Jan. 5, 2026
The Question School Counselors NEVER Get Asked
School counselors are told to: Be flexibleMake it workAdvocate harderAnd somehow still be accountable for everything. But what if the real problem isn’t your mindset- or your effort? In this episode, Steph Johnson revisits an early message from the podcast and names what was missing. She explains why reassurance has a shelf life, how guilt gets mistaken for professionalism, and why endurance keeps getting rewarded in roles that were never built to work. This isn’t about doing more. It’s about...
School counselors are told to:
- Be flexible
- Make it work
- Advocate harder
And somehow still be accountable for everything.
But what if the real problem isn’t your mindset- or your effort?
In this episode, Steph Johnson revisits an early message from the podcast and names what was missing. She explains why reassurance has a shelf life, how guilt gets mistaken for professionalism, and why endurance keeps getting rewarded in roles that were never built to work.
This isn’t about doing more.
It’s about seeing the job for what it actually is.
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Join the next-level conversation in my Substack.
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Want support with real-world strategies that actually work on your campus? We’re doing that every day in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Come join us!
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All names, stories, and case studies in this episode are fictionalized composites drawn from real-world circumstances. Any resemblance to actual students, families, or school personnel is coincidental. Details have been altered to protect privacy.
This work is part of the School for School Counselors body of work developed by Steph Johnson, LPC, CSC, which centers role authority over role drift, consultative practice over fix-it culture, adult-designed systems and environments as primary drivers of student behavior, clinical judgment over compliance, and school counselor identity as leadership within complex systems.
00:00 - A Texas Label Becomes A Life
02:21 - Roles Turn Into Stories On Campus
05:01 - Your Role Doesn’t Define You, Revisited
07:16 - The Missing Piece: Authority
10:51 - Responsibility Without Control
13:26 - Misattribution And The Burnout Trap
16:46 - Endurance Versus Orientation
20:11 - Acting As If And Professional Presence
23:36 - Mastermind Lessons And Fluency
26:16 - Internal Authority Without Confrontation
29:06 - Expectations, Limits, And Clear Seeing
31:21 - Substack, Coherence, And Culture Shift
WEBVTT
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When I was about 12, my family moved from Texas to another state, new school, and we had very different accents from the kids around us.
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And almost immediately the way that we talked became more interesting than anything else about us.
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Kids would stop us in the hallway and say things like, Are you really from Texas?
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So my brother and I started leaning into it.
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We told him things like we rode horses to school, that we wore boots and chaps, that that was just normal Texas life.
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None of it was true.
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None of us had even ever been on a horse.
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But once that story landed, it stuck.
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And years later, we were still the kids from Texas who rode horses to school.
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That became the shorthand version of who we were.
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And we almost internalized it a little bit ourselves.
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And what's most interesting about that situation is not even that the kids believed it, it's that once the label was set, nobody ever really checked it again.
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The story became more powerful than reality.
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And that's the thing that keeps coming back to me as I think about our world of school counseling.
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Because school counselors get assigned stories too.
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The testing person, the schedule fixer, the lesson rotation counselor, the one who's so flexible.
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And once that story takes root, it shapes expectations long after it stops fitting what you really do, what you're asked to do, what you are assumed to have time for, and what people think your work is, even if that's not at all what you're supposed to be doing.
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This episode really isn't about my Texas story, but it is about what happens when a role becomes a story, and that story starts standing in for your reality.
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Hey school counselor, welcome back.
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There's a question school counselors almost never get asked.
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And until it's named, this job will keep consuming capable people.
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This episode is about responsibility without authority, about why working harder hasn't actually fixed what's broken, and why endurance keeps getting treated as professionalism.
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If you've been wondering why your stress doesn't ever seem to let up, we need to talk.
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So, if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity about your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion.
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You know, you're in the right place.
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I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast.
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Way back when this podcast started, I think 2022, I shared a message that at the time I knew a lot of school counselors needed to hear.
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I said, your role doesn't define you.
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And I want to be clear, I wasn't wrong.
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At the time, that message was doing a lot of really heavy lifting for our profession.
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It was a confusing time.
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We were coming out of COVID, behaviors were already escalating, we were having trouble getting kids to school, and a lot of school counselors' jobs started changing really quickly and often moved in the wrong direction.
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And so school counselors started to really take that personally, that they were not able to do the job they were hired to do, they kept getting handed all this extra baloney.
