8 Magic Bullets for Making Your Spring Semester Easier & Less Stressful

Right now, people are busy talking about resolutions, goals, mindset, words of the year, etc., for the New Year.

In this episode, we're not going to get into any of that! Instead, we'll walk through a very specific step by step process for making sure that you have all of the little tedious things (and the little things that jump up and bite you in the rear later on in the school year) handled. Our New Year (re)Start will help you feel confident, prepared and less stressed for the rest of your school year.

Let's raise a toast to new beginnings, to working smarter, and to doing an awesome job at taking care of our own well-being as we work to support students and families.


Mentioned in this epsiode:
New Year (re)Start
School for School Counselors Planner- free
School for School Counselors Mastermind

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Transcript

Steph Johnson: 0:08

Hey there, school counselor, welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm Steph Johnson. I'm glad to be back here with you for another week of the podcast, but also the start of 2020. I'm super excited about it. A new year always feels like a brilliant, wonderful, fresh new start and I'm excited. I'm excited for the spring semester. I'm excited for what the rest of the school year holds in store for you and I can't wait to dive in to more awesomeness to help support you and empower you along the way. It's going to be a great year.

Steph Johnson: 0:46

You know, right now people are busy talking about resolutions, they're talking about mindset, they're talking about words of the year or all this kind of stuff. I'm not going to get into any of that in this podcast episode. I'm going to give you a very specific step-by-step process for making sure that you have all of the little tedious things, all the little things that jump up and bite you in the rear later on in the school year. We're going to make sure we have a plan for getting those all handled and that way you're going to feel confident, you're going to feel prepared and you're going to feel less stressed for the rest of your school year, and that's what I want for you. So keep listening. We're going to dive into all the steps of that as we go through this podcast episode, but first I want to give you a little bit of sad news. The sad news is we've run out of podcast reviews. You all know I love reading these on the podcast episodes not necessarily to toot our own horn, as much as it is to celebrate you and the time that you spend in submitting those and the information that you give about you and your place in your school counseling journey. It's just really, really great to hear from other people who were doing the same kind of work as I am, as our listeners are. It's just really super empowering. So if you have a minute, hop in your podcast platform of choice, give us a rating. If you're an Apple podcast, give us a review. Those were like gold, and you know I say that all the time. It's so, so important. We would be so, so grateful if you would take a few minutes and submit something like that for us. So thank you All right.

Steph Johnson: 2:37

So this week we want to hop into our plan for what we call our new year restart, and the reason we call it a restart is. We've already started a new year already. Once, back in August or September, we started our new school year right. We got all of our components into place. A lot of you attended our best year ever event, which is far and away Our biggest event we have all year long. It's so fun to get together and collaborate together. Over a week's time, we got all your pieces in place for your school year.

Steph Johnson: 3:14

So January is the restart. This is where we freshen things up. This is where we get our hands back into the things that really matter and, like I said, we're going to clean up a lot of the tea damn that gets in the way, all the little things that we forget about until they jump up and then we go oh man, gosh, I wish I would have thought about that before this. We're going to take care of all of that so that we can set the stage for an enjoyable and relaxed start to our semester. So anybody game for that, because I think that is going to be super, super important as we go through our year.

Steph Johnson: 3:54

So the first task in our new year restart. And, by the way, don't feel like you have to write all of these down. We have this email series you can sign up for easily to get all of these sent to your inbox. Day by day, step by step. Go to school for school counselorscom slash. Restart, r, e, s, t, a, r, t all one word, and we'll be glad to share these with you as you return back to your work and your role on campus, so that you don't miss a single thing.

Steph Johnson: 4:25

The first task, your day, one task for your restart, is to sit and think about the goals that you had for yourself back in August or September. And while this sounds really fluffy and silly and fero fero, there's a reason for it. The reason is often we have these great ideas, we have these great plans for our campus and we know about some things that our students really need, but somewhere along the way those things get lost in the shuffle. Right, we get bogged down in the minute to minute running from this thing to that thing, all of the walkie calls, all the phone calls, all of the parents, all the things happening all the time, and we lose sight of the bigger goal. It's almost like we can't see the forest for the trees. And then other times we've set goals that maybe might not be completely appropriate for our programs Like. They sounded great at the time. They were a great idea. They would be great for your students, certainly. But maybe now isn't the right time for those.

