From Flute to Fatigues to Futures: One School Counselor's Symphony of Service

In this episode, I highlight a fascinating conversation  with Elizabeth Janners, a school counselor with a super-cool blend of music and military service in her background. Listen in to hear how Elizabeth's background shapes her unique approach to mentoring the next generation, offering invaluable lessons in resilience and adaptability as she guides students through life's challenges.

Elizabeth's story is a powerful reminder of the transformative power of personal growth, and how combining various life experiences can lead to a fulfilling career that has the potential to positively impact the lives of others. Don't miss this insightful discussion that also highlights the importance of trauma-informed practices in education and how life and art can intersect to create powerful school counseling perspectives.

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Transcript

Steph Johnson: 0:08

Hello, school counselor, and welcome to the School for School Counselors podcast. My oh my. You can tell I am a little bit froggy this week, a little bit under the weather, but so super glad to be here with you. I'm Steph Johnson, a full-time school counselor, just like you, and I am super stoked to be bringing you this conversation with a colleague of mine, Elizabeth Janners. She is such an interesting person. She has such great insights into the work that we do each and every day, and I cannot wait for you to hear her thoughts and her perspectives.

Steph Johnson: 0:45

Elizabeth is a musician, she's also a former military member, and she loves bringing both of those aspects of her life into her school counseling role, where she seeks to help students determine their best outcomes, their best careers, their best ideas for the future, as well as educating them on the fact that you don't have to have one career forever and ever. You can change as you learn and grow and mature, and she's all about that life. She's also about teaching her students that they can do hard things. Things that they never imagined doing are very much within their grasp, and she loves using instrumental music to inform her approaches as a school counselor. So I can't wait for you to hear this conversation. It is so fascinating and an absolute goldmine of inspiration. I started our conversation by asking Elizabeth just to tell me a little bit about herself. Where did she get started in the world of work and how did she end up as a school counselor?

Elizabeth Janners: 1:51

I think what's interesting for me, thinking about where I am now and going backwards, is that, at least for school counseling, I don't have a behavioral science background. So I am a musician. I would still call myself a professional musician because I still play. I actually play in a group that my husband directs. It's called the Night Wind Ensemble here in Milwaukee and obviously I love it.

Elizabeth Janners: 2:21

So my bachelor's degree is in flute performance from the University of Tennessee, go Vols, and when I graduated I was doing all kinds of auditions for symphonies, all that kind of stuff to try to make it as a professional musician. Come to find out that's a very hard thing to do. I did not want to go for a master's degree and practice 12 hours a day. That was not what I wanted to do. And so I was about to graduate and I'm like what am I going to do with this degree? And then I started thinking about the military, because I grew up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, which is a very heavy Navy town with Norfolk right there, and I used to play in a community group called the Tidewater Winds, which was a group of community musicians, but a lot of them were military as well. And so between junior year and senior year of college I would often talk to them about the military music program and I was like, "oh, that's cool. Yeah, all right, great, not thinking that I was going to be doing that.

Elizabeth Janners: 3:40

So when I was graduating from college I was like maybe I should try this.

Elizabeth Janners: 3:45

So I was in Knoxville and there was a guy who was stationed in Knoxville too as a recruiter, and so he came to the university to do an audition and I was accepted, and so at that point I was like, all right, I'm going for it. And so what that meant was that summer I was leaving for boot camp, signed all the papers and all that kind of stuff. So I was like, all right, we're doing this. So that started my professional music career in the Navy music program for seven and a half years just playing my flute, playing for several presidents, playing for retired admirals, parades, that kind of stuff, and it was really great because I got to play every day and it brought me so much joy, up until the end where it started to become a little bit more difficult to be a woman in the military, and I had met my husband at that time too, and I was like, okay, this isn't for me husband at that time too, and I was like, okay, this isn't for me.

Steph Johnson: 4:55

So, as Elizabeth made the decision to leave the military and embark on a new adventure, how in the world did she end up in the world of school counseling? It's an interesting story, and one I think you're going to find very powerful.

Elizabeth Janners: 5:08

So after I left, I did a lot of soul searching, trying to figure out OK, what am I going to do? It's time to grow up, what am I going to do for the rest of my life? And I kept coming back to counseling because I loved helping kids. When I taught piano or flute lessons, it would often become a therapy session therapy in air, quotes, right and so I enjoyed that. But then also, education was such a huge part of my life because my mom is a retired psychology teacher and so we would often talk about things of psychology.

Elizabeth Janners: 5:48

I spent my whole life in a high school, because that's where she spent. Her career was in a high school, and I was in counseling for myself because my parents were divorced when I was 10. And my mom thought it was important for me to go to counseling, and so that was something that was a part of my life. Is talk therapy. So after the Navy I was like well, why don't I try school counseling? Let's see what this is all about? And around here in Milwaukee, the only school that I could get into, fortunately without a behavioral science background, was Marquette University. Fortunately, I just had to take a few undergrad classes. I had to take research methods and statistics before I could get into grad school, go to grad school and here we are eight years later practicing subcomplexing. So that is a really long answer to your question about how I got to where I am. But I know I'm in the right space because I enjoy coming to work every day.

