From Ordinary to Awesome: Exploring the Habits of Amazing School Counselors

Can you imagine waking up to a world where every school counselor felt empowered through eight collective habits? We're exploring two of those important habits in this episode (and tell you how to access the others!) to not only give you a boost of confidence and inspiration, but to also give you a taste of our live events where we get real about the trials, tribulations, and triumphs in school counseling.

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Mentioned in this episode:
School for School Counselors Mastermind 
Eight Habits of Amazing School Counselors (register to grab the replay links)

hello@schoolforschoolcounselors.com

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Our goal at School for School Counselors is to help school counselors stay on fire, make huge impacts for students, and catalyze change for our roles through grassroots advocacy and collaboration. Listen to get to know more about us and our mission, feel empowered and inspired, and set yourself up for success in the wonderful world of school counseling.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hey there, school counselor, welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast. You can probably tell it's a little bit different sounding this week than normal. That's because I am recording in a hotel room. I am in the big metropolis of Frisco, texas. I'm here for the Lone Star State School Counseling Association conference say that five times fast. And so I'm recording the introduction to this podcast in my hotel room and there's only so much a pair of AirPods can do. Right, bear with me.

Speaker 1: 0:43

But I did want to bring you a recap from an event that we had just recently called Eight Habits of Amazing School Counselors. We had a phenomenal turnout for this event. It's one that we do annually and we always have so much fun and everybody just comes away with rave reviews. So we wanted to bring you some highlights from the very first night of Eight Habits. Bring you habits one and two. I want you to not only hear the habits, because they may inspire you, they may affirm your position on your campus a little bit or give you some inspiration, but also because I want you to know what our live events in School for School Counselors are like. I don't want you to ever be afraid to join us in one of these. I want you to be excited when you hear about them because I'm telling you, when we're talking about collaborating together, we really mean it Tons of Q&A, lots of ideas and inspiration being shared and just an amazing time of collaboration and a fellowship. So, without further ado, I'm going to let you listen in on the first night of Eight Habits of Amazing School Counselors. I hope you love it. All right, there we go. All right, we're ready to cook with gas now.

Speaker 1: 2:09

Eight Habits of Amazing School Counselors is one of my most favorite things to walk through and we've done this in a lot of different formats. When it first started, it was a series that we did over four nights, if you can believe that. We did two habits each night and it was super fun. We had a lot of great in-depth discussions about the habits when we were doing that, but it was long and those were back in the COVID days. Those were back in the quarantine days and everybody's excited to be on Zoom, because it's not a thing yet days and that's just not what's going on anymore. So we started with four nights and then we switched over and then we did one night and that was way too much in one night. That didn't work well at all, and so now we're splitting the difference. We've got two nights planned for our eight habits that always know that I strive to over deliver in everything that we do here in School for School Counselors, so if we need to add some time, we might talk about it. If we need to. I always want to make sure we're serving you and serving you well.

Speaker 1: 3:21

School for School Counselors started around, like I said, in COVID May, june of 2020. It happened very organically. This was never intended to be what it is now. It was just a small gathering of people on the internet, but we were trying to figure out how to serve students online. We were also trying to figure out how to get school counselors hired, because there were lots of hiring freezes going on. No one really knew what was going to happen with schools the next year and it just felt like it was a really precarious situation.

Speaker 1: 3:57

So as we accumulated folks on the internet, we were talking and building and guiding each other and thought, man, maybe we should make this a thing, and so we formalized it a little bit and just started building piece by piece. Somebody would have an idea and we'd say, yeah, that's a great one. Let's do that, and we'd build it. And then someone else would say we should really do that. Okay, let's build it.

Speaker 1: 4:24

And now we've built an incredible ecosystem over the past few years. We have our School for School Counselors Facebook group, which no doubt you're a part of. We have our School for School Counselors Mastermind, which is a Mastermind membership. We meet probably what? Six, seven times a month in that thing. It's amazing. We have our School for School Counselors podcast. We have our Get the Job program. There's just all kinds of things going on and when I think back, I can't believe that we built all this in just a couple of years. It's crazy to think about, but I think it's because we're so real about what school counseling really is. We're not afraid to tell the truth, we're not afraid to walk with each other through the hard things, be accountable to each other and all the best things about collaborating. So, anyway, enough about that.

Speaker 1: 5:19

Eight habits of amazing school counselors. I want to walk you through what I think are the eight habits of extraordinary school counselors, and no doubt you're going to recognize many of these habits in yourself. They're either going to be things that you're already doing or they're going to be things that you aspire to do, that you know you need to do, and you just need a little push or a little bit of encouragement to know that it's the right thing. So let's get into habit number one. Habit number one is maintaining a realistic vision. I think this one is super important and, as I said earlier, it's something that we strive to talk about a lot in school.