Steph Johnson: 5:38

And so, as we reflect on these goals that we set for ourselves back in August or September, it allows us to really kind of re-evaluate not only where we're headed but what our own expectations are for ourselves. We don't want to maintain these lofty, almost unreachable goals for ourselves because we're trying to shoot for this invisible, all-star counselor badge that everybody seems to be vying for. That should not be part of your equation in the spring. We need to be focusing on how can we do our best work and still remain happy, healthy human beings along the way. Right, we don't want to be burning ourselves out trying to pursue these crazy goals, but at the same time, if there's something that we really do want to do, it's really in our hearts to make happen. We want to remember that that thing was on our mind in the first place.

Steph Johnson: 6:40

So go, get yourself a cup of coffee, get a glass of sweet iced tea or whatever floats your boat, and sit down and just kind of think through, remember the beginning of the school year, think about the professional development you had at the beginning of the year, the time that you spent getting your office, your calendar ready, all your materials prepared. Think through all of that, really immerse yourself in that and reconnect with the goals that you set for yourself or for your program. Write them down somewhere and, as you remember those goals from the fall, reevaluate them. If you want to keep them, write them down. If you're going to get rid of them, get rid of them. If you want to modify them, then change them. But whatever you do, write down your goals for this spring semester. These do not have to be huge comprehensive school counseling program goals. These might be something that feel kind of silly to say. It might be.

Steph Johnson: 7:50

I'm going to make sure that I leave campus by four o'clock every day. Some of you may be 4.45 or five o'clock, right. Whatever it is. You might decide that you want to perform one random act of kindness on your campus each week. You might decide that you just want to make it to the end of the school year. Whatever it is, set those goals for yourself. Have a direction, set your compass so that you know where you're headed when the spring semester comes around.

Steph Johnson: 8:25

So that's step one in the restart. Step two in the restart is not as reflective as the first step. Step two is a little more tactical. We're going to get a little more pinpointed in this. We're going to review our calendars for 2024. I can't even believe I'm saying 2024. That's crazy to think we're there already. So review your calendar. Review the things that you have on it, things like the events that come from your district calendar, your testing dates. Even if you're not responsible for testing coordination, those are certainly going to impact your work, right when you're able to see kids or maybe when you're able to be in your office at all. So go ahead and make sure you've got those dates down.

Steph Johnson: 9:15

Lesson times If you're doing lessons, if those have already been determined, make sure they're in your calendar. Staff birthdays If you do anything, for those would be helpful to have your personal appointments or personal obligations Make sure you have those on your calendar. I can't tell you how many times I've had one of those jump up and I'm like, oh my gosh, that's in two days. I forgot to say anything. I try to be super intentional about that, but it slips my mind all the time. So I know it does yours too. Try to write those down as best as you can recollect, and then any awareness campaigns, any celebrations you want to observe I'm thinking about in the spring, things like random acts of kindness week, national School Counseling Week, those kinds of things Make sure you have them on your calendar. They're so easy to forget, and it's easy for things to sneak up on you, right, if you're not paying attention.

Steph Johnson: 10:12

The thing is, though, as you're putting these items on your calendar, remember that you cannot do it all, particularly if you are a solo counselor on your campus, or if you're a testing coordinator, if you're a 504 coordinator, something like that. There's no way that you're going to be able to do everything you want to do. This has got to be an incremental process for you. I was just talking with someone earlier this morning about this, as we were recording an upcoming interview for the podcast, and we were talking about how, so many times, folks jump into school counseling very eager, very bright-eyed, with a lot of energy and passion for their work, which is incredible but all too often, they begin burning themselves out because they feel like they have to do everything right away. All the great things they've heard about, all of the comprehensive program components, all the things, and they try to cram it all into a year or two, and then they're left wondering why it didn't work, why they don't feel fulfilled, why they didn't reach those goals. Sometimes we have to remember this as a step by step, baby step by baby step process, and that's okay, isn't it? So we're going to keep it simple and we're just going to make sure we have everything written down. That's all that goes in to step two. All right, so we have reflected and adapted our goals.

Steph Johnson: 11:47

We have looked at our calendars coming up for 2024. Now we're headed into step three of the New Year restart, and step number three is something that I would say 90% of the time is overlooked. It is something that is essential to feeling like you are somewhat in control of the day-to-day goings-on on your campus, and this is reverse engineering your calendar. Now we put all those dates and observances on your calendar in the last step, as we wanted to make sure we didn't miss anything. Now what we're going to do is look at the things that may require some extended action, so we might go into a test administration and then we might go back a week and write one week until practice test, go back another week two weeks until the practice test. Go back another week three weeks until the practice test. You getting what I'm laying down here. We're just giving ourselves periodic reminders that these things are coming up. It doesn't mean it has to be completely planned out. It's just to remind you that you need to start thinking toward that direction.