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And just like today, many school counselors were carrying this belief that if their program didn't look a certain way, if they weren't running small groups, if they weren't hitting every single Ask a benchmark or checking all the boxes that everybody seemed to be saying mattered, then they must be falling short.
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So I said that to try to short circuit the shame that I could see and hear coming from so many of our colleagues.
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Maybe you've been there too.
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It was meant to push back against the comparison trap, which honestly I think is the engine that Asker relies on to keep their organization going.
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And to go against the idea that if your campus structure didn't allow for quote unquote ideal counseling work, that that failure somehow belonged to you.
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And for a lot of people, that kind of realization matters big time because it helps school counselors stop internalizing things that they didn't choose.
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It helps them see that being assigned to testing or lesson rotations or crisis coverage isn't a personal shortcoming.
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But that message by itself only goes so far.
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And there needs to be more to the story.
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Because telling somebody, don't let your role define you, doesn't change the fact that roles shape expectations.
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They shape how your time is used, or what outcomes you're being held accountable for, or how your effectiveness is judged.
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And sometimes that happens by people who have no idea what it is you're supposed to be doing in the first place.
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So while that reassurance that if you've been misappropriated, it isn't your fault is really important.
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It doesn't explain why the patterns keep repeating and why so many amazing, dedicated school counselors still feel stuck and frustrated.
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Why your confidence in your work can increase, but your frustration hangs on.
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Or why the relief that you feel when you're validated in that way is very real and awesome, but also very temporary.
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That's what we're gonna talk about today.
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We're not going to rehash my first message about your role doesn't define you.
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So if you want to hear that, go back to episode two.
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It'll probably be a hoot as you compare it to the podcast now.
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We're not gonna rehash that episode, but we are going to finish it.
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So here's the piece that was missing from that earlier conversation.
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It's authority.
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When I say authority, I don't mean being the boss or having control in a power-hungry way.
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I mean something that's actually much more simple and practical.
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Authority is the ability to make decisions about your work.
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It's about having influence over how your time is used.
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It's having a say in your own priorities.
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And it's about being able to decide what won't happen, not just what will.
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Most school counselors are given tremendous responsibility without authority.
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You're responsible for student outcomes, you're responsible for interventions, you're responsible for data, for progress, for improvement, but you're rarely given control over the conditions that make those outcomes possible.
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Your schedule may be set by someone else.
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Testing windows, non-negotiable.
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Lesson rotations are assigned.
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Non-counseling duties get added without subtracting anything else.
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And then somehow you're judged as though you had the choice.
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For example, you are likely responsible for improving student mental health outcomes, right?
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All while spending weeks coordinating testing, covering classes, or running a classroom lesson rotation that leaves no room for follow-up.
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But when the data doesn't move or things with certain students don't get better, admin never comes and asks, how did we misutilize you?
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Could we have set up a better system for counseling supports?
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No.
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The question is, what else could you, as the school counselor, have done?
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And even though they try to make this feel like it's your shortcoming, the truth is these situations are not about personal failure.
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They reveal a structural mismatch.
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And when we don't or we can't call that out, the blame almost always lands on the individual.
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You.
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You're the one that's made to deal with the fallout and work harder than ever in an effort to try to prove that you don't really suck at your job.
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So you work after school, you skip lunch, you try to multitask, and it still doesn't work because the conditions never changed.
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When we talk about professional identity and we don't talk about authority, we end up mislabeling the problems of our industry.
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We talk about things like burnout, overwhelm, imposter syndrome.
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But a lot of the time what we're actually seeing is misattribution.
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Capable professionals being held accountable for outcomes that they have no ability to control.
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Trying to build supports for students without the time or autonomy to make them happen.
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And once you see that clearly, really see it, something changes.
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It doesn't make your job suddenly easier.
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That'd be great.
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But you do stop assuming that the problem is you.
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And believe it or not, that clarity is the starting point for real leadership on campus.
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Once you start looking for misattribution, you see it everywhere.
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It shows up in your annual evaluations, when you're being evaluated on your counseling outcomes, while most of your week was spent coordinating testing logistics, but that wasn't on your evaluation.
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It shows up when you're told to build a comprehensive program, but you don't control your schedule, your caseload, or your calendar.
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It shows up when you're expected to deliver tiered intervention while also being the catch-all for every urgent issue that nobody else seems to have time to handle.
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And it shows up when your flexibility is praised until the outcome isn't what they wanted.
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And then suddenly flexibility isn't a strength anymore.
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It's a liability.
