Banish Imposter Syndrome: Easy Ways to Step Into School Counseling Confidence

Hello school counselor, welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm so glad that you're back here with me for another week. It just makes me feel so happy and excited that we get to spend a little bit of time together talking about school counseling every week. You may notice that the audio quality this week is a little bit different than normal. The podcast is probably sounding really strange compared to what I usually put out, but there's a really good reason for that. I've been doing quite a bit of traveling this summer, quite a bit of work trying to build school for school counselors into the ultimate school counselor community for you. I've been meeting with a lot of experts, learning how to do things a little bit better, how to serve you better. It's been a wild, amazing, exciting ride. I've also been doing some traveling, just hanging out with family, right, de-compressing during the summer, trying to get back to center a little bit better. This episode of the podcast is actually being recorded outside of my little office, my little recording studio that I've set up at home. I hope you can forgive the difference, but I didn't want you to miss a week of the podcast. This is really important to me that I'm able to get an episode to you every week. I try my very best, and I do have a message for you that I think is really going to resonate with you, so I wanted to make sure I got it to you. This is what I want to talk about imposter syndrome. This is something that is a huge, huge concern in our field, and I want to preface this by saying that I don't want to scare you. If you're a new school counselor and you hear me dive into the topic of imposter syndrome, it might be pretty easy to get a little concerned, right, get a little bit worried about some of the things I'm describing. But don't do that. I need you to take this information with a grain of salt and remember that not every campus operates exactly the same way. There are always going to be differences in how they work, in the nuances of the way that campuses collaborate, how they communicate, how they reach goals and get the job done. So this isn't necessarily a blanket statement for all school counselors, by any means, but what I want to give you is just some food for thought on this idea of imposter syndrome, because in the next few months, we're going to be hearing more and more about this, and I don't want you to have to be reactive. I want you to be proactive. I want you to be prepared so that you can head a lot of this stuff off before it even comes to find you Now. Anecdotally, we know that the majority of adults experience some sort of an imposter syndrome sometime in their life and again, I'm not in my studio this week. I don't have any stats to back that up, but I do think that you could go to any social media sites built for school counselors and go, take a swing through our School for School Counselors, facebook or even, and you'll see lots of folks asking questions where, if you read in between the line, you're going to see a lot of imposter syndrome at play. Again, anecdotally, I believe it's 20 to 30 percent of high achieving people really struggle with imposter syndrome, and so that's going to be a lot of you. You are high achievers. You have a flippin' master's degree in school counseling or some related yield. You've done extra training above and beyond that to try to be the best school counselor you can be, so that officially makes you a high achiever Congratulations. But it also makes you a little bit more prone to imposter syndrome. And the other thing is a lot of times when you're considered some sort of a minority in your workplace. So for us, being a school counselor on a campus, we're kind of the minority as far as positions go, as far as work expectations and the nature of our work. There usually aren't very many people on our campus that do the same kind of work that we do, and so it opens windows for not understanding the job role, not really getting the importance of it. You know, sometimes if you don't work in it you just don't really understand sometimes how urgent things feel for students right, how invested we become those kinds of things. And so when you're that minority, when you're doing that work it's not common in your workplace that can lead to a little bit of imposter syndrome. Also, imposter syndrome is the feeling that it can come in a lot of different ways. It can be something like I can't believe these people hired me. They must be nuts. There. Probably wasn't anybody better. Two thoughts of you know I'm a complete fraud. I don't even know what I'm talking about, I don't have any idea what to do next and I can't even believe I'm here. Two thoughts of what are they going to do when they find out that I'm not everything I think I should be. It's a terrible feeling to hear. I've been there a few times myself and I do remember what that's like and I think there are some major factors that contribute to school counselors in particular experiencing this imposter syndrome. First, I think, just the environment that we work in, particularly if you're new so either a new school counselor or new on your campus as you're learning the ropes of the campus, as you're understanding the relationships on campus, how things really work, who to go to to ask certain things, how to access materials and supplies that you need you know even down to how to work the copy machine right. That all takes a lot of brain power, it's very unfamiliar, it typically feels super uncomfortable and sometimes we feel like we should already know that stuff even though we've never been there before, and it leads to a sense of like why am I even here? I don't even know what I'm doing. Sometimes you can walk into some campus environments that are a little bit contentious or that are really kind of inherently dysfunctional, and I'm going to level with you I think that is more common in