Why You Need Sanity-Based School Counseling

August Dread And A New Lens

It's August, and if you're anything like the school counselors I talk with every week, there is a very familiar feeling that's probably settling in. Maybe it showed up when you were scrolling all the back to school posts. Maybe it sort of trickled in while you were reading all those emails about meetings and professional development days. Or maybe it's just been that niggle in the back of your brain saying, well, here we go again. Because last year was hard. And if you're honest with yourself, the year before that was hard too. And every August, you do the same thing. You tell yourself, this year I'll be more organized. I'll set better boundaries. I'll start the year stronger. And I love that about you. Truly, I do. That instinct to show up and try again and continue serving students on campus, that's amazing. But the problem is that you keep trying to solve something with effort that was never an effort problem to begin with. What if this year could actually feel different? And not because you tried any harder, not because you implemented any new programs or better systems. What if there's a secret to doing this work that nobody ever told you? And what if once you hear it, you will forever be changed? That is what we're getting into today. Hey, school counselor, welcome back. Today I want to show you three places where your professional training collides with the reality of your school. And I want to give you a better way to decide what actually deserves your time and energy. Because here's what I know: you are not short on effort. You are not short on heart. What you may be short on is a way of working that fits your actual campus, your actual caseload, and the real-world conditions you're facing on the daily. 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. So here's what I know about you because I've lived this and I've talked to hundreds of school counselors who are living it right now. You went into this profession because you care about kids deeply. You believed that if you could just get in front of students, build those relationships, and do the counseling work you were trained to do, you could make a real difference. And then you got to your campus. And what you found was a job that barely resembled what you were trained for. One of our mastermind members recently put it this way. She said, it's been a challenge because I thought I was a really good school counselor. And then I got to this school and I was like, oh my gosh, it doesn't look anything like what I've ever done before. And so I couldn't look at it as a challenge. I was looking at it as a problem. Like, I just need to get out of here. Have you ever felt that? Have you ever felt that gap between who you know you are and what the job is actually asking you to do? You're probably not imagining it. In a national study of more than a thousand school counselors, Emily Goodman Scott found that discrepancies between graduate preparation and actual job activities still existed. In other words, plenty of school counselors have walked onto a campus and discovered that the work did not line up as neatly with what they had been prepared to expect as they were told it would. You find yourself managing schedules, coordinating testing, sitting

When Training Collides With Reality

in meetings that have nothing to do with student well-being, and fielding requests and demands from every direction, all while being told that you should also be running a comprehensive program, collecting data, doing classroom lessons, facilitating small groups, and somehow hanging on to your own mental health. And this is the part that makes me a little angry. It might make you angry too. The latest national school counselor to student ratio is 1 to 372. We know ASCA recommends 1 to 250. So that national average is still about 49% above the recommendation. Meanwhile, the CDC found that nearly 40% of high school students experience persistent sadness or hopelessness as of 2023. The need remains enormous, and the national caseload average remains far above the recommended level. So you do what good school counselors do. You work harder, you stay later, you bring work home, you read the books, you go to the conferences, you buy the TPT resources, you try the cute bulletin boards and the calming corner kits and all the latest social emotional curriculums. And none of it makes that feeling go away. The Sunday night dread, the feeling in the back of your mind that I will never get to all of this. That guilt when you walk out the door at the end of the day, because there's always someone you couldn't get to. And you're not alone in that. The things that you've been thinking and feeling about your work are not symptoms of a personal failing. They are speaking to a profession-wide pattern. And that distinction, when you can distinguish between a you problem and a system problem, changes everything. I know because I lived inside that distinction for years before I could finally put words to it. And some of you have heard me tell this story on the podcast before, but I was on a very high needs elementary school campus where I could not get through a single classroom lesson without my walkie going off. Every time. Halfway through the lesson, I was mumbling an apology and racing down the hall. And when I finally went to my administrator for help, they looked at me and they said, You know what I think the problem is? I think the kids just like you too much. Y'all. Those situations, those kinds of responses meant that I spent years thinking that I was the variable, that I just needed a better system, better time management, better boundaries, better triage. It took me a long time to realize that what I was trying to build on that campus didn't match what they actually needed. I was trying to run a very structured model and a building that ran on adrenaline, and nobody had ever told me that there was another way to think about this. That's why I started investigating. I have spent years studying why school counselors burn out, disengage, and leave the profession because I believe in the power of good school counselors so deeply. I am invested in reducing how many of my amazing colleagues leave the profession and leave their campuses to absorb and adjust to the fallout of yet another new incoming counselor. Our kids need stability. They need you. So it's important to me to understand what's truly happening in our field. And I'm not interested in the surface-level explanations that you get almost everywhere else. Self-care and boundaries and the worst one, advocacy. I want to understand the actual structural, systemic, evidence-based conditions that either help or hurt school counseling. And what I found confirmed through the research is this there is a gap between what you were prepared for and what your campus actually demands of you. Now you may be sitting there thinking, of course, Steph, I knew that. I feel it every day. But y'all, this is also in the literature. And this gap between your preparation and the real world is not small. It is more like a canyon. You were given a professional identity, a set of standards, and a vision for your work, but nobody gave you the things you need to make any of it sustainable inside the building that you walk into every morning. There's a concept in organizational psychology called the job demands resources model. You may have heard me mention this before. Bardoshi and OOM used that model in a 2021 nationwide study of nearly a thousand school counselors. They found that caseload and perceived organizational support statistically predicted burnout. That does not mean that every school counselor with a large caseload will burn out, but it does show that burnout is tied to working conditions, not just your own personal resilience. And there's something that makes school counseling different from other high-demand jobs. It's not just about the volume of expectation and response. It's the ambiguity. We have significant role ambiguity and role conflict that come from unclear job descriptions, overlap with other similar professions on our campuses, supervision by administrators who do not understand counseling, and a tension between a school counselor identity and an educator identity. And there are so many places where what we were taught fails to measure up against the day-to-day realities of working on our schools.

