When Good School Counselors Go Quiet

When The Room Goes Quiet

Just a couple of nights ago, I watched a big group of school counselors get quiet really fast. I was running a live session in our free best year ever event and had over a hundred school counselors in that Zoom room. And for the first part of the evening, y'all, the chat was on fire. I was talking about what school counseling feels like, what the caseloads are like, what the role confusion is like, and how nobody designed school counseling for what it really is right now. And people were chaining in with things like, yes, this is my life. 100% people were feeling seen and engaged, and everybody was in it. And then I made a pivot and I started talking about what to do about it, how to start working your way out of those patterns and how to think differently about your school counseling work. And when I did that, everything slowed down. It noticeably got quieter. And the yes messages turned into, well, my admin would never go for that. Or I could never do that. And the energy shifted from recognition to resistance. A lot of people started explaining why those ideas would never work for them. And some people just logged out completely. And I sat with that for a long time after it happened and thought maybe I did something wrong. But I don't think those school counselors checked out because they didn't care. And I don't even necessarily think that they were disagreeing with me. I think they were school counselors who had run out of resources. And I think I was asking them to spend things that they no longer had. And there is research that explains exactly why. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity on your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, haha, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. What's interesting about my Zoom experience is that my podcast data actually shows

The Pattern In Podcast Data

the same exact split. The episodes where I talk about patterns, like this is what's happening to you, those are by far my most listened to episodes. The episodes where I teach what to do about it show fewer listeners and lower completion rates, meaning people aren't listening to as much of the episode. And that's pretty consistent every single time. I've been watching this happen for over a year, and I thought maybe I'm just not communicating the right information. But it turns out I was measuring something. And what I've been measuring through that data dive in the past year is resource depletion. Psychology has a name for this kind of resource depletion, and it's called conservation of resources

Resource Depletion Explains The Freeze

theory. And once you understand what this describes, y'all, you cannot unsee it. So let's get into it. Your silence at work is a strategy. It is a resource conservation strategy. And the educational system that you work in benefits from that more than you do. So let's think about it. What happens when your low fuel light comes on? Every single mile past that point feels very expensive, doesn't it? You won't take the long way around, you skip the extra errands, and you don't drive across town for coffee when you know there's a coffee pot in the break room. Nothing about you changed. Your preferences and your personality didn't change, but you started doing the math differently because you couldn't afford not to. That's conservation of resources theory. It comes from a psychologist named Stephen Hobfall. And this is one of the foundational theories of occupational stress psychology. The core idea is that when your resources are running low, you conserve. You stop spending on anything that isn't absolutely essential. And once that gaslight comes on, every mile has to be worth it. Now, apply that to your school counseling program. You go to your administrator and you say, I don't think I should be coordinating testing on this campus. Y'all, that takes a lot of emotional energy to initiate. And it carries a lot of social risk. And the outcome is really uncertain because you might be heard, but you might also be dismissed, or you might get labeled as difficult. For a school counselor who is already stretched super thin by a 10 to 500 caseload, responsibilities that never end, and a job that seems to shift every time somebody needs another warm body in the cafeteria, that conversation is an expense. We know there's going to be a cost to that, but the payoff is not certain. So you don't have the conversation, right? It's easier just to be quiet. You absorb the circumstances. And eventually you may start to think that you've lost your nerve. But maybe you're conserving. Because feeling tired or quiet on any given day is one thing. But what happens when that pattern repeats for months or for years? There's a 2024 study, Andreou and Colleagues, published in the Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology

Learned Helplessness And Acquiescent Silence

called, and this should get your attention, Voice in the Void. They ran two experimental studies with 654 participants. And they wanted to know what happens when people repeatedly experience their voice not mattering. What happens when they speak up and nothing changes over and over and over again? What they found was people who were exposed to repeated instances of their voice having no effect became less likely to use new voice opportunities. So even when they got new opportunities to speak up and make a difference, they chose to opt out, even if speaking up might have actually worked. They just didn't take the chance. And they reported feeling more and more helpless. Y'all, we often look at that as burnout. That is not what that is, though. That's learning. You go to your admin about your role on campus and nothing changed. Or you raised concerns about testing coordination eating into your direct services time and nothing changed. And then you said something at the team meeting about how guidance lessons were getting cut for assemblies and nothing changed. And you do that for a year or two years or even five years. And eventually you stop spending the energy. The study calls that acquiescent silence. And you know what that feels like, right? It feels like there's no point to this. And there's a piece of you that worries, maybe you've just stopped caring about your work. But maybe, just maybe, you're actually conserving. Because the thing about learned patterns is that they tend to stick, right? Even if you change campuses, even if you get a new administrator, even if somebody genuinely asks for and wants your input, you've been trained by experience to believe that talking costs you something and produces nothing. So you don't do it. You think you've become passive. Maybe you're conserving. And when a school counselor is depleted, when this pattern has been running long enough, something really interesting happens. The compliance tasks still get done. You still run the small groups, you still show up for lunch

