What Makes You a Remarkable School Counselor?

When “Tell Me About You” Hits

I can remember way back when, in my grad school admissions interview, I could answer every question about my transcript, my plans, my work ethic, my experience working in schools. But when the committee asked me about me, not my resume, just me, I felt a little bit of a panic creep in. You ever been there? I remember too filling out some paperwork for an award I'd been nominated for. And one of the questions asked me to describe how my unique skills and abilities contributed to my success. And again, I froze. I had no idea what to put down because I'd never considered it. I'd had my head down, working in the very procedural world of my school for so long. I hadn't stopped to think there was anything especially remarkable about me at all. These were two different experiences years apart, but the same blank space where it answered should have been. So I ask you, what would it actually feel like to know up front with no apologies, the exact thing that you do that almost nobody else can do in the same way? And how exactly do you figure out what that even is? Hey school counselor, welcome back. In this episode, we're talking about a question most of you have never had to answer out loud.

Job Description Versus Remarkable

Not what you do, but what makes you remarkable. I'm gonna be honest with you, most school counselors can write their own job description in their sleep. Bless your hearts. You know your caceload numbers, your crisis percentages, and the 50 small things you do all before 9 o'clock on any given day. The harder question is the one I froze on myself more than once in rooms where the stakes were high. Not what you do, but what makes you remarkable. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of revelion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. My friend, knowing what you're remarkable at goes way beyond just a personality exercise.

Why Self Efficacy Changes Practice

It's the difference between describing your job and actually understanding why you're good at it. And to be totally upfront, if you can't name what is remarkable about you, the educational system will keep naming your value for you on its terms, using whatever it happens to need at the moment. Today, we're gonna identify your awesomeness. And next time, we're gonna talk about how to actually use it when your campus gives you almost no room to move. So before I get into the research, let's be very clear about why this is such a big ding-dang deal. This is not about helping you feel good about yourself, it's about whether or not you can actually see what you're doing well enough to do more of it on purpose. There is a real measurable link between how confident a school counselor feels in their own ability and what they actually do on a campus. In a study of 693 practicing school counselors, researchers Mullen and Lambey found that school counselor self-efficacy was a major contributor to how often counselors delivered programmatic services. That doesn't mean confidence magically fixes your caseload, y'all, but what it does mean is that what you believe you can actually do in your role as a school counselor is connected to what you're actually able to carry out. And here's something that most strengths conversations skip entirely. Just knowing what you're good at is not the whole equation. A study in applied research and quality of life looked at 274 hospital physicians and found that both possessing signature strengths and having real opportunities to apply them mattered for burnout, for engagement, and for well-being. Applying superpowers carries real weight on top of just possessing them, which means the goal isn't just a worksheet where you identify your strength and file it away after some sort of PD session. The goal is using that information on purpose and doing that regularly. So the core issue here is pretty simple. Knowing your strength and using your strength are

Knowing Strengths Versus Using Them

two different things. And today we're gonna talk about both of those. But the obvious next problem becomes you can't use a strength that you can't name. And for a lot of you, naming it is gonna be the hardest part of this whole episode because of what's happened to you on campus for years. Let me tell you what I mean. I have come to understand that I'm not the only one who freezes on the what makes you amazing question. After working with school counselors for years, I can confidently say that you can ask pretty much any school counselor what they're good at, and you're gonna get a variation of the same answers every time. I love building relationships with kids. I want to make a difference, I'm organized and I want to contribute to a canvas. And those are true, but they don't answer the actual question. What do you do and what makes you remarkable are different. Most of you have only ever practiced answering the first one because that one is safe, it's modest, and you can justify it with your job description. The second one asks you to claim something about yourself without apologies. And for a lot of you, that's where things get really quiet. Now, this is not a confidence gap, and I don't think it's anything you should feel bad about because by ding dang, it's not your fault. Think about what actually happens after years of being second-guessed, double-checked, or treated like you don't know how to do your own job, especially if you've been in that world for years. That kind of treatment just doesn't irritate you in the moment and then pass on by. It accumulates. And eventually it starts to change how you see yourself, whether you realize it's happening or not. There's research on rejection and devaluation that helps explain why this lands so hard. And I'll keep it simple, but being treated as less capable, less professional, or less central to your campus's goals than you actually are can start to feel less like just a passing insult and more like a threat to whether you belong in that school at all. Nobody's recognized your unique talents and strengths in so long you've stopped looking for them yourself. So let's actually find out. I want you to treat the next few minutes like a quick self-check, and I'm gonna walk you through three areas. You don't

