The Self-Care Myth: Setting the Record Straight for School Counselors

You know that self-care is not about transforming you into an eternally cheerful person and erasing all life's challenges.

It's high time we dismantle unrealistic expectations around self-care. In this episode's candid discussion, we delve into why self-care may sometimes feel like a burden rather than a blessing, particularly in our demanding profession.

We also explore our own love-hate relationship with self-care and share personal insights on what truly works for us as school counselors within the context or micro- and macro-self care, molding our self-care strategies to our own personal circumstances and life stages.

Buckle up for an honest, insightful dialogue on self-care, its realities, and its undeniable importance in our lives as school counselors.


Mentioned in this episode:

School for School Counselors Mastermind 

No-Stress Self-Care Challenge


Resource:
Jennings, P. A., Brown, J. L., Frank, J. L., Doyle, S., Oh, Y., Davis, R., Rasheed, D., DeWeese, A., DeMauro, A. A., Cham, H., & Greenberg, M. T. (2017, February 13). Impacts of the CARE for Teachers Program on Teachers’ Social and Emotional Competence and Classroom Interactions. Journal of Educational Psychology. Advance online publication.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000187
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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hey, hey, school counselor, welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm glad to be back with you. We took a little week hiatus. It was a perfect storm of travel, illness and technology snafus that just kind of combined to make me say, hey, you know what? I just got to wait and do it next week. Have you ever had those weeks? Nothing quite goes the way you had planned. Everything is just kind of off and bouncing around crazily and you just need a second to catch your breath and get re-centered, and so that's what we did this past week.

Speaker 1: 0:42

It's funny because the topic of the podcast all along was about self-care and you know, normally when we hear folks tell us about self-care in school counseling in particular, we have one of two reactions Either our eyes get big and we get super excited to talk about all the things we know we can do to help ourselves through the day and really take great care of ourselves, or our eyes narrow. We immediately become suspicious, maybe a little persnickety, because we've heard these conversations before when folks just turn up and say you need to be taking good care of yourself and you need to make sure you schedule some me time and all of this baloney. We know that doesn't always work, and it's funny because in our line of work you would think that we would have a better relationship with those self-care conversations but by and large we don't. I think there are some reasons for that. I'm going to get into those as we visit today. But what I really want to talk about primarily is why we love the idea of self-care, why we hate the idea of self-care and actually what really works. We are told time and time again, over and over, that we need to practice good self-care in an industry that is notorious for dysfunctional work environments, for tyrannical administrators and for repeated and repetitive boundary violations. But then we get preached to. We get preached to about maintaining good self-care and it begins to become so stinking ironic that it's almost funny. And I want to talk through all the ins and outs of that self-care debate why we're so resistant to the conversation, why we feel like, why even bother? Why are we even talking about this? And then what really truly works in the realm of self-care for school counselors.

Speaker 1: 2:53

Normally I'd stop here and read a new review for the podcast, but guys, we've run plum out. I can't believe it. So I'm looking for some new reviews for the podcast. If you've been a listener and you've enjoyed what we've been putting out in the world, please do us a solid go to Apple Podcasts, give us a review, give us your thoughts and your feedback on the podcast. We would be so, so grateful for it, especially since we just hit a huge milestone We've reached 100,000 downloads of the School for School Counselors podcast. I cannot believe it. It is surreal to think that we have reached that many years over just a couple of short years. And as we're looking at our stats, guys, we're finding out we are officially the number one school counseling podcast on the planet, thanks to you, and one of the things that you've been doing to really drive all of this growth and excitement is leaving those reviews. So thanks in advance. It really does mean the world to us.

Speaker 1: 4:00

Alright, so back to the self-care conversation. I think there are some problems with this conversation, as we usually have it. One thing is that we get these one-size-fits-all suggestions Right. We get some things we should do. We get told to do things like take a walk in nature or schedule some me time, go get a pedicure, those kinds of things and a lot of time. Those lists contain indulgences. It's pampering. It's things that cost money or things that involve more time than maybe you have available.

Speaker 1: 4:39

And I don't know about you, but sometimes, as we have these conversations, I begin to feel like these self-care initiatives are actually just becoming more things to do on my to-do list, but it actually ends up stressing me out even more. Have you been there? Do you know what I'm talking about? I don't want to have to add another thing to my day. I don't want anything else to have to try to remember, to do. Goodness knows, I have enough to remember moment to moment. I don't need any extra piling on top of that, just sort of looming over me like a cloud over my head everywhere I go.