Steph Johnson: 6:57

I think Elizabeth is a great example of something that we're all talking about more and more, which is this idea of convincing people that they're only gonna have one career, that they have to choose when they're 17 or 18, sometimes as early as 15 or 16, right, depending on their high school tracks and things like that and giving the idea that this is going to be their thing forever and ever and that it's never going to change. I mentioned that I'm having these same kinds of conversations with my high schooler at home about how the career or the path that they choose right now doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the thing that they do forever, and I mentioned to Elizabeth I think she's a great example of that in the way she works with her students and that her past experiences really seem to be informing the way that she works now.

Elizabeth Janners: 7:49

Yeah, for sure. And I agree, I'm having those conversations too because I have a lot of students that are like I just want to do this and this is what I'm great at. I'm like, yes, absolutely you are. But just know, things change and that's okay and they should, and research shows that it does. And so to help them be able to tap into several passions and help them develop some of those strengths so that if the number one thing they want to do doesn't happen, we can do that.

Elizabeth Janners: 8:21

And yeah, my military experience did a lot of things in that I feel like I was able to have a kind of an enhanced maturity versus some of my other counseling colleagues who are coming right out of college and having gone through boot camp, I never thought I could do and to be able to say I did a really hard thing.

Elizabeth Janners: 8:50

And kids are like blown away when they find out that I was in the Navy and I have pictures in my office and all that kind of stuff, and so it's a really good starting point to talk about. But I talk about the punctuality. Like I am never late to anything. I am at least five minutes early. If you are on time, you're late as far as I'm concerned and like all those things discipline, attention to detail and all that stuff but that's really resonated into school counseling too. I was listening to your podcast this morning of the eight habits and eight tips to throw the restart for the new year and you're talking about the calendar and I'm like I can't live without my calendar and making sure everything is there. But I don't think I would have been this way had I not gone through the military.

Steph Johnson: 9:43

I think that, without a doubt, elizabeth's military experience certainly molded and shaped her and pushed her into being a person she may not have been otherwise as far as systems, organization, punctuality and, I'm sure, a myriad of other wonderful qualities. I sort of talked about how my fine arts experience and my background informs the way that I work with students. I tend to rely heavily on somatic approaches, emotive approaches, things like that, and I wondered if her experiences do the same for her.

Elizabeth Janners: 10:22

The thing that comes to the front of my mind is helping them breathe. When we do deep breathing right, because as a instrumentalist you have to breathe from the diaphragm and all that kind of stuff. And when I teach kids how to do effective deep breathing, it's all up here right in the chest and I'm like, no, that's actually you know not what you're supposed to do and not helping you in any way. Let me teach you how to do it. And because I was taught that forever, being a flutist as well, it comes second nature to me.

Elizabeth Janners: 10:55

So I think that's probably the first thing that correlates, but also maybe listening to and I know that's cliche to say that of course we're good listeners, we're counselors, but when you're in an ensemble, you are part of a group, right, and you're part of a section and you have to blend into that section and then you have to blend into that ensemble, and so there's nuances with each note that you play. Each note is going to have a different pitch tendency and to be able to figure out where that fits, not only within your section but also within the ensemble. And I think that may translate into counseling too, because I'm listening for contradictions, I'm listening and looking for non-behavioral cues. I'm listening for all kinds of stuff to be able to help me paraphrase, summarize, reflect on what they're saying. That's helpful too.

Steph Johnson: 11:55

Y'all. I was so glad we went on that curveball conversation. It gave me such a new perspective of school counseling and the way others worked and I just loved it. Before we started the podcast recording, we were talking about Elizabeth's thoughts on being trauma-informed, about understanding students' backgrounds, what their true realities are and how that informs her school counseling practice. I asked her to give us some more insight into that.

Elizabeth Janners: 12:28

I think, being in Milwaukee, I am very in tune to all the struggles that these kids have and not to say that obviously every location does. But Milwaukee is heavy in the crime and heavy in the trauma and heavy in a lot of kids having incarcerated parents, homelessness, that kind of stuff, and so I've become very passionate about understanding more of the trauma piece. I feel like without understanding where a student is coming from, what is going on inside their head, inside their heart, what is going on at home, it is hard for us to be able to help them be successful in school. And I feel like, unfortunately, school counselors don't have enough training in trauma-informed care and so we often then refer out to therapists and then their list gets longer and then they can't be seen for eight months, 10 months, whatever. So I feel like that's certainly something that school counselors could use, and then their list gets longer and then they can't be seen for eight months, 10 months, whatever.