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Because when outcomes don't match the expectation, the question is never what conditions made this impossible.
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It's why didn't you manage your time better?
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Why aren't you seeing more students?
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Why isn't the behavior data changing?
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And that's the trap.
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Here's what this looks like.
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You spend six weeks coordinating testing.
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If you don't coordinate testing, insert any other baloney job you've been assigned into this story.
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Not counseling, right?
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Not follow-up, testing.
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You're managing rosters, makeups, room assignments, tech issues, you're troubleshooting for teachers, you're fielding parent emails, you're putting out testing fires all day long.
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And teachers keep stopping by your door saying things like, I know you're busy, but could you just talk to this student really quick?
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But there's no one else to coordinate testing.
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So you do what you were told and you defer counseling until either testing is over or you find a quick minute.
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And that hurts because you know the cost of what's being put off.
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And then a few weeks later, you're asked why students aren't being seen more consistently, why behavior referrals are still plateaued, why you didn't run 14 small groups this semester.
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And when those questions come up, there's no acknowledgement that your counseling time was taken away.
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No pause to reflect.
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Nobody's asking about scheduling or availability or how you, as the school counseling expert on campus, think these problems should be solved.
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Just the expectation that somehow you should have made it work.
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You fell short.
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You weren't effective.
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You're evaluated either formally or informally, as if your role were static, as if your priorities were protected, and as if your time was really yours, but it's not.
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And when no one says that out loud, school counselors are left trying to solve these systemic problems through personal effort.
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That's why so many capable, committed school counselors feel like they are constantly behind, even when they are working at a thousand percent capacity.
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They don't lack skill or commitment.
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They're being measured against an imaginary version of their job, one that assumes that they have authority that they don't actually have.
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And until that disconnect is not only named but recognized, the cycle keeps repeating.
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So let me offer an apology because part of this may be my fault.
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Almost four years ago, episode two of this podcast, I was talking to school counselors who were exhausted, discouraged, wondering why they were failing at a job that already felt so impossible to manage.
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They came into it on fire and ready to serve.
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And somehow, just a little ways into it, they felt completely demoralized.
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Wanted to say something to help those school counselors keep going.
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So I said this.
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And I still believe that.
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At the time, a lot of school counselors were internalizing the idea that if their job didn't look like a comprehensive program or a ramp model or the version of counseling that they kept seeing held up as ideal in their district meetings or in professional development or at conferences, then they must be doing something wrong.
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That line, your role does not define you, was meant to interrupt that spiral.
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To say, this role was assigned to you, but it is not a referendum on your worth.
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And then I kept going.
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That's no shame in your game.
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You didn't ask for that to happen, I'm assuming.
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That was something that was assigned to you.
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And that mattered too, because it named something real that we all experience.
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You don't choose testing season, you don't choose lesson rotations, you don't choose being pulled into everybody else's behavior emergencies.
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You do what the job requires.
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But then I said one more thing, almost in passing, that a lot of people probably nodded along to and agreed with without realizing how heavy it actually was.
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You weren't, you know, raising your hand, jumping up and down saying, Here, pick me, pick me.
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I I want to do all this extra stuff.
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No, that's been assigned to you.
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And we're paid to follow directions.
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At the time, that line felt very honest and grounded.
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But after working with thousands of school counselors over the past four years in consultations inside the School for School Counselors Mastermind and in real face-to-face conversations about real campuses, I can see what I did not fully explain then.
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Those messages in episode two taken together didn't just offer reassurance.
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They taught endurance.
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They taught you how to tolerate a role that didn't make any sense, how to absorb misalignment without naming it, and how to keep going, even when the expectations attached to your job kept expanding.
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Because what I left out was this following directions doesn't protect you later.
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It doesn't protect you when the outcomes are being questioned.
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It doesn't protect you when the campus data doesn't move.
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And it doesn't protect you when you're being evaluated as if you had full control over your time, your priorities, and your availability.
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So that's where I got it wrong.
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I focused on helping you stop believing that your role defined your value.
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But I didn't finish the thought.
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I didn't mention how those same assigned roles get used later to judge your effectiveness, even when you were doing exactly what you were being told to do.
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And when that part doesn't get said out loud, that reassurance that I was trying to give turns into endurance.
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About just making it through.
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Which works for a while.
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But those feelings of frustration and restlessness and resentment, they all come back, don't they?
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So if that early episode helped you put words to a hard season, I'm glad it was out there.
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But if you also found yourself thinking, why does this still feel impossible, even though I refuse to blame myself?
