A New Perspective on Kindness in School Counseling

How can we effectively educate kids with mental health or basic well-being concerns? Carissa, a former teacher, current school counselor and mental health therapist, says it's not realistic. Students can't learn if they aren't regulated and works to be her best self for her students by remembering her goal of helping rather than "fixing"- guiding her students toward resilience and self-reliance.

Carissa shares her strategies that keep her grounded and effective while balancing a demanding workload and unrelenting needs with the realities of too little time. Our conversation brings to light an overlooked aspect of school counseling: Are we being as kind to ourselves as we are teaching our students to be?

She also shares a SUPER-SUCCESSFUL initiative that would be PERFECT for Random Acts of Kindness Week or anytime your campus & community could use a little extra encouragement.

It's easy to dream big, but Carissa reminds us that starting small and gradually building up while being kind and remembering to care for ourselves is the key to sustainable and impactful programs.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

Hello school counselor friend, welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast. I am so excited about this week's episode. You have no idea. We're going to start to sprinkle in some really fun interviews that I was able to do with some of our school counseling colleagues recently, and I think you're going to love to hear the insights and perspective they bring, as well as school counseling wisdom. We are all in for a tremendous treat, and this week is going to be no exception.

Speaker 1: 0:40

I have the honor and privilege of talking with Carissa. She is a newish school counselor on the scene, but I'm going to tell you right now, hearing her talk, it sounds like she's been doing this for years. She has so much insight and perspective on doing good work while also taking great care of ourselves, and she has a pretty stinking cool idea for spreading kindness not only across our campuses but throughout our communities. So I hope you take a close listen to this one this week, because it's going to be a gold mine for you. I started just by asking Carissa to introduce herself to everyone and tell us a little bit about herself.

Speaker 2: 1:26

Hi, my name is Carissa and I have been a school counselor for about two and a half years. Before that I was a teacher, elementary and special ed certified, for about 16 years before becoming a school counselor and I ultimately made that change. Because, as important as I think education is, if you don't have the fundamental mental health support, kids are not going to really care what a noun is, if they're having things going on at their home or they're very anxious or they are thinking about suicide. The education component doesn't really matter to them. So I really wanted to get to that base of the issue, because I was seeing these type of mental health issues when I was teaching.

Speaker 1: 2:23

Carissa may have only been school counseling for about two and a half years, but she has a tremendous breadth and depth of experience and a true passion for her work. In addition to teaching and school counseling, she volunteers for a crime victims council, working mostly with sexual assault victims, and started her own private practice focusing on women and children. She hopes to expand that into a group practice while still continuing her full-time school counseling job. So I asked her you've got to be so extremely busy. You have so much going on. How do you find and maintain a good balance in your day?

Speaker 2: 3:08

I try my best to keep realistic expectations for myself as much as I can and just remind myself of that. Also, looking at priorities what is the priority situation? And start there. That's where I need to be. And these other things going on, how can I manage them? It can be really hard to set those realistic expectations on herself. I myself a lot of times have that. I want to help everybody, save everybody, feeling so. I don't want to feel like I'm letting anybody down, but it's just about prioritizing and this is what I can do right now. That doesn't mean later I can't do something more, but this is where we're at right now and trying to look at that realistically and then go from there.

Speaker 1: 4:00

I love Carissa's mindset on this and I think it melds really nicely with what we say around our school for school counselors world all the time, which is I'm a helper, not a fixer. It's so easy to get in that mindset, a feeling like you have to fix everything and that's what stresses a lot of school counselors out.

Speaker 2: 4:23

Feeling like we have to do all the things, yeah, and it can be hard realizing that All of that needing to fix or helping it's not all on us. Whoever we're trying to help has to take ownership in that process to at least a search and degree. So we need to remind ourselves of that. We can't make people do things. We can help them. We can show them options and resources and be creative, but at the end of the day, even if it's a person we care about and we're concerned about, there's only so much we can do.