Three Professional Gaps That Hurt

So I'm going to show you three of those. Because once you can begin to recognize them, you can start making very different, more strategic decisions. Problem one, our profession often talks about success through the scope of our reach. How many students you see, how many lessons you deliver, how many groups you run. But nobody ever taught you how to evaluate whether the format you're using is actually the right vehicle for the outcome you're after. Certain delivery formats have become standard practice in school counseling, and we all just keep using them without ever stepping back to ask whether the evidence supports them in the way we assume it does. Problem two, think about how advocacy gets talked about in this profession. It's almost always framed as fighting for your role, pushing back, correcting misconceptions, educating stakeholders. And those things can have their time and place. But depending on the culture of your campus, that pushback can quickly get translated into difficult or unprofessional or not a team player. There is a dimension of professional influence I don't think we talk about nearly enough in the school counseling world, that has nothing to do with what you say and everything to do with how you're positioned on your campus. Meaning how your role is understood by your administrators, how your expertise is perceived in big decisions, and whether stakeholders see you as a strategic partner or a support service. Many school counselors tell me they were never taught to think about that. And it's costing them dearly in autonomy, in respect, and in access to the very students they are trying to serve. Problem three, this is the one that kind of hurts the most. Many of the expectations that we internalize about ourselves, our programs, and what's possible in our schools assume ideal conditions. I don't know if you've noticed that you don't work in ideal conditions. Nobody does. But when your daily reality doesn't match those perfect world expectations, you don't question the expectations, do you? You question yourself. And this is where I believe school counselor preparation leaves a huge gap. It teaches professional ideals, but not always how to adapt those ideals to the real world constraints that you actually have. You try harder, you add more, you feel worse, you blame yourself, you try harder again, and around and around we go. That's the cycle, right? And it is relentless. My friend, it's not a motivation problem and it's not a skill problem. It's an operating system problem. You have the training, you have the heart, but what you've been missing is the layer that makes all of it sustainable inside the building you actually walk into every day. Now, here's where most people start giving the whole speech about self-care because they don't know any other way to advise you in these tough situations. Take bubble baths, set boundaries, learn to say no, even advocate. And you and I both know that a conversation like that at this point would be insulting because you've heard it, you've tried it, and it didn't work. You cannot self-care your way out of a structurally misaligned role. It's like putting a band-aid on a broken arm and wondering why it still hurts. And the research also points in that direction. A 2025 review of health worker burnout found that individually focused resilience interventions, like self-care initiatives, only produce small benefits, and they argued that working conditions need attention too. Our world of school counseling research is beginning to describe a related pattern. There was a small 2025 study of 13 school counselors who had left or were preparing to leave the profession. Turner, Gossett, and Faye identified exhaustion from job demands, lack of administrative support, and systemic challenges as factors in their decisions. Their interviews also suggested advocacy burnout and loss of hope as additional contributors. For some of the counselors in that study, repeated advocacy without meaningful change gradually became a loss of hope. And that is not laziness or ineptitude, y'all. That is an understandable response to conditions that felt increasingly impossible to change. So, what grew out of my research was not another set of tips or another curriculum or another motivational poster. It is the operating layer that, in my opinion, should have existed all along. It's a way of school counseling that starts by getting honest about what you can actually accomplish in a school day and then focusing your energy where it actually makes a difference. A way that takes what you know about counseling practice and gives it a structure designed for the limitations of the school day. A way that teaches you to think about your professional presence on a campus the way a strategist thinks about influence. In other words, how to be deliberate and intentional. I call this sanity-based school counseling. And I call it that for a reason. Because what it's designed to help you regain before anything else