education than folks really talk about. School environments can become pretty dysfunctional over time, and sometimes that leads to feelings of imposter syndrome, because now, not only are you trying to learn the campus, you're trying to learn the ins and outs and what's expected of you, but then you're navigating all of these weird relationships right, these strange hidden rules that are in place, and you're just trying to learn to play a game that you've never seen and it's overwhelming, and sometimes that can lead you to feeling like a complete friend. Two I think a lack of good professional training before you get involved in your school counseling role is a huge barrier. So often we graduate from our graduate programs with these ideal scenarios in mind. We've been taught to build comprehensive school counseling programs right Under the stipulations of correct caseloads. Right, we're working in a 250 to 1, for example, and you're going to need to do this and that and you're going to work toward ramp status and it's all perfect world kind of stuff. But campuses and schools rarely operate in the realm of the perfect world. There are budgets to take into account, there's staffing to take into account, scheduling concerns, principles, personalities. Sometimes they're not educated about your role and how to correctly utilize your expertise. All of those things come together and we're kind of smacked in the face with these situations and circumstances that no one taught us how to navigate. And so we have this perfect world mindset and these thoughts of I should be doing these things, I should be attaining this, I should be doing all this stuff everybody else is talking about while operating in this environment. That can't sustain all of that. So when you have that feeling of controversy between both sides, it starts to make you feel like you are not quite enough. That leads to that feeling of imposter syndrome. Lack of professional network can lead you to feeling some imposter syndrome too. It's super, super important that you have someone to talk through specific student concerns, programming, choices, decision making, for what is most important, where do your priorities lie in that moment in time? And really you need good feedback from people who are in the field, who have been doing the same kind of work you're doing, and beyond that, you need good feedback from people who understand the situation that you are in. You know we go in these social media groups and see people asking for advice. You know they're posting about. I have situation A. This thing is happening. I've tried solution B. That's not working. What else should I do? People start chiming in with their advice and it's all very well meaning, but they don't know the specific situation and so all they're able to offer really are sort of generic solutions or conjecture, and most of the times those are not helpful to the particular specific elements of your situation. If you've got a good professional network in place, if you have good professional consultation going, then you're going to be working with people who understand your situation, who have actually talked with you. They've heard you talk about your campus, they know your personality, your counseling style, all that kind of stuff, so that they can lead you to a better conclusion. That's why we built our school for school counselors. Mastermind was to be able to provide that kind of support to our colleagues. Number four I think one of the reasons that school counselors feel imposter syndrome is this consistent focus on advocacy. Now, don't get mad. I do think that we need to be advocating for our own campus I do, but I don't think we should be doing it in the way we've been told. And I think this constant focus on advocacy, this constant push of convincing school counselors that the majority of advocacy in our field rests on our shoulders, solely on us, it's squarely on our shoulders every day when we walk through the doors, I think is a bunch of gaslighting, to be honest with you, and I do think it leads to these feelings of not being good enough. Sometimes, too, it feels like a little bit of competition right, like everybody else is doing better than I am. Why am I such a terrible counselor? Why can't I get these things in place? Or it starts to lead to a lot of perfectionism, where you're just overworking yourself, overthinking, trying way too hard and becoming a perfectionist in your program, trying to attain this magical level of school counseling. Last and some folks are going to take issue with this and not trying to hurt anybody's feelings, but I do want to be real about it I think that there are too many resources at play for school counselors. I think when you're just getting started, that can really be a barrier for you. Let me explain what I mean. Let's say that you hop on your laptop and head over to the magical land of TPP otherwise known as teachers, pay teachers and start looking through counseling curriculums for anger, for anxiety, for all the different things you see your students expressing at school or that you anticipate seeing in the school year, and you start wading through all of these resources that have been created. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you may have heard me say that research is telling us that the majority of resources available on TPP are absolute junk. There are lots of statistics to back that up, and I don't know that that's true for the counseling world in particular, but I would gather it probably is just based on some of the warnings we've had to give to our own basement group members about vetting the people they're buying resources from. There are many people on that site who aren't even school counselors, who don't have backgrounds in mental health, who don't have backgrounds in social, emotional learning, that are creating resources, making them look super cute and doing a really great job of marketing them so it looks like they're quality resources when they really aren't. Typically, what I see are new school counselors hopping on TPP and just collecting all of the things, when sometimes the sellers will be like we have a free thing this weekend, come grab this activity, come grab this game or whatever it is, and you end up with all these materials which seem like are going to make your counseling job easier. But then, as you get into it, what you find is you're constantly waiting through resources. You're constantly evaluating what's the next thing I need and second guessing yourself or questioning yourself if they don't work or if you're going to see any results, and both of those concerns are rooted in lack of a strong base of counseling approach. You don't have the fundamentals of how you're going to approach your counseling program in place. You're not standing firmly in the realm of being a solution-focused counselor or practicing motivational interviewing or practicing play-based counseling. You're not devoted to any one particular realm and while you certainly don't have to be, you need to know the fundamentals. If you cannot look at a teacher's pay teachers counseling resource and pick out the underlying theoretical basis for that activity, you don't need to use it. You need to know what you're using while you're using it, and so when we're using these resources we have thousands of them available at our disposal we're not well-versed in what they are, we're not sure if they're going to work or sometimes, if they don't work, we blame ourselves. That's leading to imposter syndrome. So what do we do about all of this? How do we avoid imposter syndrome, as much as we possibly can, believe it or not, it's a little bit easier than you might imagine. Number one would be making sure you have that strong network. You need a strong professional development community and I would recommend that you build one outside of where you work. We see a lot of school counselors that show up saying you know, we've got a great professional development community in our school district. I have lots of school counselors that work in my district that I can ask for help. We love to collaborate together and that is awesome. It's fantastic. But I think you also need a place where you can voice concerns or get clarity on things that are happening within your district without feeling like you're jeopardizing your job. Sometimes conversations that you have within your district don't feel super safe. You know there's that little piece of you that wonders if it's going to come back to bite you later. Somebody's going to mention something you said, it's going to be taken out of context or something like that, and you don't need that level of worry on top of everything else that you're dealing with. So if you can figure out how to develop a strong professional network, a strong professional development community outside of your workplace environment, that would be my first suggestion. That's what we do in our school for school counselors mastermind. We teach and every week we meet for weekly consultation, and so it's not just a time for me to sit on a Zoom and tell everybody what I think about everything and try to convince everybody how smart I am. It's true professional collaboration. It's an amazing experience, and so try to find something like that for yourself where you can take those nagging questions or just not sure how you feel about, and bring them to consultation with people who do know you a little bit, because once you get involved in this community, people are going to start to understand your situation and what you're working within, but also can give you some pretty impartial advice or some good direction to head in that you may not have thought of. Essentially, they're helping you see the forest for the trees, if that makes sense. The second you need to really commit to a strong foundational approach in your counseling. This may change over time. I know that mine has, and I've kind of gone away and come back to some different things. It's been an interesting journey and one that's been full of a lot of growth. I really focused on one at a time to get my feet under me, to really get a comprehensive understanding of what I was doing with the mechanisms of the approach, work all of that. You need some strong theoretical underpinnings in your work. Not only is that going to guide you in how you approach students and how you cancel them, but it's also going to give you confidence because you know that whatever you're bringing to students in your counseling office is going to be evidence-based. So first we have build that strong professional community. Second, a strong foundational approach. Third, good boundaries. As I mentioned before, sometimes when we're struggling with imposter syndrome we kind of start leaning toward the perfectionistic side of our personalities. We will start to overwork, we will start to show up early, stay late, do extra things, volunteer for extra stuff, and while none of that is bad contrary to a lot of the conversations that you see in a lot of different places for school counselors none of that is bad. It's only bad if it bothers you, if it crosses a boundary for you. So please don't let other people make your mind up about that. You need to work in the way that feels most authentic to you. But if you're leaning into perfectionism because you're trying to make up for these feelings of imposter syndrome, that's a problem. I'll maybe talk in the next couple episodes probably within one of those about good boundaries, about not only how to set good boundaries, but how good boundaries work, as opposed to a lot of the things that you hear that I don't think are necessarily true. I think when we're advised to set boundaries, it sounds a lot like draw a line in the sand and just don't cross it for your own good or for your own well-being, and I don't think that's necessarily what that is. So we're going to have a really good conversation about boundaries coming up, but for now, just think