Speaker 1: 5:20

And a lot of times these conversations also make me a little angry, if I'm being honest, because it feels so dismissive. It feels dismissive of the realities of our work, of just the general experience of being a working person in the world and no offense to the guys, but being a working woman in the world give some significant and specific challenges for us. I also don't like the idea that once you engage in good self-care, everything is just magically wonderful. It's a bill of goods. For sure, self-care is not going to erase all of the hard things about life. It's not going to magically make everything more tolerable. You're not going to be instantaneously happy and optimistic and the birds aren't going to sing every morning just because you've engaged in some of these indulgences. It's not realistic, but that's often the way people try to convince us to take good care of ourselves. So, while it's well-intentioned, I'm afraid it's pretty misguided. And so you know me, I don't do cliche, I don't tolerate it well. So these conversations really start grating on my nerves. When folks try to convince us that once we engage in good self-care, everything is sunshine and roses.

Speaker 1: 6:47

It takes me back to the days when I used to run marathons. I've mentioned this a time or two in the past, but I used to be on a running team that would run marathons for charity, and when I signed up to do this, I was just telling my masterminders this afternoon I could not run around the block. It was the craziest thing. I just got inspired to sign up and try it and my husband said what are you thinking? You can't even run around the block. And of course he encouraged me and he said he believed that I could do it if I wanted to do it. But what in the world inspired you to take this step? And I said I don't know, I just want to see if I can do it. I've kind of been that way my whole life. I just wanna see if I can do things that other people can't do.

Speaker 1: 7:31

And so what I learned as I got into that world in training for marathons was that the process involves extraordinary amounts of self-care, because without it you're never, ever gonna cross the finish line. Your whole world becomes a series of self-care, planning and implementation so that you're eating the right way, you're sleeping enough, you're wearing the right clothing, you're getting enough of different other kinds of exercise to supplement your running training, you're on the right training schedules. All of these things start to go together to create a successful marathon date. And y'all, when you're set to run 26.2 miles, you need all the help you can get. So I got really good at planning self-care and really implementing it to take good care of myself.

Speaker 1: 8:24

But with all that being said and with all the great measures I implemented, I also never expected it to make me a sub four hour marathoner. So in the marathon world, a sub four hour marathon is like the holy grail, that's like the most magical of the magical races that you could run. I'm gonna be honest with you guys I was one of the slowest marathon runners you'd ever hoped to see in your life At one race true story they actually started taking the finish line down before we got to the end of the race and my husband was showing up to cheer us across the line and he had to make them put the finish line back up for us. We were not fast runners, but I enjoyed the races immensely. We had some great team stuff going on in the backs of those races and they were experiences I will never forget.

Speaker 1: 9:23

But I wasn't an elite athlete. I wasn't built to be that way and no matter how much self care I implemented, no matter how well I ate, no matter how hard I trained, I don't know that I ever would have gotten to a level like that. But that's so often the kind of idea we're given about our own self care measures that if we just do the right things, if we do them enough, if we do them consistently, we're going to metamorphosize into this brand new being that has everything going their way. And in our heart of hearts, we know that's not the way life works, and so I think that's why we kind of get persnickety about the conversation before it ever really gets started, because we have these little grains of cynicism already built in. Maybe we're thinking of the times that we tried to take better care of ourselves but we felt like we didn't have the resources or the time or the support to do it and we just ended up walking away. We just kind of threw our hands in the air, said the hell with it and I'll just keep pushing on like I've always been doing. Have you been there? Do you know what I'm talking about?

Speaker 1: 10:36

As I'm talking through this, I think it's pretty pervasive, not only in the school counseling world, but in the education world and even kind of in our culture at large. There are a lot of these misconceptions. There are a lot of platitudes that get thrown at us about the idea of self-care, and as we come into November and December, I think this is one of the longest, most difficult stretches of the school year. The new has worn off. Students are settling in, we're starting to see their true colors, administrators and coworkers are really starting to show their stressors and their triggers, and often this time of year our work gets very intense. We have a long stretch of school ahead of us until the end of the semester. We have the holidays to look forward to, but for the most part there's extra stuff that goes along with those, and so it's really hard to keep sight of getting to the end of the semester.

Speaker 1: 11:35

And I don't know Hopefully you're not with me on this, but I think most school counselors are November and December feel really heavy. Maybe the change in the seasons has something to do with that too. You know the time change it's getting darker earlier, it's getting colder, and so we always try to talk about self-care in our school for school counselors world in a little bit different way than everybody else. No surprise there, right? If you've been in our world for any amount of time, you know we typically don't hold these conversations like everyone else, and self-care is going to be no exception. As a matter of fact, we have an event kicking off right now that you can take part in on your own time and in your own way. So keep listening, because I'm going to give you all the details about how to get involved in that. It's completely free of charge. You're going to want to be a part of this.

