When Your School Won't Let You Be a School Counselor

A Road Trip Style Check-In

What do you do when you're trying to do everything right as a school counselor, but it's just not working? You've tried explaining what you're supposed to be doing, but nobody really seems to care. And you start thinking, why do I keep showing up at all? Maybe you've listened to this podcast and you've thought, what would Steph say if we could just sit down over coffee or maybe ride together in an Uber at a conference somewhere? Well, today we're gonna do something a little different. And if you hear some road noise, you're not imagining things. I took this one out on the road, and the best part is you're writing shotgun. Hey there, school counselor. Welcome back. Today's episode, a little different. No studio microphone, no script, and definitely no fancy production. Just me and my car talking through a question that I have been thinking through a lot as I'm preparing for my upcoming keynote speech in Utah. Because I know there are school counselors out there, maybe you, doing everything they know how to do, trying to build better programs, and still feeling like they're getting absolutely nowhere. And I think there are a few things to think about when you find yourself in that position. 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 in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. All right, who knows if this is gonna work or not? Doing something totally different today. I am currently traveling. I have no idea what this is gonna sound like when I'm done, but it has been a whirlwind couple of weeks in our family. If you have ever been a marching band family, you know the intensity that is October. And so we got in last night about 2:30 in the morning, got back home from our last marching competition, caught a few hours of sleep, and now I'm back on the road to go pick up my youngest from the grandparents. So it's been a whirlwind weekend. Was going to go home and sit down and record the podcast episode that I had ready for you. And then I thought, gracious, let's just make some good use of this car time. We're always talking about using your time to the fullest. So here I am doing exactly what I preach. Just wanted to talk a little bit about something that's been on my mind. As I'm preparing and refining my keynote for the Utah School Counselor Association, which is coming up in just a few weeks, I absolutely cannot freaking wait to do this. I am so excited. And as I've been refining things, as I've really been clarifying things, even in my own mind in preparation for this, one of the things that has really stuck in my brain is what do you do when you're a school counselor on a campus and you know what you need to do and you're trying to build influence like we talk about here.

When They Want Your Labor

You're trying to advocate the right way instead of the traditional way that you've been taught, but you're still not feeling like you're making any inroads. You still feel like you're stuck, nobody's listening to you, nobody really cares what you want to do. They just want you to execute, right? They want you on the campus to utilize your labor instead of your leadership. And you're stuck doing all of these lunch duties and car rider duties and guidance schedules and perpetuity and just silly things, leading committees, you have no business leading and people asking you to do things that really have nothing to do with the reason you wanted to become a school counselor or even the job description that you were given when you started. What do you do when you're in this limbo area? Like, do you just grit your teeth and grin and bear it and try to make it through? Do you look for somewhere else to go because you're just fed up and you're wondering if maybe the grass isn't greener at another school? I think these are very real situations and real concerns. And part of the reason, too, in addition to preparing for Utah's conference, is that I have several members of my School for School Counselors mastermind who are in this situation right now, where inexplicably things have really changed in their programs all of a sudden, whether that be change in leadership, whether that be a change in their assignment, or just in the way that their admin is operating overall. Sometimes we have these years where all of a sudden it feels like everything gets blown up and we feel like we're starting from scratch, or we are in this season of trying to push the boulder up the hill and it keeps rolling back down on us. And it starts to feel like, what is the point? Why am I here? Why do I even keep trying? What am I doing? And is it really making a difference? And that is a really terrible place to be. It doesn't feel good, it's not good for your mental health, it is not good for your sense of satisfaction in your work. And that's when it starts to feel like a slog going to work every day, where you look at the door for a minute before you even walk through it, because it just feels like such a huge push to even go into the building. Have you ever had times like that? I know I have. I've had times in my career where I was really having to pump myself up on the way to work to even make it there. Where I was pep talking myself all the way. People on my commute probably thought I was insane because I was in my car just chatting away to myself. Or sometimes even you're in those seasons where you're screaming to rock anthems, or you're shouting gangster rap, or whatever it is that gets you through, right? So that you can at least feel like you have some bit of power or control or something before you walk into this place where you know you have absolutely none. And