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This is me saying what I should have said sooner.
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Reassurance helps you endure.
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But what comes next is about helping you orient so that endurance is no longer the only option that you have.
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When endurance stops being the goal, you stop asking questions like, how do I survive this?
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And you start asking, What's actually going on here?
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Orientation isn't about pushing back, it's about seeing more accurately.
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And this is where my undergrad training as a scientist really comes in handy.
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I don't know if you know this about me.
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In my undergrad, I trained.
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Trained as a chemist, we're talking lab coat, goggles, beakers, and bunts and burners, the whole nine yards.
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And I loved it.
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Long story about how I ended up working in schools.
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But science teaches you to look at systems before you assign blame.
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It teaches you to identify variables, to notice what conditions are present and which ones aren't.
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When you're oriented this way, you stop treating every problem as a personal challenge to overcome.
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You start noticing patterns.
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You notice which expectations are realistic and which ones assume that you have authority that you just don't have.
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You notice where your time is actually going, not just where it's supposed to go on paper.
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And you notice which outcomes you're being held responsible for, even though you don't control the conditions that produce them.
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It's not cynicism, it's clinical observation.
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Endurance says, just keep going.
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Orientation says, pause.
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Name the variables.
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Identify the constraints.
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So it's not mindset work, certainly not positive thinking.
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It's not even telling yourself a nicer story and hoping that it helps.
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And when this distinction truly takes root, it starts to show up whether you intend it to or not.
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It shows up in how you carry yourself in meetings, in the words that you use to explain your role or your activities on campus, in your tone of voice, when you're being asked why something didn't happen.
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Or in how quickly you jump to justify yourself or you don't.
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It's not performing like you have confidence.
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Now you're operating from accuracy.
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This is where counseling theory starts to matter to you.
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In Adlerian psychology and in some behavioral and cognitive approaches, we talk about the idea of acting as if, not pretending, not faking it, but organizing your behavior around the belief that you are testing for truth.
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When someone begins to act as if a new understanding is accurate, their internal experience changes.
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And over time, their environment often responds differently as well.
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That's what we're talking about here.
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When you can stop organizing yourself around the belief that you personally failed and start organizing your thoughts around what was structurally possible, your presence changes.
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Your language changes.
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Your posture and your pacing change.
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And then, even if you're not doing anything else differently, the way that you're perceived on campus starts to change too.
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You didn't have to confront anybody, you didn't have to take any professional risks, speak up when you knew there was going to be blowback, stick your neck out when it didn't feel safe.
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But you stopped showing up as someone trying to outrun blame.
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And you started showing up as a professional who understands the conditions of their work.
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This is exactly the kind of shift that I see happening with school counselors inside my school for school counselors mastermind.
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Every week they bring what's happening on their campus and we orient to it together.
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We name what's structural, what's contextual, what's being misattributed, and what actually deserves their energy.
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Over time, that kind of thinking really takes root.
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Their language becomes more clear, and they feel less reactive when expectations shift or when they're being questioned about something.
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They don't get loud, they're not having to engage in anything risky.
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But just that fluency and what they're actually doing changes the way they work.
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Just more fluent in the job they're actually doing, not the imaginary one that they keep getting measured against.
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Orientation doesn't magically fix the system, but it does do something almost as important.
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It gives you a stable internal reference point.
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So when expectations shift or priorities change, or you're being asked why something didn't happen, you're no longer scrambling to justify yourself.
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You're oriented, you're solid, you know what you know.
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You can answer factually, you can document clearly, and you can move through your day without constantly trying to prove your worth.
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That's a big deal.
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And it's harder to do than it sounds, but I'm here to tell you it is the ultimate game changer.
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And even when that change in perception never leaves your internal world, it still changes everything.
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Because once you are oriented, endurance, just pushing through, is no longer the only option that you've been given.
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Now, before I go on, I want to be really clear about what I'm not saying here.
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I've alluded to it, but I want to be very upfront.
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When I say that orientation changes how you show up, I am not talking about confronting your administrator.
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I'm not talking about pushing back or doing anything that feels like it's risking your job.
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Many school counselors work in environments where speaking up, even when it's done calmly and professionally, can have real consequences.
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And I get that.
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I worked for the world's worst principal at one point in my career.
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And I remember the fear of retaliation still like it was yesterday.
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That fear is real.
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And pretending that that doesn't happen in schools would be irresponsible and honestly probably a little unethical.
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So let me be very clear about what I mean.
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