Hate Hearing About "Self-Care?" An Alternative for School Counselors

Hello school counselor, welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm so glad that you're back here with me. I know I tell you that every week, but I really honestly and truly mean it. I love it when you come join me for the podcast episodes. I just cannot get enough of hanging out with you guys. So thanks for being back this week. You know school is coming to an end. I know some of you are already finished with the school year and you're kind of you know who's letting that big sigh of relief come forth. And the rest of you are finishing things up. You're wrapping up transcripts and scheduling and things like that, getting ready for a wonderful, relaxing summer ahead. And as we think about what we want to be doing this summer, often we sort of default back to our summer list right, our bucket list, all the things we want to get done, all the things we want to try or do or see. And then sometimes in that conversation we start to think a little bit about self-care, but we don't get super invested in it. It's just kind of an afterthought, if nothing else. Well, i'm here to talk this week about the fact that I don't even think self-care should necessarily be a big part of the conversation. Instead, i think there's something much more important that we need to be discussing, and I'm going to have that for you, along with the evidence base in the rest of this episode. Before we jump into that, i want to say thanks to Stacey S25, left a review for us titled ADHD, and they said I loved this podcast so informative. I am a year two counselor but also a parent of an ADHD student. This was really good, so thank you, stacey. I appreciate that very much. I believe they are referring to episode 49, which was the one just right before this one. It was called ADHD Support Revolution Rethinking Interventions for Success, and it talked about a concept of positive and negative urgency with regard to ADHD. So if you haven't checked out that episode, it's a really interesting way of looking at how you're working with your ADHD students, and so I encourage you to go take a listen. All right, so we know self care is important. It's essential for us as school counselors to make sure we're taking good care of ourselves. Summer is a time that we need to be relaxing. We need to be preparing ourselves for the school year ahead, because we're often called to care for others. Right. We spend all this time caring for other people, taking care of our students on campus, trying to figure out the best paths ahead, how to help them realize their fullest potentials. And often we're called to help our colleagues as well, perhaps to mediate, perhaps to be a shoulder, perhaps to provide ideas or inspiration for the classrooms. And many of us are caregivers as well. We take care of our children, we take care of parents, we take care of friends, and our whole day is invested in the well-being of other people. And so it gets really, really easy to push your own needs to the side, doesn't it? I know I fall in that category. For sure I have to be very, very careful about those kinds of things. Scovholt and Trotter Matheson a resource that will be in the show notes. You can go and pull it for yourself if you'd like. Note that school counseling is a high-touch line of work I know I can get many amens on that And that this high-touch work trains us to consider other people's needs and really get good at distancing ourselves from our own emotional needs. We develop this identity where we're the helper, we're the listener, we're the mediator, sometimes even against our best judgment. We can develop an identity of being the fixer, which is dangerous, and you've heard me talk about that in the podcast before. But nevertheless, no matter how we see ourselves in these equations, we've distanced ourselves from our own emotional needs, and so we know that summer is great for self-care, right, it's a great time to get reinvested back in those strategies that we know can help us. We know that good self-care can reduce feelings of stress and feelings of burnout. Engaging in hobbies, practicing mindfulness You've heard all of these, right. You're probably very, very well acquainted with them. We know that we can enhance our emotional well-being through self-care. We end the school year being depleted. We've got to build ourselves back up, manage any mental health concerns that are looming around the corner. If we're flirting with a little bit of depression or anxiety, this is a good time to tackle that. We know the good self-care can help with our self-esteem, our self-confidence. That's gonna lead to better mental health as we head into the fall. And we know that good self-care can lead to improved physical health right and better immunity. Regular exercise, eating well, getting enough sleep those are all very hard to do during the school year And we know all that, right, we know that. But here's the thing I hate talking about self-care. I absolutely hate it. Let me tell you why. I think when we get into these conversations about self-care, while they are typically well-meaning, right, they're typically meant to help, they're coming from a good place they also tend to trivialize the situations that we're dealing with. They tend to become very cliche And if you guys have been around my world very often, you know I do not handle cliche. Well And good self-care isn't always as easy as other people make it sound. For example, when I was walking through all of those self-care strategies, were you sitting there thinking, yeah, stuff that's great, but what you're forgetting is I have all these things to do during the summer that I couldn't do during the school year. I have all these appointments I have to make up, we have vacations, my kids have sports, we have camps, i need to get caught up on my cleaning and my house, like purging, decluttering all the things I have to get done in the summer. So, no, i don't have time for good self-care. How many of you were thinking that? Because I think that is more normal than we realize. And then we feel bad when we think that, right, we feel like, oh man, i should be doing that, i should be taking better care of myself. So instead of worrying about self-care measures over the summer, i think that we need to focus more on the idea of self-compassion. And if we can focus on self-compassion in the space between semesters, we can really start to lean into our own experiences and we can really start to truly care for ourselves. So what is this? Because self-compassion and self-care sound like they're the same thing, don't they? But they're