Consultation Is The Lifeline

so the first thing I want to tell you is if you are in one of those seasons, and if you're in one of those situations where you just feel like, what is the freaking point? Why do I keep showing up? Why do I keep beating my head against this wall day after day after day, when everybody's made it very clear that they have no intention of listening to what I have to offer? If you're there, I want you to know one, research tells us this is peer-reviewed, all right? This is not just the evidence-based label slapped on something because we read one study. This is, I don't present things like that. The literature says if you are in a place like that, the number one thing that's going to sustain you is consultation. Full stop, that's your best resource. So make sure that you have that in place somewhere. Whether that be a colleague, ideally it would be more than one colleague because you need different viewpoints and vantage points. You need different people giving insight and feedback on what you're talking about. And sometimes you need somebody who could call you out. And you don't often find that in the one person that you select for yourself, right? So you need to have a variety of input coming in at you, and you need to have experience in the room, true experience. And here are some good benchmarks for you. People who can run their program without any worksheets, those are great places to start. And I hope that doesn't sound catty. I don't mean it that way. Perhaps a worksheet has its place in moments, but overall, people who do not instantly reach for printable group plans, printable worksheets, those kinds of things, those are gonna be your people because that means they know their mechanisms. They know their fundamentals, they know their underlying philosophies and evidence base, and they're going to be able to guide you more effectively than someone just saying, well, here, go download this anxiety group. It seemed to work for me. Those solutions can work short term, but they're not gonna work you out of the problem you're in now. So, first is make sure you have a strong, consultative group somewhere.

Make One Irresistible Proposal

Secondly, think about the way that you are communicating information on your campus, the things that you were trying to take a stand on, the things that you know need to be implemented, but you just can't do it yet. Think about those things and think about the way in which you're presenting them to your campus and your administration. If you are presenting it the way I see most school counselors do, which is in a flash of bravery, they stand up and they say, This isn't appropriate for my role. When I'm doing this, I can't do all these other things I'm supposed to be doing. I really want to talk about how we can change this. Nine times out of 10, you're gonna get shot down. That's not the way schools work. We would love to think that we are these collaborative, collegial environments, you know, where best practices and best ideas for kids come to the table and we can all discuss them and debate them and come up with the best solutions for our campus. But in reality, schools do not work like that. They are understaffed, everybody's underpaid, everybody's overworked, and nobody has the time to sit down and do business the way we all know we should be doing business. So that's no shade on any particular person. It just is what it is. The education system is broken, and we are working within a broken system. So we can't expect perfection in our conversations and our advocacy efforts if the system around us is fragmenting in a million pieces. Make sense? So we really have to key in on what are the essential components, not the whole big enchilada. What are the essential things? What are the non-negotiables for us in our program that we thousand percent feel like we need to take a stand on? That's what we need to be focusing on. Not all the things, not changing your whole schedule, not shuffling all these teachers around because you don't like the way that your guidance lesson works. You're not available for crises, you're always being called. That's not going to be a fruitful conversation with your administrators. You need to target one to two very key ideas that not only benefit your program, but benefit the campus in a big way. Something that is a priority for them, a problem that they've been trying to solve and can't quite figure out how. Now, how do you do that? Well, that's a whole other conversation. You have to be able to identify the initiatives that your admin hasn't tried. Almost all the time, those are going to be located in the evidence base. They're going to be in the research. You're going to need to be fluent in the research in that area, which is way too much for me to present on a podcast episode, right? Best practices for attendance, best practices for anxiety, best practices for school refusal, best practices for disruption, whatever it is. Uh, too much in one episode. But I will tell you again, if you're in a good consultative group, they're gonna be able to help you solve these problems and be able to conceptualize what you want to present and how you want to do it. And sometimes you present these ideas and they get shot down. That's okay. It's not the end of the world. It doesn't mean it's dead. It just means that we're gonna have to come around through the back gate in order to make an impact. It's totally possible. We can guide you through that. So we've talked about having good consultation behind you when you feel like you don't even know why you're showing up every day. Why does anybody even want you there? Do they want you there? Why can't you make any changes or impact? You need good consultation. Secondly, you need to be able to identify those key aspects, those key things that your campus is struggling with, where you are uniquely positioned to help. And you're going to present those in a way that seems irresistible to your administrator.