Sanity-Based School Counseling Explained

is your sanity. And I mean that literally in a I can breathe again kind of way. Sanity-based school counseling is bigger than any single tool or a set of questions. It's a way of thinking about and making decisions within your role. It happens when you try a different approach, you see what happens, and you have people to help you think through what comes next. And I want to tell you what I'm watching happen in the School for School Counselors Mastermind because it will show you what this looks like in practice. Remember when I said about professional positioning? One member reported that the language she gained through our collaboration helped her explain her work more clearly during her summative evaluation, so much so that her principal raised her rating in her evaluation on the spot. Y'all, her work did not suddenly become more valuable in that five minutes, but she had become better equipped to make the value of that work visible. That's a part of operating differently. This isn't about adding more programs or more interventions or assuming more responsibilities. Sometimes getting in front of your school counseling work is about understanding your work well enough to communicate its value to the people who make decisions about what you do all day. I am watching that kind of shift across our entire community. Members have told me that even when their caseload or some other circumstances hadn't changed, they started getting fewer of those random requests automatically routed to them. Others say they're doing more meaningful work without pouring so much energy into formats that weren't producing what students needed. One of our members said something recently that I have been thinking about a lot. She said that when she joined the mastermind, she was burned out. Seriously burned out were her words. And she said she was thinking she might be at the end of her school counseling career, that maybe she just needed to move on from school counseling altogether. And then she joined us and she started hearing a different way of thinking about our work, looking at it through a lens that accounted for what her actual days really looked like. A way that gave her the latitude to do meaningful work sustainably inside of the real constraints and expectations on her campus. And she said it felt like being given permission to breathe again. And then she said this, and I want you to hear it the way she said it to me. I wish I knew this way earlier in my career. I wasn't crazy all these years. Y'all, I wasn't crazy all these years. Have you ever thought that? Have you ever felt like you're crazy trying to achieve something that's impossible? But our members are showing that once you stop treating yourself as the problem, you can finally start truly evaluating the work itself. Sanity-based school counseling is more than three questions, but these are going to be a really meaningful way to get started. So before you add another program, agree

Three Questions To Guide Decisions

to another responsibility, or decide that you were somehow already behind at the top of the school year, I want you to pause and ask yourself three questions in three different categories: outcome, vehicle, and conditions. For outcome, what am I actually trying to create? Not what activity am I supposed to run? Not what does the model say should be on my calendar? What needs to be different for students or staff or this campus because of my involvement? Secondly, vehicle. Is the way that I'm trying to create that outcome actually the best fit here? Or is it simply the format school counselors are usually told to use? Because the lesson, the group, the initiative, the committee, the school-wide program, that is not the outcome. It is just one of the possible vehicles. And some vehicles cost far more time and energy than the outcome justifies. So, to say this in another way, once you look at the vehicle, you stop automatically reaching for a classroom lesson just because a classroom lesson is what school counselors usually do. Third, conditions. What do the conditions on my campus genuinely support without requiring me to become the missing resource? This question is a big one because there is a difference between stretching professionally and building an entire program around resources, time, authority, or cooperation that you do not have. The school counselor should provide the tool, not always be the tool. Now, those three questions are not going to fix your entire school counseling program by tomorrow, right? But they will help you stop making every decision from guilt or from habit or from an imaginary version of what a good school counselor is supposed to be able to accomplish. You have to be able to accurately evaluate your own performance while accounting for the conditions in which you're being asked to perform. You gotta know where you stand to know where you can go. And that is where sanity-based school counseling begins. Not by lowering your standards, but by making sure that your standards are attached to reality. Y'all, school counselors deserve more than survival strategies. You deserve a way of working that actually works. So

Mastermind Invite And Final Sendoff

if you are ready to do more than just recognize these patterns, if you want help changing how you operate inside the actual reality of your campus, that is the work that we do in the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Every week with school counselors working through the actual decisions and constraints that they're facing on their campuses. It is August, but this time you don't have to walk back into that building hoping that the year will somehow feel different. You can walk in knowing that you do not have to approach the work the same way that you always have. You can make different decisions about what your campus needs, what your conditions actually support, and what deserves your energy. So come find us. The link is in the show notes. I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, take care.