Speaker 1: 5:03

Spoken like a true clinical therapist and a wise school counselor for sure, because we know that unless people have a desire to change or something compelling them to make a positive change, it's going to be extremely difficult. I noted that, in schools particularly, it feels like we're more of an assembly line model of counseling, so to speak. We expect to apply an intervention, see a result, fix the thing, move on. And it's that way in schools, not only with academics but with school counseling as well. Just administer a small group and everything will be fine, talk to them for 10 minutes and everything will be okay. But that's not the way that kids work.

Speaker 2: 5:49

Yeah, you get lucky sometimes where there's some kind of disagreement and it can be worked out A one meeting, maybe a follow up meeting. But yeah, sometimes there's that assumption Go do your magic and fix the situation and I love that. They think I'm able to have that magic and that usually I do really well and that's great. But yeah, it's not as easy as sometimes the outside world of counseling thinks that it is.

Speaker 1: 6:23

Y'all. So many people in our industry love to talk about self-care. As a licensed therapist and school counselor, carissa has some really strong opinions about what constitutes true self-care and how it can be attained, and I think she may be a master at it. I was glad to hear her opinions because, I'll be real, a lot of the self-care conversation I find irrelevant to real people in real life. It sort of makes me cringe, and I think it does Carissa too. Listen what she had to say about it.

Speaker 2: 6:59

We go to so many trainings about self-care and they're like oh, just spend one extra half an hour a day reading a book or doing this. The way they break it down it's logical, but it doesn't work for everybody and they shrink it down to this little issue and don't really understand what self-care really is and that it's a mindset and a way you have to go about your day, go about your week. It's not like a quick fix oh, I'm gonna get massaged tomorrow. I'm good on self-care for the week because it's a daily thing, even if it's just a small thing daily, and I think it's very personal and unique to everybody. I think it'd be more helpful in trainings that help people figure out what might really work for them, as opposed to here's four things. Here's a breathing technique. Especially as counselors, we know that stuff. It should be more about helping the individual kind of sort out what works for them. What works for one person does not work for another person, and I have that mindset when I'm working with students or clients that I can show you some tools and we can practice things, but in the end of the day you need to figure out which one of these tools are gonna work for you, and I just wanna give you a sampling of some things to try. And if it works today, it might not even work tomorrow.

Speaker 2: 8:24

Whatever your self-care is, I think it's good to be purposeful and to have a variety of things. Maybe you go take a walk, but it's raining. What else can you do? And don't beat yourself up either. If you can't get that walk in today, the whole day is not ruined. You're not horrible. Life throws different curves and stuff like that. So you have to give yourself grace as well.

Speaker 2: 8:55

Yeah, there's realities of me being one person in five places. Sometimes one day I had to be in three places at one time and I had to do two virtually and then one in person because there's only one of me. But before I came to that position, the position didn't exist and they had nothing. So I need to remind myself that I might want to do this really comprehensive counseling program for each school, but it's not realistic because I'm only there one day a week or two days a month. So I'm gonna do the best I can with that time. So, yeah, just keeping your own expectations in check. So you're not stressing yourself out. You're one person, you're a human and you're gonna do what is best that you can do in what situation you're given.

Speaker 1: 9:49

I could not agree with Carissa's thoughts more. It's so important to make sure that we're keeping a realistic perspective in our work and not burning ourselves out trying to be a hundred different people at once.

Speaker 2: 10:03

I mentioned that there's a huge trend of folks coming out of grad school thinking that the expectation is to build this mega school counseling program that's instantaneously comprehensive, and then they jump on a campus and start to burn out really fast and we're taught, like you said, all the different components of a counseling program and, depending what system we come into, some may have some part set up, some might not really have much set up and they're eager and they want to do the best that they can.

