My 6 School Counselor Confessions (You, Too?)

Bathroom Dream And Six Confessions

Okay, y'all. Here's my big confession. When I decided to leave classroom teaching and become a school counselor, I had some really ambitious dreams for my professional future. I was going to help kids. I was going to make a difference. I was going to change lives. But beyond that, there was one particular perk that I was really looking forward to. I thought I was going to finally be able to go to the bathroom whenever I wanted. Listen, this is a completely true story. And I should not be admitting this on a global podcast, but here we are. My mastermind members have heard me tell the story here and there over the years. So I do have witnesses to this, and they can confirm that this was my actual primary consideration in my decision to become a school counselor. Again, something I should probably not be admitting publicly, but here we are. If you have ever been a classroom teacher, you may not fully appreciate the luxury of being able to go to the bathroom without having to arrange for another adult to supervise 25 other human beings. Y'all, when you think you have the opportunity to not have to do that, that feels like real freedom. And I was here for it. I pictured myself in this beautiful little school counseling office, meeting with students, making a difference, and occasionally just getting up and going to the bathroom whenever I felt like it, without asking for permission, without calling the office, without looking down the hallway, desperately trying to find somebody that could cover my class for three minutes. Yeah, I was just gonna get up and go. I had a bachelor's degree, I was working on my master's, and apparently my biggest professional aspiration was bathroom management. Anyway, if that tells you anything about how accurately I understood what the world of school counseling was going to be like, which was I was not accurate at all, you can probably imagine how the rest of my expectations worked out too. Hey, school counselor, welcome back. Today I'm confessing six things I used to believe about school counseling, and some of them are pretty embarrassing. Some of them probably are going to sound familiar to you, and a couple are things I still have to remind myself about even after all these years. We're gonna have a little bit of fun with this episode because sometimes the best way to appreciate how much you've learned is to remember just how confidently you used to be wrong. 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 definitely in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors Podcast. You know what's dangerous? It's being absolutely, positively certain about something when you actually have no idea what you're talking about. Ask me how I know. Actually, you don't have to ask me. I'm gonna tell you six things I once believed about school counseling that made perfect sense to me at the time. And as I'm walking through these, I sincerely hope I am not the only person who believes some of these because otherwise, this episode is going to get really uncomfortable for me. So let's get into it and see how it shakes out.

Time Control Is An Illusion

Confession one. I thought I'd finally be in charge of my time. Now, we've already discussed my aspirations about bathroom access. And honestly, I think that probably tells you everything you need to know about how I pictured my job, right? I thought moving from teaching into school counseling was going to give me more control over my day. I imagined appointments. That's funny now thinking about it. I imagined appointments and meetings and working with students, but also with some flexibility. I could decide what needed to happen and when that needed to happen. It's cute, right? Because I didn't really appreciate the full scope of what school counseling was and that your schedule is really more of a suggestion, isn't it? It's a beautiful little document of things that you intend to do right up until somebody shows up needing something. You could have your entire day planned out, but then a parent calls, or a student needs immediate help, or an administrator stops by with something that they think absolutely cannot wait. Or maybe somebody just needs you to come down to the cafeteria and you don't even know why. And suddenly half the day's gone and you've accomplished exactly none of the things that you intended to accomplish. And now you're standing in the hallway trying to remember what was supposed to come next, which, by the way, I think is another fascinating part of school counseling. The number of times that I have walked somewhere, very specifically, gotten stopped by two or three people along the way, and then completely forgotten where I was going in the first place. Right? That's like working in a building full of human pop-up ads all the time. And let me tell you something about the bathroom situation. Because at my current school, the restroom is literally about 20 feet away from my door. It may even be 15. It is a short walk. It is a little protected hallway that is away from the main hallway, and I still regularly get stopped on my way. Sometimes even more than once. So apparently that is plenty of room for somebody to just have a question, tell me about a student, or ask if I have a quick second. And sometimes if I'm not dancing yet, I do. But sometimes I would really just like to make it those 20 feet without another thing getting added to my agenda. As a matter of fact, I am pretty sure the universe has a sense of humor, at least at my school, because whenever I get really ambitious and I start organizing my day to tie up all the loose ends that have just been nagging at me, y'all, that is when all heck breaks loose. Does this happen to you too? It is like the universe looks at my calendar and says, Oh, look at her. She thinks she's in charge. That's precious. Now, I don't want to make this sound like I think school counseling is harder than teaching. Uh, I really don't think it's a competition. Right? There are totally different kinds of jobs in a lot of ways, and they have different kinds of demands. But I had confused having more flexibility with having more control. And those are not the same thing. Sometimes having flexibility just means that everybody assumes you're automatically available. And when you don't recognize that distinction, it's easy to spend a lot of time being frustrated that your day is not going the way that you planned. Which leads me to my next confession.