Elizabeth Janners: 13:37

So I feel like that's certainly something that school counselors could use is just a little bit more of trauma informed care, because you have a student who is coming from an abusive family. They're coming into school as their safe place, but they're coming in on high alert anyway, because that's what their body is doing as a defense mechanism for what they're dealing with at home. They're not going to be able to function, they're not going to be able to focus on math when they have all of this going on at home. So teaching some of those coping skills and how to manage that stress and all of that is super important, and I try to do a lot of that, but I feel like certainly more training in how to help some of those kids who need us the most with trauma-informed care is super important.

Steph Johnson: 14:35

I love the way Elizabeth thinks about this. You know we often think we're trauma-informed just because we hear about a lot of trauma and we're able to have conversations around it, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we know about best practices or that we understand how to lead our campuses toward a trauma-informed perspective. It's a whole different enchilada y'all, and so I'm so glad that Elizabeth is bringing this to the forefront of the conversation. Sounds like that's a concern in her neck of the woods. It certainly is in mine as well, and we can't tell families just to hit the pause button on their issues and wait for someone to come to the rescue.

Elizabeth Janners: 15:18

No, it doesn't work. And then you feel guilty, you feel like it's your responsibility then to become their interim therapist, and then that's not appropriate for you, that's not fair for you, you don't have that kind of training. So yeah, that's a double-edged sword there, for sure.

Steph Johnson: 15:35

As we neared the end of our conversation, I asked Elizabeth what does she strongly believe about school counseling? What is she super invested in? What does she really care about when it comes to her work?

Elizabeth Janners: 16:00

just coming in every day and hoping that I will have talked to one kiddo who I said something to them that had a light bulb go off in their head. I spent the first part of my school counseling career in the K-8 schools and I was the only counselor in both of those places, and that was obviously very difficult to be the only counselor because you're not able to, and that was obviously very difficult to be the only counselor because you're not able to do anything really that you want to do. So when I got here to high school I found that I really love talking about after high school. I really like the college piece, the scholarships, all of that stuff, and I talk a lot about, obviously, with my seniors what are you going to do afterwards?

Elizabeth Janners: 16:46

Okay, what are you going to do after that? Just helping them figure out what do you want your life to look like after high school. And they are shocked sometimes to find out that they didn't really quite think about this until now. And so what drives me is hoping that I will have reached someone, either through some trauma, informed discussions, to be able to help them with one coping skill, one technique, to use one thing to help them after they leave this building, and then what does the rest of their life look like?

Steph Johnson: 17:28

Don't you just love the way Elizabeth sees things? Just reaching out, making that impact, no matter how granular it feels in the moment, no matter how small and insignificant these isolated things may feel, we know we're guiding them toward their purpose, toward their best directions or their passions in their futures. I think that's pretty cool. I asked Elizabeth if she had any last thoughts or last words for folks that may be in similar situations, who are looking to make the transition to school counseling or feeling like gosh man. I haven't worked in schools 10 or 15 years, like some of these other people. I don't know if I can make it as a school counselor or whether I can hold my own.

Elizabeth Janners: 18:16

I do, and I will say too, after I graduated with my master's, it took me a long time to get a job, and I think that maybe just where I live, or maybe because I was only able to look in like a 45 minute radius because of my family. But oftentimes you're going for one position in one school and then there are hundreds of applicants. I would like to think that my unique background did put me ahead of some applicants, but at the end of the day it all comes down to how you interview, how you sell yourself, what your resume looks like. If this is really what you want to do, if it's meant to be, it will be, and it took me four years. I didn't think it was going to take that long, but it did. But I'm so grateful to have had your, the Get the Job podcast, the course, all of that, all those materials, because it really changed everything that I was doing. I felt like I performed better and had more quality materials after that.

Steph Johnson: 19:29

Sometimes it's about combining the dynamite that you already possess, taking it, putting it in a little bit different package and kaboom, all of a sudden it explodes and brings out the best in everybody around you, and it sounds like that's exactly what Elizabeth has been able to harness. Hey, I hope you found this as inspirational and motivational as I did. I love talking to my school counselor colleagues, hearing their insights, hearing their perspectives on our work. I find it really re-energizes me and gets me excited for the week ahead. So I hope it's done the same for you. Elizabeth is a doll. I'm so glad that she gave me the opportunity to speak with her and I'm so excited to hear what the future has in store for her.

Steph Johnson: 20:18

Hey, if you enjoyed this episode, if it lit you up and got you fired up for your work again, could you do me a solid Go to your podcast player of choice and either leave us a star review or leave us a written review about how the podcast has influenced or informed your work? It would mean the world to us and it will also help other school counselors discover the level of motivation and insight and influence that we strive to bring to each and every episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. We would appreciate you so much. All right, I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast, hopefully a little less froggy and a little easier to understand next time. But in the meantime, I hope you have the best week. Take care.