Why Compliance Stays And Initiative Dies

duty, you still enter all of your data into the system, you still pull kids for schedule changes. Those tasks are low cost, they're expected, they're safe, they require effort, sure, but they don't require you to risk anything. So those continue. But what drops off is the discretionary work, the work that requires initiative, advocating further for how your programs should actually be working, pushing back on responsibilities that do not belong to you, raising questions about whether the way the building uses the school counseling position actually serves students, rethinking the school counseling role instead of just surviving it. The system gets a functioning school counselor, it just gets a quiet one. And eventually you start believing that either that's who you are or that's who you should be. And so I want you to hear this because I am not blaming administrators in this situation. Most of them are depleted too. Most of them are running their own version of this exact same pattern. This is not a conspiracy where people sat in a room and decided, let's exhaust the school counselor so they stop asking questions. But nobody's talking about how to prevent this either. Because a quiet school counselor is indeed a convenient one. So the system doesn't have to conspire to keep you quiet. It just needs to keep you tired. And then the silence takes care of everything else. So here's the part of the podcast episode when I would normally say, here are three things that you can do when you go back to work. But you already know what would happen if I did that. Some people would lean in and pay attention, some would start listing reasons it wouldn't work, and some people would just turn me off and move on to the next thing. And y'all, that's exactly what the research predicts. Telling a depleted person to spend more energy on something is like telling someone with an empty gas tank to drive faster. So I'm not gonna do that. But I am going to tell you what the same research says about finding your way back. Because conservation of resources theory doesn't just describe loss spirals, it describes gain spirals

Turning Loss Spirals Into Gain

too. And there's a study, Hann and Kennan Colleagues 2008, published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, followed over 2,500 professionals across three years to track what happens when your resources start coming back. And they found that when people gain resources, they become engaged. And when they're engaged, they start taking initiative again. They start showing proactive behavior, self-starting, going beyond the minimum, the exact things that the lost spiral killed. And that initiative feeds back into engagement, which feeds back into resources. And the spiral reverses itself. So the question is not how do I get braver or more assertive or more loud? The question is, where do I start getting my resources back? The counselors who went quiet in my Zoom weren't giving up, but they were doing the math on the resources they did not have. So the way back starts with changing that math. The good news is the easiest resources to recover are not emotional. You don't have to force yourself to feel like changing before you can actually do anything. The easiest resources to reclaim are cognitive. And the answer is fluency. There is cognitive load research behind this. When a skill becomes automatic, when you don't have to rethink or reinvent the process every single time, your working memory gets freed up for higher order thinking. And when cognitive load drops, proactive behavior comes back. Apply that to your job on campus. If your documentation process is something that you're fighting every single day, every time a kid walks through the door, that's costing you. If every time someone on your campus comes to you for consultation and you worry about what to say in the moment every single time, that costs you. If every administrator conversation feels like you're making it up as you go, that costs you. These aren't just inconveniences or inexperience. Those are resource drains that feed that loss spiral. But when those same tasks become fluent, when you have a system and a rhythm and a structure that doesn't require conscious effort to execute, you get your resources back. And the research says that when those resources come back, initiative comes with it. So you don't suddenly become a new counselor, but you finally have something that you can spend. And that's good because you can't solve a resource problem with a motivational speech, right? But you can solve it by getting fluent at the things that are draining you. So here's what I want you to do this week. And I promise this will be a quick one. Think about

Fluency, Consultation, And Your Next Step

what is the one thing on your campus that costs you the most energy every single time you do it. The thing that you've done a hundred times, but you still have to think hard about it. I want you to think about what that is. And honestly, I'd love to know. Send me an email. Drop it in one of our social media groups because I think we're going to find out we're all being drained by the same handful of things. And I think that really matters. That's where your fluency journey begins. And the way you begin to build that fluency, many of you have heard me say this over and over in the past few weeks, is to engage in a good quality consultation group. Full stop. And you know we have our school for school counselors mastermind available if you're ever interested. But you need to do something to build the fluency, reduce the cognitive load, and get your voice back. So the good news is you have not been losing yourself in your work, right? You've been conserving. And knowing that, stop asking yourself why you don't have the courage to speak up, why your advocacy efforts aren't working, why you feel so disrespected. Instead, ask yourself where am I conserving? That's going to give you the answers you need to feel more competent and more confident in the school you're coming up. Hey, I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, take care.