Steph Johnson: 13:09

And let me add here this does not have to be on paper. This could be your electronic calendar. I know most of us are keeping those at work these days. Put it on your electronic calendar, have it, give you an alert. One month until 504 deadline. Two weeks until state testing begins. Three weeks until national school counseling Wait, yeah, it's coming y'all.

Steph Johnson: 13:33

So make sure you have those in your calendar. That will help you stay on top of things and feel like you are a little bit more in control, instead of it slapping you across the face. You know, a week before it's supposed to happen and you're panicking and going. I don't know how I'm gonna get all this done. How am I gonna get all this together? You will be able to plan more proactively. You'll be able to have things in place and feel a lot more calm and assured in whatever that activity is If you don't love the details.

Steph Johnson: 14:06

This is a super great Jedi trick for you. It is fitting these reminders in your calendar to get your brain thinking that way. If you're super detail oriented, you might already have some plans ready. You might already have your outlines for your events or your observances or testing already ready to go, if you do. Kudos to you. Not all of our brains work that way, however, and so these reminders are super, super helpful. We have some templates for some event planning in our School for School Counselors planner. We provided that free this year to any school counselor that wanted it. So if you haven't gotten your copy yet, you can hop to our website, schoolforschoolcounselorscom slash planner, download that and toward the end of the planner we've got a bunch of templates and things like that that you can use to plan those events so that you can make sure that you do not forget a single thing.

Steph Johnson: 15:03

All right, moving on to step four, this one is sending home communication to families, making sure that we are communicating well, that there's not anything we need to let our families know, things like activities coming up on campus, maybe some policies that need to be revisited, or parents need to be reminded about how to access resources, how to access counseling resources online, how to get in touch with you those kinds of things or even calendars or timelines for due dates. Particularly if you're working with students on college applications and things like that. You wanna make sure you're communicating these things between school and home. This does not have to be some sort of razzle-dazzle presentation. It doesn't have to be a fancy graphic newsletter or anything like that. It can be something very, very simple, but let's make sure we're getting that information out to the people that need it. I think it's going to cut down on a lot of the questions that you get, a lot of the concerns that you hear. People are going to feel like they're more in charge and in control of what they're doing on their end because they're gonna have the information that's necessary.

Steph Johnson: 16:21

All right, so we're on to step five. Just to recap really quickly, step one was reevaluating, revisiting your goals from the fall and modifying them as you need to. Step two was getting all of those basic, essential dates on the calendar. Step three was reverse engineering those dates to make sure that we know they're coming up, that they don't come up and bite us later and we were surprised and frantic and frazzled. And then step four was getting our communication home to parents, making sure we're communicating with students and that we're all still on the same page, all right.

Steph Johnson: 17:02

So step five of the New Year restart is going to be looking at our themes, looking at our topics for lessons, if you're providing those on your campus. Are your lessons still going according to plan? Are they still on the timeline that you said at the beginning of the year or do those need to be modified? Do you have any lessons or activities coming up where you need specialized materials? Do you need to start ordering certain things now so that you have them on hand in plenty of time? This is something that you're going to want to get ready to go right at the start of the spring semester. No running around trying to grab whatever you can grab. One of my pet peeves is getting at you know. I reply all email from someone saying I need pipe cleaners for an activity today. Does anybody have pipe cleaners? And I always think Lord. I mean. I know we all need help from time to time, but please plan ahead. Make sure you've got those things ready to go for your activity. So check and make sure you have all of your materials, all the things you're going to need for the things coming up in the spring. That's not bad right. Getting your mind wrapped around what you want to do, what your plans are, I think, is the hardest part. From there, the rest is pretty easy, as long as you have everything in place and ready to go. All right. So that was step five of your new year restart plan. We're almost to the end.