about what are the aspects of your lives that you feel are non-negotiable. If you can't stay past 3.45 every day, make that a boundary. If you're only going to work your contract hours because that's all you're getting paid for, make that your boundary. If you're only willing to stay half an hour late three times a week, make that your boundary. The boundary itself is not the issue. It is making most decisions ahead of time for yourself, just to stave off that overworking, perfectionistic kind of vibe. So, strong network, strong foundational approach, good boundaries. And then, last, something that you may not have ever thought about in the context of imposter syndrome good data. Let me explain what I mean. So when we got our head down, we're cranking stuff out. We're trying so hard to meet all of these invisible goals that have been set for us in our school cancelling programs, it's really easy to start feeling like we're not doing enough. It's really easy to feel like the bar has been set way too high and, no matter how hard we jump, we're never, ever going to be able to clear it, and that becomes really disheartening. That leads into this imposter syndrome and then all kinds of dominoes can start falling. From that point, if we're keeping good data, particularly for us in use of time, in our sort of broad campus data such as attendance, achievement, those kinds of things, we are going to be able to put our finger on where our efforts are inspiring change. It's going to give us the ability to see where we're making an impact and why. It's going to allow you to take time to acknowledge what you did, and this is something I don't hear school counselors talking about. We need to be talking about look what I did to improve XYZ. Not because it's all about us, right, and as school counselors we are generally pretty self-effacing people but we do need to take a moment, even if it's just privately, to celebrate ourselves and go man, look, I rocked that, I did a great job, or man? Look, I moved the needle on that one. Now we're headed in the right direction. That's important. You need to be able to know that what you're doing is making a difference. That's why you got into this work, so good data is going to help you do that. I think that imposter syndrome takes out a lot of school counselors that need to be in our field, but they just get beaten down. They feel uninspired, they feel like they cannot reach all of the goals that have been given to them. They fall into this downward spiral of imposter syndrome and it becomes too difficult to recover, and that's a shame. Every single one of you have spent years in study, tens of thousands of dollars, to achieve your dream of building relationships with students and helping them reach their full potential, and so I don't want to see you throw that all the way for some little pesky imposter syndrome, when we know what we can do to get you back on track. Develop that strong professional network, identify your foundational approach, draw good boundaries for yourself and use data to be able to celebrate your wins. So, as the school year is beginning, keep those in mind. I think it's going to be an amazing school year for so many of you. If you're listening to this episode on the data release, you know that tomorrow we are starting our best year ever celebration. This is our favorite thing to do every single summer. It's become a tradition in school for school counselors, it's going to be four nights of getting prepped for the new school year. It's going to be some great reminders for those of you that have been in the field a while. It's going to be some great new information for those of you just starting out and, true to everything that we do here in school for school counselors, it's going to be stuff that you don't generally hear other places. We're going to bring a lot of things to the forefront, a lot of new ideas and ways to look at your work, and we've also got a lot of new information this year that we haven't shared before. It's super exciting. It's being in a Zoom room with tons of colleagues who share the same passion and drive for your work that you do. It's being able to talk to people about this, and it's people who actually get it. It's being able to collaborate in real time, not only with me, but with everyone there that's present. One of my favorite things is when we dive off the class into these side tangent conversations where we really get people's questions answered and we really get folks feeling competent and confident for the new school year. It's just an amazing, amazing time. We're going to have four nights of it, starting this Tuesday, july 25th. If you haven't signed up yet, what are you waiting for? Get over to schoolforschoolcounselorscom slash best year ever. We would love for you to join us beginning on Tuesday. And if you're listening to this podcast after we've started Best Year Ever we're going to have those recordings up through Labor Day. You'll have to get the replay package. It's not expensive. It's like five bucks or something. It's just an activate for the hosting of the videos. So if you want the replay package, you can head on over to schoolforschoolcounselorscom slash b-y-e-replace. That b-y-e is for Best Year Ever B-y-e-replace and you can grab the replay package and enjoy those through the Labor Day weekend, all right. So I hope you were able to get through the podcast episode with the weird audio this week, the weird circumstances, but also with a lot of ideas and goals for how you're going to avoid that imposter syndrome this coming year. It's just so, so important that we feel empowered and inspired each day that we walk through the campus doorways, knowing that we're there to make a difference for students and feeling like we were born to do this. That's my wish for you. All right, my friends, I'll be back singing with another episode of the School for School Concerts podcast, so keep listening. In the meantime, I hope you have the best week. Y'all take care.