Speaker 1: 12:31

But in this event we're going to be breaking down self-care, and one of the things we talk about is the idea of micro self-care versus macro self-care. So let me kind of just give you the quick outline of what each of those entails and, as you hear it, you'll go oh yeah, I think I did know that. But think critically, like, how often have you truly heard a conversation about this and all these self-care pitches that you've heard everywhere else? Micro self-care is the type of self-care that you probably usually hear about. These are your smaller daily activities that can be easily integrated into your day Things like mindfulness, things like taking a break, holding good boundaries which I think a lot of people misinterpret and we're going to have a podcast episode coming up about that one very soon. Other ideas staying hydrated, getting enough sleep, engaging in hobbies that you enjoy, giving work at work. Those kinds of things are micro self-care activities and those are the ones that we're typically presented with when we're having self-care conversations.

Speaker 1: 13:44

But there's a flip side to self-care, and that's macro self-care. Macro self-care involves larger, more comprehensive practices that address your overall feeling of well-being. They're typically things that require more time, more resources and probably more planning because they're aimed at the bigger picture. Macro self-care is your 10,000-foot view of self-care. Things like managing your stress effectively, attending to your overall health or your overall well-being, taking vacations, making sure that you're planning to eat well, making sure you're exercising, making sure you're going to therapy from time to time. Those are examples of macro self-care, and the micro activities can certainly fit into the macro frameworks. But if we're just doing micro activities with no rhyme or reason to them, or it is doing them because somebody told us to, of course they're not going to feel meaningful to us. They're not going to feel as relevant in our current circumstances, and that's when we really start to resent people talking to us about taking care of ourselves.

Speaker 1: 15:07

Both of these components micro self-care and macro self-care are really important. They have to be things that you're actually going to do or things that you actually can do right. The micro is going to address the daily stressors. They're going to help you maintain balance, and then the macro aspects are going to push you toward the bigger, longer-term effects that you're really seeking. These categories of self-care can also be adapted. It doesn't have to be 50% in micro and 50% in macro. All the time.

Speaker 1: 15:47

We know, as school counselors that life ebbs and flows. Our workloads intensify and back off from time to time. Things get busy, then they let up, life gets difficult and then it gets a little bit easier. So you can adapt your self-care efforts according to your season. If you're super busy and you don't have time for one other thing, you don't have time to think about anything else. You're probably going to be focusing on more micro self-care, the things that you can easily implement day to day, moment to moment, whereas if you have a little bit more time and more resources available, you might be looking toward macro efforts to support you and sustain you in some bigger goals. You'll have the plan to think through the future, to those to plan them out, to be intentional about implementing them.

Speaker 1: 16:42

I think, personally, that's why we feel so frustrated with the self-care talk in general, because, as school counselors, as people who work in the education field, and as partners, caregivers, we feel perpetually busy and overwhelmed, don't we? We feel like we never have a second to breathe. We're always running from one thing to the next. We're putting out one fire at school and then going home to put out another, and it just starts feeling like craziness. And so when folks start talking to us about well, make sure you're engaging in some good self-care activities. It feels like we're just slapping this band-aid on these bigger systemic problems. We get frustrated about being misutilized on our campus, not feeling like our voice is heard, not being invited into big decisions on campus. Sometimes we're over-scheduled, we don't have enough time to build our programs the way we want to. We don't have enough flexibility in our day. We're not being viewed as an authority on campus. All those things are so stinking, draining, and then add to that all of your personal stressors and self-care starts to make a lot of people feel like we're just slapping this band-aid on the situation.

Speaker 1: 18:00

The interesting thing is that there's some studies on this. You know I'm always going to go to the research. There are lots of articles out there with teachers and educators talking about how they don't want to hear more about self-care. They don't want to be sitting in meetings having their administrators tell them that they should be using better self-care measures, and the participants say things like you know, if they really cared about self-care then they wouldn't make me sit in this meeting. They would let me go home. They would give me more planning time. They would give me the things I knew to do my job right. All those things. I bet you've probably heard that at your school, haven't you? You've probably even thought it or said it yourself, because I know I have. I know that I was teaching in particular.

Speaker 1: 18:47

I said those kinds of things a lot, but, as I said, there are several studies that have looked at this and it's really interesting. One that was conducted by a team consisting of Jennings Brown, frank Doyle, davis, rashid Demoro, greenberg man that's a whole bunch of folks. In 2017, they implemented a self-care plan for teachers working in high-poverty elementary schools in New York City, and it focused on teachers' own emotional regulation and mindfulness, really working just to try to get them in touch with their emotions, how they saw the world, how they could self-regulate. They worked with these teachers all year. It was about nine months. At the end of that, the research showed statistically significant improvements in reduced psychological distress, fewer aches and pains and an improved ability to stay calm In the intensity of that high poverty, high needs campus they were able to show and this study is not the only one whereas we feel like I don't really know how much self-care works, I know how important it is that I don't really feel like it's super important.