Steph Johnson: 18:37

Step six is to look at your technology angle. We want to make sure that we're looking at any counseling pages or online presences that we are responsible for. Maybe a website. It may be a teacher page on a school website, it may be a social media account. Whatever it is, we want to look at it and make sure of a couple of things. Number one are the links up to date? Are they still valid or any of them broken? Can people get to where they need to go relatively easily? Number two, are your announcements current? You guys may not know this about me, but sometimes I creep your school websites. Did you know this? And the reason is we really work hard to vet anybody that we bring into our school. For school counselors Facebook group it's not just your name pops up and you have a post about feelings, and so we think things are gonna be okay. We have a very high decline rate in our Facebook group and that's not to be ugly, that's not to keep people out of the group, to try to be malicious, but it is an effort to keep the quality of the discourse high.

Steph Johnson: 19:56

We want to make sure we're only accepting people who have a true vested interest in the field of school counseling and so, as part of that process, sometimes when we're looking at profiles and things like that, if we see a school name or something like that, we'll hop over to the school webpage. We wanna see what the school's about and we'll see. If there's a counselor page, we'll go look at that, and I cannot tell you how many pages I've looked at where there are announcements on there that are old, old, old. Just a few weeks ago in 2023, I ran across a counselor webpage that still had information up about COVID, pandemic resources, things like from quarantine, shutdown days that were still up there loud and proud on their school counseling page. So just kind of get those freshened up, get them dusted off. Make sure all the information is up to date and looking good. Make sure you have the right resources listed for students and parents Again, that everything is still there, it's still working, those programs still exist. And then if you've done something amazing, like you've lost 100 pounds, you've chopped off all your hair, it's now a different color, you'd now wear eyeglasses, whatever the case may be, you might look and see if it's time to update that profile picture. You want people to be able to instantly recognize you on your school webpage if they know you and if not, you want them to be able to see your picture on the website and then connect it to the real person once you meet them live and in real time. So go ahead and give those accounts, give those pages a once over, make sure they're nice and clean, that they're looking good. It's only going to help your program and you yourself look more professional, and we absolutely need that as we begin advocating on our campuses and within our greater communities.

Steph Johnson: 22:01

All right, step seven for our New Year Restart is going to be pre-planning self-care or mental health days for ourselves. This may not necessarily be anything that you have specifically planned right now, but you do know that once the spring semester gets underway, we're all running around like frantic people again. We are going to forget to stop and assess our own needs many times, and so we've got to get super proactive about making sure that we're leaving space for taking care of ourselves. It is imperative, it is a non-negotiable. Nobody needs a counselor that's not taking care of themselves and, despite what your principal might lead you to believe, your campus can survive without you for a day. They absolutely can't. They can survive without you for even a couple of days, and they can definitely survive without you for an afternoon. So don't feel guilty. Don't buy into this baloney that we peddle on our school campuses about. You know it's for the kids we need to be here all the time. I get it. I get it. Education is important work, but you are important too.

Steph Johnson: 23:27

So go ahead and put some days on the books that you know you're going to be able to use to pause and to catch your breath. It sounds simple, right, it sounds almost ridiculous to say, but how often have you truly made this a priority? How often have you intentionally gone in your calendar and said I'm going to take one day every six or eight weeks and I'm going to focus on myself? This is going to be your year. This is the year that you're really going to implement some better self care for yourself. So book those days and promise yourself that you're not going to compromise, you're going to keep those days and you're going to make yourself a priority, because you have to treat yourself like you believe that you're amazing because you are. You keep walking onto a school campus every day, searching to serve students, looking to build other people's futures, and doing it in conditions that are often a little difficult to navigate as a professional right. The go, go, go mentality. The moment to moment shifts and pivots and all the crazy things that happen the hearing the worst there is to hear on your campuses and still being able to keep yourself composed and professional and handle those situations. You have a hard job and you're amazing because you keep showing up to do that, day after day after day. So you need to believe that about yourself and you need to treat yourself like you believe it's true. You are amazing for the work that you do. All right, and then we're to our last step in our new year restart. If you've been keeping track, this is step eight.

Steph Johnson: 25:32

The last step in your new year restart is figuring out what you're going to do to grow. Thank you. Determining the areas that you want to learn more about doesn't mean you have to binge on it, doesn't mean that you have to go all in and learn everything there is to know about it by the end of the school year, but you do need to identify something that you'd like to be more knowledgeable about, something that maybe you feel might help your work with students on your campus, or something that you feel would help you grow as a counseling professional in general. Identify some things you're interested in. They may not necessarily be the right things right. It may not necessarily be the magic bullet for your campus or for your program, but learning never hurt anybody and you're only going to grow and mature as a professional the more you read, the more you engage in consultation and the more you seek to develop your expertise and to develop your professional confidence when you're called upon to discuss that Super, super important.