The Myth Of Getting Caught Up

Confession two, I thought I'd eventually get caught up. Y'all, I really believe this one. I thought there would come a day when I would finish everything. All the referrals would be wrapped up, emails answered, documentation finished, lessons planned, like all the loose ends would be tied up, and then I could get to the good stuff. And I know you know what I'm talking about here, like the projects you really want to work on, the students you wanted to spend more time with, or the program improvements you'd been wanting to make. Basically the things that you went to grad school imagining you'd actually be doing, right? I just needed to get everything else out of the way first. And then I'd be able to sit back in my chair, look around my beautiful, aesthetic, perfectly organized school counseling office and think, well, that's school counseling. Nailed it. So apparently I thought there was some point where my school would just run out of problems. I don't know, friends. There is no caught-up status. There is only like temporarily less behind, right? And sometimes even that feels like it's an illusion. Because school counseling has this remarkable reality where when you complete one task, that usually creates several more just for you. Like you get that small group organized and that's wonderful. But now you've got to coordinate the schedules and communicate with teachers and plan the sessions and track attendance and figure out what to do when half the group doesn't show up. You finish the referral process for a student and that's great. And now you got more students to see. You clear out your email inbox and that's fantastic. But while you were doing that, you got 12 more emails. It is like trying to empty a swimming pool with a coffee cup while somebody's standing there with a hose on, right? And for the longest time, I kind of conceptualized that as my personal failure. Like if I was just more organized, if I could just work a little faster, if I could find a better system, then I'd finally be able to get ahead. But what I had to eventually recognize was that I was measuring my success against a condition that doesn't actually exist. And as long as I kept telling myself that I would do the important work after I finished everything else, I was allowing everything else to determine what was being counted as important. Now, these two beliefs that I've shared with you are a big part of why the idea of modulated expectations became one of the pillar ideas in my sanity-based school counseling method. Because

Modulated Expectations For Real Conditions

I eventually realized that while I entered school counseling hoping to just be in charge of my own bladder, it turned out that the first thing I really needed to be in charge of was my expectations. So when I talk about modulated expectations, I'm not talking about lowering your standards or deciding that you're just not going to get to stuff. I mean you have to adjust what you expect of yourself to account for the actual conditions that you are working in, to take into account your campus, your admin, your resources, your strengths, the real parts of your job, the number of kids on your caseloan, the number of extra baloney duties they've given you, what your current service ratios are right now, all of those things. We cannot build expectation based on the imaginary scenario where nobody's interrupting you, all of your plans are working out, and you have unlimited time to do whatever you need to do. Because I can tell you from experience, waiting for that reality to appear is not an effective school counseling strategy. Now, you would think that once I figured out I couldn't control everything, I might have become a little bit more comfortable admitting that I didn't know everything either. But you know it would be wrong.

Asking For Help Builds Competence

Confession three, I thought asking for help meant that I wasn't very good at my job. This one's kind of embarrassing. But I also think it happens to a lot of us when we become school counselors. We spend years preparing to enter this profession. We study counseling theories and human development and assessment and intervention and ethics, and you know how to help people work through difficult situations. And then you get a job where everybody starts bringing you their difficult situations. You're the person people come to when they don't know what to do. So what happens when you don't know what to do either? Well, apparently, according to the way I understood this job at the beginning, you should just figure it out. Hopefully, without anybody realizing that you didn't really know in the first place. Because you are the school counselor. You are supposed to know this stuff. And here's the crazy part. I had spent years learning about the importance of seeking help. But in my mind, that rule was apparently just for other people. To be fair, I do think there is something about working in a helping profession that makes it really easy to fall into that kind of trap, right? Because we spend so much time being the person that other people rely on that it gets real uncomfortable to admit that we sometimes need to rely on somebody else, even when the situation gets really complicated or it's something that we've never encountered before. It can even happen when we're in situations where there's absolutely no reason to expect that one person should be able to handle it by themselves in the first place. Think about what would happen if we applied that standard to other professions. You go to the hospital and the doctor says, you know, I'd really like to consult with a specialist about this. And you respond, oh, wow, so I guess you're not very good at being a doctor. And you would, you would never do that. We generally recognize everywhere else that consulting with colleagues is part of responsible professional practice. But then somehow, when we need consultation, we start feeling like we should have already known the answer. And I'll tell you something else. There is a difference between asking someone to tell you what to do and consulting with someone to improve your thinking. Good consultation does not relieve you of your responsibility to exercise your own judgment, but it does help you exercise better judgment. Sometimes when you talk through different, sometimes when you talk through difficult scenarios with other professionals, you see a possibility that you might have overlooked. Or they challenge an assumption they notice that you've made, or they can help you recognize that the thing that you're worried about, it probably isn't the most important thing that's happening. And sometimes they can confirm that yes, the situation really is just that complicated or that ridiculous, which honestly can be helpful in and of itself, right? But the point is needing consultation does not mean that you are failing. It is actually part of how competent professionals work. And my next confession takes that same misconception in a little bit different direction. Because apparently I thought that being competent meant that I also had to work like I was Batman. Confession