Speaker 1: 6:06

For school counselors, I think, when we go to grad school even if we worked in schools for a long time, when I transitioned to school counseling, I thought, man, this is going to be a piece of cake. I had no idea. I had no idea what my school counselors had been doing, and you probably have folks on your campus that are the same way. Right, they think they understand your job, they think they know what you do all day. They have no clue what you do all day, and so when we get in our grad programs, we start all this counseling coursework. It's very heavily counseling oriented, and what I mean by that is it's those clinical counseling skills, right, it's how to sit down in a room with someone, different methods of getting information, of encouraging practicing your skills in a counseling room with someone. My program had us go in a room where we got recorded and we were like live broadcast into this viewing gallery and everybody was sitting in there and they were critiquing you in real time and you knew that was going on, but you were trying to keep your mind on the counseling session. It was crazy. I don't know if any of you guys had to do that. But all of those clinical counseling skills, all those very specific skill sets.

Speaker 1: 7:25

Then we get out into the school counseling world and all of a sudden it's not what they told us it was going to be. All of a sudden it's about scheduling, it's about paperwork, it's about running programs, it's about running committees, it's about all the here there running around all the time putting out fires, and a lot of people go through a period where they grieve the career that they thought they were stepping into, because what we're taught and what we do are so very different. Tell me in the chat if you've ever had that experience, if you remember getting started in school counseling and going. Wait a minute, this may not have been what I signed up for. I really don't know what I'm doing here right now. Seen some folks in the chat say, yeah, they understand, they've been there and I was there too.

Speaker 1: 8:21

I think too, we come in and we want to be go-getters. We're trained in ASCA models, we're trained in best practice, we know how to build a comprehensive school counseling program. We know, we're trained in fire to do it. Then we get on our campuses and realize we're probably not going to be allowed to develop the program that we want to. It always tickles me to see some of our brand new counselors say I get to build a program from the ground up, and I'm always excited for them, but I'm always wondering in the back of my mind are you really going to get to build that program the way you want to? I sure hope they do.

Speaker 1: 9:02

Sadly, I think the majority of school counselors do not. Where we learn, we're in charge of FIBLE floors, we're in charge of providing IEP counseling, we're in charge of leading student support teams, we're in charge of clothing, closets and all these other things that take up time, when what we really thought would be we're sitting neat and neat with students, helping them through realizing their potentials, finding their best selves right, and that's often not the case. We're told to advocate a lot for our roles and I'm going to tell you I don't think that's especially appropriate, which goes against the grain of what most other folks will tell you. I think there is room for advocacy, but we need to do it the right way. We'll talk about that later on in our habits.

Speaker 1: 9:55

But I think the most important part of all of this, of all this craziness of what we expected versus what's really happening, is that we have to maintain that realistic vision. We cannot get so caught up in the ideal program, in the I should be doings, in the what if we could do? This should be happening. Our kids need all of those things that we tell ourselves every day. It's good to dream. It's good to strive towards goals. It is not good to burn ourselves out because we're chasing this unrealistic vision. Does that make sense? So we've got to be super careful. We've got to make sure that we are building the right relationships on campus so that we can start moving the needle the right way.

Speaker 1: 10:49

We need to pace ourselves. We always tell our folks that, like our get the job program and our new school counselors, that they need to just sit back and watch and listen and observe, and that period of time needs to be at least two years, sometimes three, before you really start pushing toward any major changes. And again, that may go against every fiber in your being. Because we're go getters, we wouldn't be here if we weren't, because lackadaisical people don't go get master's degrees for school counseling. They just don't. It's not like we're making super mega bucks here, right, we do it for the love of the kids, we do it because we want to make a difference. So I know you're a go getter and when you're a go getter sometimes you have to really be mindful of pacing yourself. Keep that in mind, that realistic vision, making sure that you're keeping all your aspirations reined in. You've got a clear picture of, yes, where you want to go, but what are some incremental baby steps that you can take in order to get there. So, habit number one maintaining a realistic vision.

Speaker 1: 12:05

I'd love to stop for a minute and see if anybody has any thoughts on that or if you've ever found that was a struggle for you, particularly maybe when you were getting started. I find too. Sometimes it's a struggle for me at the beginning of the school year. Do you ever do that to yourselves, where you're like man? This year is going to be different. I'm going to add all this stuff in. I'm going to do all this crazy stuff. It's going to be amazing. And then reality hits you in the face when school starts and you go oh yeah, oh yeah. Now. I remember that. Now that's not that we were looking over calendars on my campus today. We were looking at November and December calendars, trying to fit all the things in, because we have tons of stuff going on, and I looked at my principal and said, oh yeah, I forgot November and December. I'm just basically coordinating donations in, donations out, and we were all laughing because that's certainly what it feels like.