not. Neff 2011 says this is a quote. Self-compassion entails treating oneself with kindness, recognizing one's shared humanity and being mindful when considering negative aspects of oneself. They go on to say that self-compassion is going to provide greater emotional resilience and greater stability for counselors, for helpers, for people in general than self-care measures. Self-compassion also involves a lot less self-evaluation, a lot less ego defensiveness, and focuses on self-enhancement rather than self-esteem. So what does that mean? What does all that mean? Why should we care? When we talk about self-care, we talk about self-esteem. Those usually are tied pretty closely together. We're talking about evaluating ourselves right. We're talking about trying to look at ourselves and seeing ourselves positively, and usually that's going to be a need to be above average or to be a little bit special, because we're hitting all these benchmarks that we set out for ourselves. You see how this self-esteem and self-care idea are linked. Self-compassion doesn't involve that. Self-compassion doesn't entail any evaluation of yourself and it doesn't require you to compare yourself with other people. It is just a really self-kind, connected and clear-sided way of seeing ourselves, even when we feel like we failed, even when we feel like we can't meet the standard or when we feel like we are very, very imperfect. I don't know about you, but if you live in a world anything like mine, we have plenty of opportunities to feel like we haven't made the grade that we're inadequate or too imperfect right. So self-compassion helps us address these gaps in our well-being. It helps us address all of these things that have come to light through working on our campuses in the past year. Nothing for nothing. We have plenty of opportunities at work to feel like we are inadequate. We're given tons of things to do that have nothing to do with our jobs, because nobody either wants to do them or knows how to do them right. So we're the ones that get to figure it out. Our professional campus climates often aren't the healthiest and those can often leave us feeling pretty inadequate And just generally. A lot of times, our roles get discounted, if not by our direct supervisors, then certainly up the chain of command right, and all these things and other circumstances as well, kind of swirling around us lead us to feel like maybe we're a little bit less than We were, perhaps not meeting the standard we should be, and so it's important to recognize our own need for self-compassion. Costan, a C-O-A-S-T-O-N 2017, and again we'll link this paper in the show notes wrote a phenomenal paper titled Self-Care Through Self-Compassion A Balm for Burnout, and in this paper, they relayed several strategies specific for counselors that either need to develop self-compassion or want to develop self-compassion. So they made several recommendations for counselors that I think are really timely and really pertinent to most of our situations. And it's not this cliche, you know self-care kind of stuff. Make sure you take a walk in nature, make sure you make time for yourself, read a good book, go volunteer in your community. Those are all great things to do, but I do believe that these strategies are going to be much more beneficial. So number one is a strategy that we often hear about within the realm of self-care as well, and that is mindfulness. Kostin cited a study that found that higher levels of mindfulness corresponded with lower levels of burnout. The summer is a perfect time to begin cultivating a mindfulness habit, right? And there are lots of ways that you can be mindful. It could be through meditation, right. It could be through mindful eating. It could be through being mindful and just routine activities in your life washing the dishes, washing your hands. For the method, the important piece is that we are cultivating that mindfulness being in the moment, at that moment. It sounds so simple, but, man, it's a difficult skill. So focusing on mindfulness during the summer, when you have a little bit more bandwidth, you have a little bit more headspace, is only going to serve you well. One strategy that they recommended was decreasing your intellectual boredom. Man, think that phrase through for a minute. That just really makes me go a little bit. Decreasing your intellectual boredom does not mean that your work has been boring, right, because, my friends, far from it. In school counseling we are very hard pressed to have a boring day ever. But what it means is in your work you probably have a lot of really mundane tasks. You have a lot of repetition in your day. Perhaps you have a lot of sitting in your day if you're working on transcripts, end-of-year paperwork, those kinds of things, or we've got things going on that we just typically do over and over and over and over again, right, talking kids through coping skills. No two conversations are the same, but sometimes we can find ourselves just kind of going through the motion in those conversations. So it's going to be important to us to decrease intellectual boredom. That could come in the form of continued professional development, going on and learning something new this summer, while you have the opportunity, continued professional consultation where you can discuss aspects of your career with other folks that just understand where you're coming from, or learning something new. And when I say something new, that could be inside the counseling profession, as we talked about, or it could be something completely unrelated to school counseling, like learning a new language, learning how to make sushi, learning how to code, learning how to play a strategy game, those kinds of things. Learning something new. And decreasing that intellectual boredom is going to help stimulate our mental environments. It's going to help us begin to develop the chops to be more self-compassionate, right, it's going to get us out of our rut. It's going to get us out of that stinking thinking that we can sometimes fall into. Kostin's third suggestion is practicing writing, and I know so many of you in our community really, really enjoy writing. This could be any style of writing that you choose, from journaling to some narrative writing, poetry writing, musical lyrics, writing letters to people. It really doesn't matter. What matters is that the practice of writing helps reduce emotional inhibition. It helps us to kind of let go of some of our emotional inner lives that we've kind of tamped down in the course of the school year. We've had to kind of bury some of the things that we've thought or felt to