Activities Are Not The Intervention

four, I thought every student problem needed a counseling activity. Preferably one that I could download for $2. Okay, listen, I am not here to start a fight with the teachers pay teachers crowd. There is some good stuff out there, and there is plenty of situations where a well-designed activity can support your counseling work. Uh, I think there are fewer and further between than we would like to think, but they're there. But I think ultimately what we need to acknowledge is how easy it is to fall into this belief that the right materials are gonna solve the problem. Like a teacher comes to you because a student is having trouble with friendships, so you go looking for a friendship activity. Or a student is getting frustrated in class, so you go look for something about emotional regulation. Or maybe a student is having trouble following directions, so you go find an executive functioning activity. And typically these are gonna come with little cartoon characters, full color cover pages, and about 87 different pages of materials that you're gonna print and laminate and cut apart and organize into little plastic baggies. Congratulations! You have just spent $2 on an intervention that's gonna cost you two hours of your life to prepare. Which is kind of exciting when you consider that the sessions involved are probably only about 30 minutes a piece. And by the time you get everything printed, laminated, cut out, sorted out, and organized, you may have completely forgotten which students you bought this for. But I mean, it sure is cute, right? And you have a really nice set of binders with lots of other things just like it waiting inside. Y'all, the activity is not the intervention by itself. What matters is why you're using it, what you expect it to accomplish, and whether it's appropriate for the problem you're trying to address. And here's the part about this that I think is real interesting. Sometimes we are so focused on finding the right thing to do with the student that we don't stop to consider whether doing something with the student is the best approach in the first place. Like the student who's having difficulty completing independent work in the classroom. Maybe that's because they need more direct instruction on a skill. Maybe they do need counseling, or maybe the assignment is just consistently beyond what they can capably do. Maybe the task demands need to change. Maybe the adult that's working with them needs some support in approaching the situation differently with the student. And maybe, just maybe, a beautifully laminated coping skills wheel is not going to accomplish a whole lot in that situation, no matter how many five-star reviews it has. I had confused lesson preparation with intervention planning, which is a very impressive mistake to make when you're someone who used to be a teacher. That is one of the biggest changes I've made in how I think about school counseling. I used to associate doing a good job with being able to provide something directly, being able to provide a lesson or a group or an activity or a session, something that I could personally deliver. But sometimes the most useful thing that I can contribute is my time in conversation with a teacher or an administrator. Sometimes the student benefits more from something that happens in the classroom than something that will happen in my counseling office. And sometimes the best counseling decision is recognizing that the situation doesn't require a counseling intervention at all. That brings us to my second pillar of sanity-based school counseling, which is consultation. And I mean consultation going in both directions. Seeking out expertise when I need it, but also using my own expertise to help other people think through and respond more effectively. Now, if you think that my first four beliefs about school counseling were optimistic, my friend, you ain't seen nothing yet because the last two involve my expectations of other people. And apparently I had some expectations.