Interpersonal Strengths That Get Results

have to say anything out loud, but just notice where you find yourself nodding. Notice where you feel like, oh yeah, those are the things that are gonna actually belong to you. So let's see. Where do you become an unusually effective school counselor? First, interpersonal strengths. Not just I'm good with people. That's a what you do answer again. This is how you're good with people, specifically. Are you the one a shutdown eighth grader will finally talk to because you don't try to feel the silence? Are you the one that can sit with a parent mid-meltdown and bring the temperature down without ever having to raise your voice? Are you the one teachers send their angriest kid to because they already know that you'll get something out of them that nobody else could? And it's not always about the students either. Are you the one a burned out teacher vents to in the hallway because you actually listen instead of trying to fix it? Are you the one a local business or community partner keeps coming back to specifically when other campuses can't seem to keep that relationship alive? Notice what's happening in all of those. Not filling the silence is a specific choice you make on purpose in a specific moment, and it gets a specific result. The kid talks when he wasn't going to talk to anybody else in the building. And that's repeatable. You could do that again tomorrow with a different kid, and it would probably work again. That's the difference between a personality trait and a strength. A trait is just how you are. A strength is something you can point to, you can give it a name, and you can use it on command and on purpose. And the reason these are so hard to identify in yourself is because you assume everyone can do them. If staying quiet while a kid works up to talking feels easy to you, your brain figures it must be easy for everyone. So it doesn't even register it as a skill, let alone a remarkable one. It just feels typical. The things you're actually best at are often the things you've never once considered spotlighting, because to you, they don't seem especially difficult. Second, data and evidence. Where do you think clearly when everyone else gets crazy? Some

Data Skills And Hidden Pattern Spotting

of you can see a discipline pattern in a spreadsheet before anybody else in the building does. Some of you can walk into a meeting and reframe a vague concern into something measurable right then and there. Maybe you built the spreadsheet nobody asked for, but six months later everybody on the staff is using it. Maybe you're the one who notices the exact week things started going sideways for a kid before anybody files a referral. And here's another one that feels kind of counterintuitive, but still belongs in this category. It can also be the gut feelings, the hunches that you can't fully explain in the moment that turn out to be right almost every time. Y'all, that is not the opposite of data. That's pattern recognition running so fast in the background of your brain that you experience it as an instinct instead of as evidence. That's not just, quote, being organized. That's how your brain processes a problem that nobody else is processing the same way. Third, counseling approaches. What's the approach that you keep reaching for and that is working for you, even when you're not

Counseling Approaches That Feel Like You

necessarily talking about it out loud? Maybe you're naturally systemic. When you're working with a kid, you naturally start considering the whole family or the whole campus, and you see how systems affect a student's well-being. You know how to influence those systems to support that student. Or maybe you're naturally solution focused and you guide short conversations that move the needle and move it quickly. Maybe you default to a strength-based approach without ever really labeling it that way, but you just can't help but find out what's working in a kid before you start to go after what's wrong. Or maybe you're the one that stays so level-headed in a crisis and you are calm showing up in those situations when everyone else is freaking out. That is not a technique you learned in grad school. That's something that fits how you actually think, how your brain works and how you see the world. And when an approach is really yours, it doesn't just stay in the counseling office. It becomes part of how you operate all day, in the hallways, in staff meetings, and five-second conversations at the copier. If this is a strength of yours, you'll often see staff members kind of adjusting their own interactions with students based on how they've watched you work with them, even if they can't tell you why. Now, the thing about all three of these categories, interpersonal, data, and counseling approach, is that you don't need all three to be amazing. And most people that I've worked with, honestly, are truly remarkable in one, maybe one and a half. They may be strong in all areas, but there is almost always one ability that totally takes the cake. So once you've identified yours, you need to actually say it out loud instead of just letting it

Say It Out Loud With Specifics

live as this vague feeling in the back of your mind. Fill in the blanks. I'm good at whatever I'm good at because I can do this thing by noticing, trying, implementing something when this thing happens. Try it. I'm good at de-escalation because I can read a kid before they blow up by slowing my own pace down when everybody else in the room is speeding up. Or I'm good at data because I can spot a pattern early by actually looking at the numbers weekly when most people only check them at report card time. That's a remarkable statement. Not I'm organized, not I'm good with data, not I'm good at calming people down. A mechanism, a method, and a condition create the actual shape of what you do that nobody else in your building does the same way. So go back to those two rooms for a second where I was filling out the award paperwork and where I was interviewing with the grad school committee. Both times, the actual answer was already there. It was sitting in years of work I'd already done. I just didn't have a name for it yet because nobody really ever asked me to find out. And I find in my conversations with school counselors all around the country that the real answers are almost always sitting there the whole time. In the kid who finally talked to you, in the patterns you see before anyone else, in the effective counseling approaches you can facilitate almost without thinking about it. You've just never had a reason to explicitly identify it until somebody makes you sit with a question. Now, to be fair, knowing this doesn't automatically make your job on campus easier. You can know exactly

Real Campus Limits And Next Steps

what you're remarkable at and still be sitting under a principal's thumb who tracks your every move with a caseload so extra it's laughable assigned to you by someone who's never once had to do that job themselves. That's real. And I'm not going to pretend like we can solve it in 30 seconds. But there is some potential for big changes once you understand and truly own what makes you a remarkable school counselor. We work on this a lot in my School for School Counselor's mastermind. But for now, I just want you to sit with the question we started with. Not what do you do, but what makes you remarkable? Say it out loud. And then next episode, we're going to pick up exactly where this one leaves off. And we're going to talk about what it actually looks like to use what's remarkable about you on a real campus with real limitations, including the ones you have that feel impossible. It will make a difference, I guarantee it. Hey, I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with that episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, my friend, take care.