allow us to effectively counsel students or to allow us to function within these campus environments that we've been placed in. You can write without worrying about the organization of your writing, without worrying about conventions right, letting the rules disappear, just doing what you may, and it also gives you the opportunity to construct some alternative endings to some situations that have been bothering you, some things that are really laying heavy on your heart, or to help you reframe something that you've been working through. Writing is also great for self-reflection, for writing things that don't make sense, in order to practice being non-judgmental toward yourself, and sometimes folks just like to do things as simple as journaling some quotes that they find especially wonderful, or journaling some lyrics to their favorite songs. It's amazing what these practices can open up for you as you get into them. One suggestion I really liked was writing yourself a permission slip to let your mind wander or to embark in periods of rest, or just the creative act of writing yourself a permission slip and stating the reasons why you need to be allowed this time can be very, very powerful. And, as I said, we're going to link to this article in the show information and there are even more ideas about some great writing exercises that you can do to help facilitate self-compassion. So so far, we have three suggestions. We have practicing mindfulness, decreasing our intellectual boredom and practicing writing. The fourth suggestion we got two more, to go friends, we're almost there is practicing physical self-care, which again we hear often in this time of year and talking about taking better care of ourselves. But the suggestion from this paper is to consider caring for yourself like a plant. Have you ever thought of yourself as a little sprout, as a little seedling? What are the things that you need? You could again, perhaps write this down. You might create a work of art. You may sit and be mindful and think through it. What are the things that you would need to care for yourself like you would care for a plant. Do you need light? Maybe that means you need to get outside more. Maybe it means that you spent too much time confined in an office or in a school building. Do you need nourishment? What is it that nourishes you? Do you need healthy food? Do you need intellectual nourishment? Do you need emotional nourishment? Kind of going through that exercise and really considering all the aspects of how you would care for yourself is going to help you really key in and target the areas of physical self-care that you truly require, without following some little, you know, flip outdated list that you found on the internet. The last suggestion for cultivating self-compassion is reigniting your spiritual life. Kostin cites another study in their paper that says Failure to be aware of spirituality as an aspect of the human condition can create potential boundary issues, limit a counselor's understanding of the client due to unexamined beliefs rooted in one's own spiritual background, and result in difficulty managing the emotional uncertainty and pain of clients due to the counselor's own struggles with faith. Therefore, engaging in reflection, exploration or a regular spiritual practice can benefit both the counselor and the client. That's powerful, isn't it? Yeah, so we've got to be connecting with our spiritual life, our beliefs, our hopes, our dreams, our connections. One way you can do this is to take on what's called a moral inventory. You can find some assessments like that online. Please look in the literature so you get something that's valid. But a moral inventory might be something that you'd want to check into. You can take part in a spiritual or religious community. Get reinvested back in those circles so that you can be your best self and realize your fullest potential, or reconnect with prayer or meditation. Be intentional about it. Don't just think you know, oh, i'm going to do a better job this summer, being mindful, i'm going to do a better job this summer in my prayer life. I'm going to fill out my prayer journal. Whatever it is that you do, instead of thinking about it and intending to do it, why not make it a habit? Why not take the summer to develop that habit now? Something like atomic habits is a fantastic resource for how to develop those. But I would say schedule yourself some reminders Intentionally. Remind yourself to do these things. Set an alarm on your phone, put a note on your calendar, create a queue in your day that reminds you to stop and engage in these activities because it's only going to benefit you. And then, once the school year starts, you'll have the habit in place and you can adapt it to the fall schedule, all right. So five strategies for counselors for developing self-compassion practicing mindfulness, practicing intellectual boredom, practicing writing, practicing physical self-care, imagery and reconnecting with your spiritual side. Y'all, relaxation, self-compassion and even self-care are so important for those of us serving in the helping professions And if we want to maintain our health, if we want to maintain our well-being, if we want to further develop the capacity for self-compassion which, remember, is going to lead to decreased levels of burnout, better self-perception, better wellness, we need to begin to lay those tracks now. We do have a wellness wheel worksheet available on our website. If you just need a quick informal check-in with yourself to see the areas in which you may need to grow or you may need to reinvest over the summer, you can access that at schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash wellnesscheck all one word wellnesscheck. You can download that wellness wheel assessment and just kind of get your thumb on where you feel like you stand right now After this difficult, challenging but amazingly awesome school year that we've all just completed. So I hope that conversation was helpful to you. I hope that you enjoyed kind of making the mental distinction between self-care and self-compassion And I truly hope that you find the time this summer to invest and engage in some self-compassion activities. The work you do is so important, my friends. It is so needed and so very necessary. So take the summer, rest, rejuvenate. Don't forget to tune into the podcast While you're hanging out by the pool sipping those margaritas, or whatever it is you're doing. I'm going to enjoy talking with you throughout the summer, so keep listening and I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. Take care, my friends, and be well.