Speaker 1: 13:01

All right, I see some comments in here. One of our commenters says it was a struggle and also happens with new admin coming in. That's a great point. That's a great point because once you get new administration, it can change the whole climate on your campus. It can change all of your policies and procedures on your campus. It can be a complete upheaval sometimes, and so you've got to be really grounded in that realistic vision for your school counseling. Absolutely, thank you for that. All right, so we've got habit number one. I'm going to move over now into habit number two. Before I do that, I just had one more chat comment pop up. It says looking at our standards, it almost seems as if we have classes all the time. It's difficult to prioritize lesson topics for me when I only have the kids 30 minutes every other week. I think that's a great point.

Speaker 1: 13:58

If you've listened to the podcast for any length of time, you will know I do not just blindly promote the Ask a National model. I think it has some great concepts in it. I think it has some great components in it. I'm wondering if the school counseling world is shifting a little bit away from some of the components written in that. The guidance lessons, the social emotional lessons, I think might be one aspect of that, that we're going to see a huge shift coming up. I don't have any evidence to support that, that's just my own opinion, but I'm pretty interested to see what's going to happen with that because I think we're going to see a huge shift. We cannot serve the levels of mental health needs that we're seeing on our campuses and continue to conduct these lessons at the same time. It's also giving our administrators a feeling of permission than to be able to put a lot of our school counselors into scheduled classes all day long, not understanding how they are tying everyone's hands behind their backs. School counselors can't do their work efficiently and effectively if they do not have control over their own time. It's really funny because a lot of our we as master degree school counselors have often as much education as our administrators do. It's funny. It's an interesting dynamic for sure.

Speaker 1: 15:40

In the chat I'm saying what do you mean by shift? I think that let me think about how to say this the best way Post-COVID mental health in schools is forcing our hand in a lot of ways, and what has always worked, what used to work or what was idealized as working, I think, is changing. We're seeing that a lot, we're talking through that a lot in our mastermind. We host weekly consultation and support chats there, and we're just seeing unprecedented needs from students in our schools. I think, too, that funding concerns are huge right now, political concerns in the education realm and with school counseling in particular. We're all changing the landscape, and so I think, in order for us to stay relevant in schools, to be able to keep our heads above water, to be able to function on campuses where we're carrying caseloads of six, seven, eight, sometimes 900 students, we're going to have to change the way that we're looking at the way we work. So that's what I mean by the shift. It's just a collective shift across our culture that's really going to affect us, our place in the schools and how we do our work. So I hope that helps.

Speaker 1: 17:11

Another commenter says yes to the struggle and then to find that either the district or principal has decided that a different direction is going to be taken. It's hard to modify the vision it is. I think we marry ourselves to these ideas or these visions that we have for our programs and what feels so defeating is that we often don't get a vote in that A lot of times we're told what's going to happen, we're told what we need to do, but we're not generally asked what should we do? Which direction should we be looking? If you're able to provide that kind of feedback, you have a dynamite administrator, so hold on to them because they're going to be doing some good stuff on your campus. Okay, so let's get to have it too. I'm feeling some sort of way about have it number two, but I'm going to tell you I'm still following it for myself. There's been some changes. Have it number two is collect the data. Now we know in our school counseling world. Right now, we're being beaten over the head with the idea of data driven school counseling, and there are some pros to that and there are some cons to that.

Speaker 1: 18:28

Right when I started collecting data in my school counseling program back when I got started, I started collecting data because I wanted to get a good read on what I was doing. It was a great way for me to give myself feedback about how I was managing my time, about where most of my time was going, where my biggest needs were coming from, and it helped me to project what was going to happen a week out or a month out or a year out. I could look and gauge where I was going to be at certain points in the year, and it was wonderful. It was wonderful. I trained myself to be able to log every single minute of my day without fail. I loved it. I thought it was the best thing ever. And it's fun because you can take that data, pop it up on a screen in professional development and hear the entire audience just go. I love you Because they have no idea what you do all day, and so when you start popping numbers up there hard, true facts about how many crisis calls you've attended to, how many suicide interventions you've had to do, how many individual counseling sessions, how many groups you've run all the different aspects of your job and you're able to put them up in black and white in very clear cut numbers.

Speaker 1: 19:54

Folks start to realize oh, they're not just hanging out in their office waiting for something to happen. Oh, okay, we work a lot behind what I call the veil of confidentiality, just meaning that most of what we do, most of what we talk about, doesn't get shared with anybody else on our campus. We're not walking around telling everybody stories for them. We're interested to those details and to those concerns that students have on campus. Walk into any teacher workroom and what's the topic of conversation? Girl, did you hear what they said to me? What did they say? Who's doing what? That kind of stuff, and a lot of the conversation centers on students. We can't be part of those conversations. Oftentimes I was. We don't have anything to share with them.