Speaker 2: 10:36

They have all that extra energy and stuff like that. But yeah, it's not that you don't wanna strive to do the best and even maybe push that envelope a little bit and do a little more than you thought you could do. But you have to stay realistic as well and remind yourself that, okay, this year I might implement this great small group system and then next year when you reevaluate, you know what this small group was good. But now I would like to add this extra school wide thing, so we don't always have to do everything at the exact moment that we start. We sometimes have to build and remind ourselves that's okay If it's not everything at once. Just start somewhere and just start building on that, as you can.

Speaker 1: 11:23

We have been honored to have Carissa in our school for school counselors community for years and I think she's participated in just about everything we've ever offered or put out into the world. I asked her what has School for School Counselors done to help sustain her school counseling practice? I was expecting tactics or techniques, or perhaps consultation. What she had to say blew my mind and I'm going to be honest, I've really struggled with whether or not I was going to leave this in the podcast, but I want to be true to her words and what she sees in our School for School Counselors world.

Speaker 2: 12:05

I think the best benefit, which might be overlooked sometime, is just how real of a person you are to start with. Though you have a lot of experience, you don't act like this stuffy individual who knows everything when you're going to sit down and explain to us how everything works and how it should be. You're more a person that is easy to talk to, so that makes it great. This is like your side project, but I don't feel like this is like a money grab or this is what your concern is. It's about more of a community of School Counselors coming together, providing support, sometimes with different ideas and what to do, sometimes just venting and letting out some things that are frustrating you and realize that there's some other people having a very similar frustration as well.

Speaker 2: 13:01

Only when you're in a position where you don't really socialize with lots of other School Counselors because I'm the only School Counselor for five schools I think it's beneficial that way, if you are within the island upon yourself, have some counselors like Belone and the School or multiple schools, to have that kind of interaction, that very real human interaction, not like putting on airs and trying to be the queen of something. You're just a regular person and that makes everything feel really comfortable. I think it just starts with just who you are as a person and that's filtered into what School for School Counselors is, because that radiates. I think that's ultimately the best benefit I got from it.

Speaker 1: 13:54

Thank you. I'm humbled by that. I don't even know what to say in response. Oh my stars, that's not what I was expecting at all, thank you. Thank you so much. I'm glad that's shining through, because when we started, the whole point of any of this was that we were stronger and smarter together and that we should never have one expert ever in a room ready to tell everybody else what they should be doing. That was grad school. We've all been through that now.

Speaker 1: 14:24

It's time to collaborate and get better amongst our peers to help each other out. So thank you so much for that, and I get I want to say.

Speaker 2: 14:34

I agree, then, what you said about not being 1 expert in the room, because even somebody who just starts counseling, they may have something to share that we haven't thought of. When I was in college, before even officially graduating, I started to accumulate resources and put them into Google drive With different categories, which I've done. Now, over time, I have like thousands of resources. Now that might be an idea. Somebody who graduated is like oh, I've thought about this, make sure you're Putting them in different places because some weird topic comes up and then you can look up oh, I have these things on that.

Speaker 1: 15:13

Yeah, I think you can learn something and get experience from anybody at any level, because, though there's obviously things in common with us, there's also so much diverse Education and information and settings that they're coming from, so we all have something that we can contribute as we wrapped up our conversation, I asked Chris, with all the things that she has going on, all the busyness and the clinical work and the school work and even home life and personal life, what keeps her walking back through the doors of her campuses day after day?

Speaker 2: 15:50

It can be the smallest thing, sometimes that you're talking to a student who's having a hard day or just Dealing with something that they don't know how to deal with, and when you sit down with them you have those conversations to get to know them a little better and you can see them being more at ease and more calm and having a thought of maybe how they can attack whatever the situation is. I had a student like that and then a few days later they had come to me and they said it felt like a giant weight was lifted off them because they were able to do something that was previously causing them a lot of stress. And the student told me that you changed my life and I was just melted. I'm not sure that's quite accurate, that I changed their whole life, but you could see on their face the weight was lifted and in that moment it may look the whole year to matter what I was going to do past that it made it worth it. So, like all those accumulations of things like that, it shows me that I'm in a good place. I'm doing something. These are what my skills are for.

