest is restorative. It is not a consolation prize. It is not the thing you get to do once you've earned it by being productive enough. Rest is a clinically necessary part of functioning in a high demand profession. And the research behind that is not vague. Christina Maslock, whose work on burnout in the helping professions is foundational. Like this is the woman who literally created the Maslock burnout inventory. It's unambiguous. Genuine recovery from chronic occupational stress, feel familiar, requires actual disengagement. Not I'm relaxing, but also mentally drafting my small group plan for the next year. No, actual disengagement. There is nothing wrong with spending the first two weeks of summer doing absolutely nothing professional. It is not laziness, it is biological maintenance. And if we're being honest, sometimes your body makes that decision for you the very first day you don't have to set your alarm. But I've seen in consultation with school counselors all over the country that those who burn out fastest are the ones who never actually stop, who spend their summers in this low-grade guilt about not doing enough, not knowing enough, not preparing enough, and who go back in August or September technically functional, but emotionally still on empty. I have been that person. And I can tell you firsthand, it does not produce a better school counselor. It produces a more exhausted one. So give yourself the permission explicitly, out loud, if you need to. You get to rest, sleep until 10, sit on the couch and read something silly. That is not failure. That is what recovery looks like. Now, with that said, there is also a real cost to doing absolutely nothing professional all summer. And we need to be honest about that part too. The research on skill maintenance suggests that complete disengagement from complex skill sets produces real deterioration. You could go back in August and spend the first two weeks feeling like you're trying to remember a language you used to speak fluently. Your words don't come as quickly. You can't form your arguments as convincingly. It's frustrating. But a little bit of deliberate engagement over the summer keeps your counseling thinking alive and makes the transition back significantly smoother. So here's the decision. Identify one specific, meaningful, professional thing that you're going to engage with this summer on your terms, at your pace, with a clear beginning and end. Not a 12-module learning course you're going to abandon by the third day end, right? Or not a vague intention to read more, one specific thing. This is exactly what we work on together in the mastermind through the summer. We don't run courses, we don't give you assignments, but we do provide a room of clinically serious school counselors asking hard questions and thinking clearly about their work. And we're going to be doing that this summer through a very intentional, no stress book study. So if that's what your one thing might need to look like this year, the link is in the show notes. But make that decision about whatever your thing is. Write it down, tell somebody, and make it real enough that you know you're going to make it happen and you're not going to conveniently cast it to the side when summer gets real exciting. All right, three decisions. Who you're going to be before the building decides for you, what you're going to do with a professional relationship that cost you the most energy this year, and what you're going to protect for your own growth this summer, alongside the permission to actually recover and rest without any guilt. None of these things require a fancy system or a purchase or a certification or a weekend workshop. They require about 20 minutes of thinking before you lock your office door for the summer. The decisions that shape your August are almost never made in August. They're made right now, in May, when you're too worn out to realize you're avoiding them. This is your chance to make them on purpose. Picture that first morning pack. You walk into your office, you sit down, and something feels different. The situation that you were dreading is maybe still there. The coworker is still the coworker, but you're not carrying an unexamined version of it anymore. You did the work in May. You made the decisions on purpose. And that's a different kind of August. Not perfect, right? Everything's not resolved, but it feels better. That's what May can do when it does its job. Hey, I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode. of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, remember, the counselors who walk into August with a head start didn't work harder all summer. They thought more clearly in May. That's it. That's the whole thing. Take care.