Speaker 1: 20:45

I think, because people don't see what we do, they don't hear about it, they're not there to witness it, that they automatically just jump to the conclusion that there's not much going on. If you are located in an area of your school, where you're not out and about, you're not super visible to your staff, then they're just automatically going to assume that must be the sweet life over there. That was actually what led me to become a school counselor. This is probably not a great story to tell you, but one of my determining factors for going into school counseling from teaching was it looked like it was a pretty sweet gig and I thought I'd probably be able to go to the bathroom more than once a day. Those are my criteria, folks. That was some heavy decision-making and luckily enough and I got into my program and realized I wasn't made for this. But my decision-making skills were not on point with that one. But because I had a misconception about what my school counselors were doing. I know that the folks that I work with probably have those same ideas.

Speaker 1: 21:51

We're keeping our data as guideposts for ourselves so we can gauge our efforts. We know what's giving us a return. We can see, if we're tracking campus numbers, what things are really changing. If we have a big attendance initiative, is it having the impact we want it to have? If we're doing test-taking strategies, if we're doing academic skills, if we're doing anti-bullying whatever it is we're doing we can watch those stats track across our campus and know if we're having the intended effect, which is really neat. If you're a data nerd like me, super motivating to see all these cool charts and graphs and all these things popping up in your day going yeah, that's pretty neat. We can take those charts and graphs and information and we can present them to our administrators. It's a great tool for advocacy. It's a great way to be able to call to their attention what we're doing all day. I like that staff presentation, just putting some hard numbers to what we're doing and using the language that school administrators speak In these days. That's the language of numbers. It's data. All of our schools are running on that right now, and so we need to be able to speak their language.

Speaker 1: 23:09

We can talk about social-emotional skills all day long. We can talk about friendship. We can talk about school counseling ethics. We can talk about confidentiality. We can talk about all the things in school counseling. Sometimes folks will smile and nod at us like they understand what we're talking about, but nine times out of 10, they really have no idea. They really just don't get it. They think that we talk about feelings most of the day. We help people feel better. Sometimes we give them some advice and we send them on their way. If only our jobs were that easy. How amazing would that be.

Speaker 1: 23:49

I think there is also a hidden benefit of collecting your data, and that is it is a great way to remind yourself to take a breath. Here's what I mean by that. As I said earlier, I know most of you are super go-getters. You are very driven. You are likely type A or inclined in that direction. You know how to make things happen. You know how to get things done. You have a tremendous amount of motivation. I know that about you because you are where you are today.

Speaker 1: 24:23

Sometimes, when we have those kinds of personalities or when we're super invested in student outcomes, those are what drive us in our work. They're what brought us to the field. It's really hard to pull our foot up off the gas pedal. We feel like we should be going all the time right. We should never stop. Add to that your staff not understanding what it is you do all day, and then usually we feel like we have to prove ourselves. We have to prove we're working hard, because no one thinks that we are. It's a crazy thought that I've had it a lot, so I know I can't be the only one, and so when we're looking at our data, when we're looking at all the things we've done in a day, all the things that are back to back to back, all the different ways in which we've been able to help students, all of the hard work we're doing, it's a great reminder that we need to stop and pause and take a breath and just again go back to that realistic vision for school counseling.

Speaker 1: 25:34

There are some days on campus that I am just on fire. I'm just running from point to point. I'm like a ping pong ball and I'm just going all over the place. There are other days that I need to take a slower pace, the days when really tough things are happening. The days when there are just so many things piling on top of each other it feels overwhelming. The days when your coworkers, your teachers or your staff come to you and they have a huge problem that's really weighing on their heart. It's good to be able to stop and pause, and for me, my data sometimes gives me the permission to do that when I'm really not feeling it, so I hope that makes sense. So make sure that we're collecting that data, campus-wide data and also our own use of time data. So you guys have got it One, maintaining a realistic vision. Two, collecting the data.

Speaker 1: 26:41

So I hope you enjoyed that recap of habits one and two of our eight habits of amazing school counselors. There was so much more conversation that went on during all of this and if you'd like to hear them, if you'd like to hear the replays, we were initially only going to offer those for 24 hours, but I think we're going to extend them through Halloween. So if you're listening to the podcast as it's being released, shoot me an email, hello at schoolforschoolcounselorscom. I'll be glad to send you the direct link to the replays and you'll be able to watch the whole thing and see what the other six habits are. So thanks for catching this episode.

Speaker 1: 27:21

I hope the audio quality didn't make you crazy. There were some blips and burps in there. Just thanks to Zoom, you know how that streaming stuff goes and then you know, of course, here are me recording in my hotel room, but the bottom line is we just want you to have what you need to serve students well, to inspire not only the people you serve on campus, but to gain some inspiration for yourself, and I hope this episode serves to do a little bit of that for you. I'll be back soon with another episode and in the meantime I hope you have the best week. Take care.