Speaker 2: 17:07

I had done a school wide thing this year that I want to try when I was doing bullying and kindness lessons for bullying prevention month and I hung up in the schools these kindness posters where they were ripped off a paper and they had different compliments they would give them to somebody and I had so much success with that. I had principal saying we need more of these. These signs are all gone the first day, like all the compliments are gone. I even had a student because I put that up make up his own compliments on his own and hand them out to his peers and I was just like Lord, I'm like that one way better than I thought and with that, when I would stop a student who I saw pulling off a compliment, I would say who are you going to give it to? Because I wanted to see if they weren't just like pulling them off when they all had different stories about their parents or a teacher or a sibling they were going to give them to and why they were going to give them to this person. I had students and start to request more put up.

Speaker 2: 18:16

But yeah, I think when I counted between my five schools, I think there was something like a little over 2000 compliments that went out in the community Because of that idea. Sometimes you have an idea and you're like, hi, I wonder how it's going to go. That one really well, next year I will improve upon it. I'll probably make some with some different kinds of compliments and mix it up. But yes, stuff like that keeps me going and as maybe silly as a thing that seems how that does make a difference and even if just in a moment, and shifts that student to be appreciative to somebody and share that with somebody and get some positives instead of all of the negatives that we are always getting and unfortunately one negative takes way too many positives to get rid of it. Just little things like that. Those things sustain me.

Speaker 1: 19:11

What a fantastic idea, especially with random acts of kindness week coming up. Y'all imagine the impacts that you could make on your community doing just what Carissa did. The word that comes to mind listening to Carissa speak was encourager. Carissa feels like the ultimate encourager for students. Not a cheerleader, because that's different, but solid, meaningful, real and authentic support for students. So, as a last word, I asked Carissa if she had one piece of advice or one bit of wisdom that she could provide to her school counseling colleagues. What would she want you to know?

Speaker 2: 19:56

We promote all this social emotional learning. We promote ideas of trying to be kind other students, be kind to each other, conflict mediation, all that kind of stuff. What's hard a lot of times is showing that kindness to ourselves. So when we are feeling overwhelmed, reminding yourself that we can do it and we're human beings, we're not robots. We are not just programmed to do some kind of whatever presentation or curriculum that we're human beings to and we give that kindness easily to other people, but we need to remember to be kind to ourselves.

Speaker 1: 20:39

It was a delight to visit with my friend, carissa, and I felt like we could have talked and talked all afternoon if we had the chance. She is a delight, she's absolutely precious and she has such a great viewpoint on so many things. I think it's important that we remember the things that she told us that it's important to maintain a realistic perspective in our work, that we need to be extending ourselves, grace and taking good care of ourselves in meaningful ways. That we can be an encourager in this world where so many people are feeling beaten down, by spreading positivity, kindness and compassion to others. I so enjoyed this conversation with Carissa and I hope you did too. I hope it was as inspirational for you as it was for me. Hey, before we go, I want to let you know if you're listening to this episode around the time of release.

Speaker 1: 21:42

We are right at the start of National School Counseling Week, and that's always an exciting time for so many of us, but my team and I here at School for School Counselors really felt like it was time to pay some things forward.

Speaker 1: 21:58

Instead of giving you all these extra to-dos or expectations on top of your already-overwhelmed schedule, we thought we'd do something a little different. We are hosting a mega School Counselor giveaway. It's going to be insane. There is one grand prize that consists of a year's membership in our School for School Counselors Mastermind, a $150 Amazon gift card and 10 of our favorite school counseling related books shipped straight to your door. This is going to be an epic contest, and not only can you win by entering, but you can also get extra entries for sharing and letting your other School Counseling colleague friends know about it. You can find out all about it on our webpage, schoolforschool counselorscom, so head on over there and get signed up. Alright, I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, both Carissa and I hope that you have the best week. Take care.