Being Liked Is Not The Goal

Confession five. I mean, after all, I was the school counselor. So of course, everybody was supposed to like me. I was supposed to be nice and approachable and understanding and patient and positive and the person that everybody felt comfortable coming to. Basically, I imagine myself as the campus equivalent of a golden retriever, right? That's happy to see everybody, delighted to be included in things and always ready to help. Somebody walks in my office and I practically start wagging my tail. Oh, hello, a person. Do you need something? I love helping. But somewhere along the way, that very reasonable goal, I think, of building positive relationships turns into something that can be a lot less reasonable. Like believing that if you're doing your job well, that means that no one should ever be unhappy with you. When you think about that, that is a fascinating standard that I set for myself. When I have worked in buildings full of people who frequently disagree about pretty much everything. Think about this, y'all. Teachers disagree with other teachers, parents disagree with teachers, administrators disagree with parents and teachers, students disagree with everyone, and some people can't even agree about where the thermostat temperature should be set. But somehow I was supposed to be the person that everybody liked all the time. I had to be friendly and agreeable and understanding when someone was frustrated. And if somebody didn't seem particularly happy with me, well, that meant I'd done something wrong. Maybe I hadn't explained myself clearly enough, or I hadn't been supportive enough, or maybe I just needed to do something to smooth things over and build the relationship. Because if somebody was irritated with me, how was I supposed to be an effective school counselor? Here's what took me a minute to figure out people can like you and still not respect your professional judgment. They can also think you're wonderful and not. Involve you in important decisions. They can appreciate everything you do for them and still have absolutely no interest in changing what they do. And on the other hand, somebody can disagree with you or be frustrated with your recommendations or not even particularly enjoy talking to you and still respect your expertise and trust your judgment and recognize that you have something valuable to bring to the table. All of those things are not mutually exclusive. I mean, the relationships matter, of course, and being approachable is important. But being a good school counselor doesn't mean you're channeling joy from inside out all day long, each and every day. But that's what I imagined. And I bet that to some extent you might have imagined the same thing. That somehow we are supposed to be the emotional sunshine of the campus. Always cheerful, always encouraging, always ready with a smile and a reassuring word, even when we're having a terrible day ourselves. Even when we know other people are upset with us, or we genuinely disagree with something that's happening. And that's where the expectation becomes a problem. Because sometimes doing your job well means saying something another person may not want to hear. Sometimes it means making a recommendation that somebody else finds inconvenient and wants to push and wants to push back on. Sometimes it means disagreeing. And you cannot spend your entire school counseling career editing your perspective to make sure that everybody stays happy with you. Which brings me to my last confession. And this one might be my favorite, and it may be yours too, because apparently I didn't just think that everybody was supposed to like me. I thought that they were going to be absolutely delighted that I'd arrived on their campus. Confession six. I

Influence Is Earned Not Granted

thought everybody would be so glad I was there that I could change the whole campus world. Y'all, oh, I was ready. I had gone to graduate school. I had studied school counseling. I knew about child development and advocacy and leadership and collaboration and systemic change. And I had ideas. I had good ideas. And I was excited to share them because I was going to help students, support teachers, work with families, collaborate with administrators, and together we were going to make that campus an absolutely magnificent place to be. You are welcome, everybody. Here I come. And to be fair, I did not come up with that idea all on my own. Graduate school convinced me that I was going to be a leader. And I don't just mean a leader, I mean an all-caps leader, an advocate, right? An agent of systemic change. Those are some pretty impressive responsibilities to saddle yourself with when you haven't even figured out where the Wi-Fi works in the building yet, right? But I was ready. I had learned about the ASCA National Model. I knew that school counselors were supposed to advocate for students, they were supposed to collaborate with stakeholders, and they were supposed to improve systems. But what I didn't fully appreciate was that everybody else on campus already had a system. And some of them were real attached to it. School counselors really are prepared to be leaders and advocates. Those are legitimate parts of our profession. And I still believe that school counselors can be tremendously influential in improving what happens in schools. But somewhere between learning that I was supposed to be an advocate and actually trying to advocate for something, I discovered a few details that grad school left out. For starters, other people already had their own opinions. And in some cases, those opinions were very strong. They already had their own priorities and their own established routines and reasons for doing things the way they'd always done them. And as it turns out, they were not necessarily sitting around waiting for a brand new school counselor to arrive and explain how everything could be improved because they'd been doing it wrong. I know, right? It is shocking. I think that I imagined and was led to believe that if I had a really good idea, people would recognize that it was a really good idea. And if I had evidence supporting my recommendation, well, that was even better. Surely everybody would appreciate the opportunity to do something more effectively. Maybe they'd even ask me what I thought. And maybe I'd be invited to some important meetings where I could blow their minds and the principal would say, you know, I am so glad you're here. We have been waiting for someone exactly like you to arrive at our school. And maybe they'd even ask me if I consider serving on the campus leadership team or presenting my ideas to the faculty, or maybe they would just explode into spontaneous applause when I walked into the room. And to be fair, occasionally people do recognize what you bring to the table and they should. But here's the part I didn't get back then. You can have a terrific idea and still be asking somebody else to change something that matters a whole lot to them. You could be asking a teacher to give up a routine that they've been relying on for years, or asking an administrator to reconsider a decision that they have already made and abided by. You could be suggesting a change that costs time or money or energy that somebody doesn't feel that they have. And while you're standing there thinking about how much better things could be for students, somebody else is standing next to you thinking about how much more complicated their job is about to become because of your great ideas. You may both care deeply about students. And you may even agree on what needs to change. But that doesn't mean that you're going to agree on what needs to happen next. And having the facts on your side doesn't automatically settle that conversation, nor does your master's degree, or you being really, really enthusiastic. Ask me how I know. What changed for me was realizing that professional influence is something that you develop, not something that you're automatically awarded because you showed up. And that required me to pay a lot more attention to how decisions were actually being made on campuses. Who had authority? Who had influence? What mattered to the people involved? And was there even room to make a contribution? What could I do to become someone whose professional judgment people would actually ask for? And that is very different from assuming that everybody's just going to welcome my ideas because they're great ideas. That brings us to the third pillar of sanity-based school counseling, which is professional influence. Being liked is nice. Having good ideas is nice, but being able to use your expertise to affect what happens for students is something else entirely. And it's worth learning how to do, even if people aren't throwing parades when you walk through the door.