Steph Johnson: 26:46

So maybe it's something like trauma-informed programs really getting down into the meat of what it means to be trauma-informed and not this surface-level conversation that we're hearing everywhere. Maybe it's staff morale or how to get your staff on board with your counseling program. Maybe you want to kind of poke around and see if you can find some tricks or strategies to make that happen. Maybe you want to learn more about multi-tiered systems of support, and that can get pretty complicated the deeper you dive into that. So do you want to get some more information on how to really invest in that on your campus? Do you need to know more about 504? Have you been saddled with that responsibility and you feel like you're kind of making it, but you're also kind of faking it at the same time? You're not really sure if you're getting it exactly right or if you're meeting best practice.

Steph Johnson: 27:40

That might be an area that you want to look at. Do you want to get better at behavior intervention? Do you want to feel like you're more in control when you walk into a behavior situation? Do you want to feel like you can better regulate yourself? Do you need some behavior strategies? Do you want some ideas that you can toss to your staff when they come to you for support and for help? Those are all areas that you could seek to learn more about Now. Should you do them all? No, no, no, my friend. Pick one, pick one thing, because there's always time to dive into something else or to dive into something more deeply when you have some more breathing space, perhaps during the summer, or you can continue in the fall.

Steph Johnson: 28:29

This is not a one and done kind of thing. We should be constantly learning and evolving. But identify that one specific thing that you would really love to know more about and then make a plan for how you're going to do that. Schedule it on your calendar. That is my magic trick for learning and for being productive and getting the things done. I have to have it written down on a calendar to remind me to get to it, or my brain will go a hundred different other directions and I may not get back to it. But decide how are you going to learn? Are you going to read research papers? Are you going to seek out peer reviewed research? Are you going to seek out textbooks or academic books on the topic? Are you going to seek some professional organization knowledge? How are you going to get this information Schedule, some reminders Y'all you can remind yourself into any habit that you want to build. But whatever you do, make sure you do this with intention Because, again, as we get into the busyness of the spring semester, as we get into the task and task and moment to moment stuff, as we get into all of the crisis intervention, as we get into the counseling and the lessons and the parent support and all the things we do. This is a piece that often goes by the wayside and you are too good at what you do to become stagnant. So be intentional about this process.

Steph Johnson: 30:06

If you feel like you need a quick and easy way to build your expertise that doesn't require pulling up a bunch of peer reviewed research, that doesn't involve buying a bunch of $60 or $70 books or whatever it is, consider joining our School for School Counselors Mastermind. In there we have a Netflix style library of tons of topics that your grad school education forgot the things that you need to know in real world school counseling application. We have weekly consultation and support chats every Tuesday evening. They are freaking amazing. You have never been in anything like this ever so cool. We have periodic book studies. We do those in the summer to build our skills. This past summer we focused on dialectical behavior therapy. That was a huge eye opener. We've also done motivational interviewing with students. We've done solution focus counseling. We've looked at a lot of Ross Green's work and lost at school, which is to try to figure out how we can help students more purposefully on campus and more successfully. All of those things are going on.

Steph Johnson: 31:14

We have an exclusive mastermind group for folks to ask questions and get feedback in a more controlled environment. It's just an amazing, amazing community to be a part of, and we built it to help folks build and develop their expertise. Whatever you do, though whether you join the mastermind or you go out on your own both are perfectly awesome, but make sure your intention about it, make sure you decide in your heart that you're going to do something, because, like I said, you're amazing. You're too good not to be growing and developing your competence and your expertise. Super, super important that you do that.

Steph Johnson: 31:57

All right, I hope you enjoyed hearing about our steps to our new year restart. And again, if you need these in email form, it's super digestible this way. You send you one email every day for eight days, and it gives you one actionable step each day. You'll have them in your email. You can refer back to them anytime you would like. You can sign up absolutely free on our website, schoolforschoolcounselorscom. Slash restart, all right, well, I hope this was helpful to you. I wish you all the best in 2024. I can't wait to hear about your successes. I can't wait to celebrate with you as the semester goes on and you get those wins that you've been looking for, and I can't wait to support you, and I really hope and pray that this coming second semester is going to be your best semester yet. I truly, truly want that for you and I wish you all the best. Keep listening. I'm going to be back soon with another podcast episode and until then, I hope you have the best week. Take care.