Trade Perfection For Contribution

The third thing I think you should probably do in this season is recalibrate the way you're looking at your program. Because most of us, as we've been trained in implementing the national model, we understand comprehensive school counseling programs, we understand all the data-driven practices. We have this very black and white picture in our minds of how school counseling programs should work. And when we're on a campus and we're not able to facilitate our programs in that way, it really wears us down, doesn't it? And whether you'll admit it or not, somewhere in the back of your mind, you probably have the thought of, well, I'm I'm failing. I'm failing my program because I'm not meeting all of these benchmarks that everybody else online seems to be saying they're meeting. Spoiler, they're not. They are not meeting those benchmarks. They want you to think they are, but they're not usually as high speed as they want you to think they are. Okay. And this is no shade on anybody. I think people present their best selves on social media, right? School counselors are no exception. And they genuinely want to help. So if they want to help and they can present themselves as someone who knows who's been there and who's crafted the perfect program, of course, people are going to listen to that. There's a whole psychology of this, right? This is again a whole other conversation. What if instead of looking at your program as black or white, it's comprehensive or it's not, my time is 80-20 or it's not, I have one to 250 or I don't. Instead, I'm looking at it in these absolutes, almost like a pass-fail rubric, right? What if we start looking at it through a completely different lens? And instead of grading ourselves with regard to things that we often have no control over, what if we start looking at it through the lens of contribution? Because in all of my conversations with thousands of school counselors across the country and really across the world, when I ask them, what brought you into school counseling? What made you want to do this kind of work? They always say some variation of, I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to build relationships with students, and I wanted to be either the kind of school counselor that I had or the kind of school counselor I wish I'd had. And when we're wired that way as natural helpers, I don't think it's too big of a job to start looking at our word through the lens of contribution rather than comprehensiveness. The comprehensiveness can come. All right. I'm not telling you to abandon that model. But in the meantime, for your own professional wellness and sanity, you might need to let go of it for a minute. And when you're having a really rough day, you're doing lunch duties, you're doing baloney committees, you're doing test coordination or whatever it is that you've been tasked with that you do not want to do, instead of thinking, this is failing my program, or worse, I'm failing my students, because we often internalize all of this, right? Maybe what we should be thinking is, what contributions have I made today? What contributions have I made to the well-being of my students? What contributions have I made to the betterment of my campus? And we start looking for those micro moments of contribution. Now, is this going to change the game for you completely? No. I'll be honest, it's not. It's not going to change the way your administrator sees your program or how you get shoveled around. But it will help you identify where you're moving things, where you're having an impact, where what you're doing, even though it feels like it is completely wrong, is actually making a difference. Where have I contributed today? That is the single most important question you can ask yourself when you're in a difficult situation. And so I just want to encourage you to try these. If you're in this season of hardship in school counseling, when you're in this season of, I don't know if I want to keep doing this, I don't know if I can make it through the year. This is hard. This isn't what they told me it was going to be. Or why is my administrator such a stark, raving maniac right now? Right? Because we all have those times. Go back to these three key elements: consultation, a unique proposal for change, and identifying where you're contributing whether than where you're passing or failing. I sincerely hope these are going to help you make it through the next few months as we crawl our way toward the holiday breaks.

Three-Part Reset And Invitation

And in the meantime, I want to remind you that if you're seeking a community that can walk alongside you with this, that can provide you the resources and the fluency and the expertise to be able to challenge this, or if you just don't want to have to do it by yourself, the School for School Counselors Mastermind is always open, and we're in there waiting for you to come join us. You can find out more information in the episode description. In the meantime, y'all keep your chin up. You are doing great work, whether it feels like it or not. I promise you, you are making a difference. And at the end of the day, my friends, that's what it's all about. Take care.