Redefining What Good Counseling Looks Like

So there you have it. Six things that I used to believe about school counseling. And I have to say, when you put all those together, my expectations were pretty impressive and also maybe slightly unhinged. I thought I'd have control over my time. I thought I'd be able to finish all my work. I thought I should know how to handle everything. I thought every student problem needed something that I could personally provide. I thought everybody was supposed to like me. And I thought that my arrival was going to usher in a glorious new era of educational excellence. Y'all, I had a lot going on in my head. But here's something I find interesting when I look back at all of those beliefs, because they are not entirely disconnected from one another. They are different versions of the same basic misunderstanding. I had a very specific picture in my head of what being a good school counselor was supposed to look like. Things like a good school counselor gets everything done. A good school counselor knows what to do, helps every student, gets along with everybody, and changes things for the better. And if I could just become good enough at my job, surely all of those things would fall into place. Well, I can tell you that was an expensive test to run because the longer I worked in schools, the more I realized that being good at this job doesn't necessarily mean being able to do the job the way I imagined. I needed a different way to approach the work. I needed something that could confront the realities of the campus that I was working on, the demands of the real-world job, and the things that I could actually influence and account for the things that I couldn't. And those things eventually became central to what I now teach as sanity-based school counseling. Modulated expectations, which is being accurate about what I can reasonably accomplish in the conditions I'm actually working in. Consultation and understanding that my expertise doesn't have to begin and end with something that I personally deliver to a student, and professional influence and learning how to become someone whose judgment can actually change what happens instead of just hoping that people are going to recognize the brilliance of my ideas. Sanity-based school counseling is not about giving up on what we want school counseling to look like, but it's about becoming much more effective within school counseling, in the schools we actually work in, with the people we actually work with, and in the circumstances that we actually have. Because you can spend your entire career trying to make your job match the picture you had of it when you were in graduate school. 250 to 1, 80, 20, comprehensive components, all in alignment. That'd be great. But it's often not reality. So maybe you could start figuring out how to do really good work in the job that's actually in front of you. And as it turns out, that is where a whole lot of your professional growth happens. So which of these six confessions sounded the most familiar to you? Or better yet, what's something that you used to believe about school counseling that experience has now completely changed your mind about? I would love to hear about it, especially if it is more embarrassing than my bathroom thing, because frankly, I need the company. I can't believe I've put that out there.

Free Resource And Listener Reflection

And if any of these confessions in any way hit home, I have something for you I think you're going to enjoy. It is called The Secrets of Sanity-based school counseling. And it is a look at some of the realities of this profession that don't make it into grad school and how the three pillars of sanity-based school counseling can help you approach your reality a little bit differently, a little more confidently, and in a way that actually makes you feel like you're moving the needle. I will put a link to that in the episode description so you can go grab it and have it. And let me say too, don't wait until you feel like you're caught up to go get this thing because we both know how that's going to work out, right? Go get it right now. You know, I started this episode by telling you that one of the things I was most excited about when I became a school counselor was being able to go to the bathroom whenever I wanted. And looking back, I actually think there is something pretty cool about that because I went into this profession with some really big dreams. I wanted to help kids. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to change the world. And I also wanted to be able to go to the bathroom in peace. And many, many years later, I am still working on a few of those, but I have learned this. Sometimes getting better at school counseling means getting a little less attached to what you thought it was supposed to look like and getting a whole lot more intentional about what you can actually do. Even if your biggest professional ambition, even if your biggest professional ambition for the day is just making it those 20 feet from your office to the restroom without somebody stopping you in the hallway, it can be done. And

Closing Thoughts And Take Care

as you're working on that, my friend, stay skeptical, check your sources, and take care.