Speaker 1: 20:15

There's so many more bigger fish to fry. My school isn't following the ASCA model. My principal is scheduling me in rotations. Everything is terrible. Nothing's going to get better until all that stuff gets fixed. These kinds of studies are showing that indeed, it would be nice if those things got fixed, but in the meantime, you really can take control and emphasize your own well-being, promote your own self-care. Even within a crazy, crazy work environment, it's possible and I would say preferred to be able to do these kinds of things.

Speaker 1: 20:55

The trick is going to be finding something that's going to actually work for us right, because no one's life is the same, no one's campus is the same, no one's situation is the same. We have to find something that really truly works for us, and we've got to develop a self-care plan that keeps the micro and the macro efforts in balance, because when we have too much micro self-care, we end up potentially compromising our own boundaries. We're not taking good care of our overall mental health or our physical health, but on the flip side of that, if we're focusing too much on the macro self-care, we feel more stressed moment to moment, and so we've got to have a great plan that's really balanced and that includes things that are actually realistic for us personally in our own real-life situations. That's so important. I think it's really hard to read a list and pick out one or two things and say, oh, those look great. And implement them without fail and then feel amazingly fantastic. If that were true, I think the self-care conversation would be much different everywhere we're having it.

Speaker 1: 22:11

The good news is that we have a self-care challenge that is open right now. It's called the no Stress School Counselor Self-Care Challenge. Play that five times fast and it is a self-guided, self-paced event, because we really did endeavor to make this truly no stress. We didn't want you to have any meetings to have to remember to attend. We didn't want you having to go find anything or buy anything. We wanted to make this truly our best effort at self-care outreach that's realistic and attainable, so that you can feel more balanced, more composed and more effective as we get into all of this holiday hustle and bustle, both on campus and in our own homes.

Speaker 1: 22:59

The self-care challenge is going to walk you through step by step in helping you identify what kinds of self-care don't work for you. What do you not want to do? What makes you angry when people suggest them to you. And then it's going to help you find your effective micro and macro self-care initiatives. It's going to educate you about something that we've developed called the cycle of role dysfunction in school counseling and how that plays into your self-care plan, and at the end of the whole thing, you will have developed a completely customized, personalized self-care plan that you can realistically implement to help you feel more in control, more centered, more grounded and more able to attend to the things that you need to. All of this comes your way in the version of a daily email, and inside those emails you have the opportunity to click on some links to get some videos and printables that go along with it, but you don't have to. The email can guide you where you need to go on its own, because, again, we designed this to be as low stress as humanly possible.

Speaker 1: 24:17

Y'all, we just want to support and empower you this time of year. I know it's hard. I'm a full-time school counselor, just like you, and I get it. November and December are tough, and these things that you see in the self-care challenge are the things that not only I do for myself this time of year, but these are evidence-based practices. These have the full weight of research behind them, and so you know it's not just some fluff I came up with while I was sitting in the Dunkin' Donuts line one day. This is truly going to be helpful to you and your quest to be the healthiest and most effective school counselor that you can possibly be. If you want more information on the self-care challenge or you want to get signed up because, again, it's no cost y'all absolutely nothing to get into this Head on over to our website, schoolforschoolcounselorscom.

Speaker 1: 25:11

Slash self-care All one word, no hyphens, anything like that. Once you get there, it'll take you less than 10 seconds to get the self-care party started, and then I'll be excited to hear from you later on about maybe, some of the self-care discoveries you make about yourself. Maybe some of the things you've been chasing that now you realize aren't even effective for you. Or maybe some things that you've always tried because people told you you should do it, but now you realize that you hate that stuff and you don't want to do it anymore. Maybe you want to do something completely different. This challenge is going to guide you to discover what all of those things are, and then you can come and inspire us in the School for School Counselors Facebook group so that everybody can hopefully get revitalized and get really excited to re-engage in self-care. So I think this is going to be a really really cool community activity for all of us to take part in, as well as a really awesome personal development journey. I can't wait to see what you come up with.

Speaker 1: 26:19

Schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash self-care. All right, I hope that episode got you thinking about your own self-care pursuits. I hope that got you thinking about how effective they are for you, or maybe a category you might be missing in your current plan, and you know what. That's okay. It's absolutely okay. We're going to get you all lined out and ready to go for the beginning of 2024. All right, I'm going to go engage in some self-care of my own right now, but I will be back here again soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. So keep listening and, until we talk again, go sign up for the self-care challenge and I hope you have the best week. Take care.