School for School Counselors Podcast

Is it Time to Eliminate Some Joy from School Counseling?

• School for School Counselors • Episode 101

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So many of us need to "eliminate some Joy" from our roles. What can this mean for school counselors who strive to build positivity, growth mindset, and can-do attitudes throughout campus?

This week, we're taking a cue from the movie Inside Out and talking about how constantly being the go-to "fixers" on campus can lead to burnout. We discuss how the inability to distinguish ourselves from perpetual "Joys" takes an immense emotional toll, and why high expectations from students, parents, and staff can push counselors to the brink of exhaustion. What can we do to redefine our roles for healthier, more sustainable environments?

You'll hear:

  • The emotional toll of always being the "fixer"
  • How empowering the entire school community can reduce "Joy"
  • Practical tips for maintaining a balanced workload

Listen for practical insights and real-world tips that will help you reclaim your energy, focus on what truly matters, and thrive in your counseling role!

Resources/Citations:
School for School Counselors Mastermind
(Free) Modern School Counselor Planner

Claro, S., Paunesku, D., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Growth mindset tempers the effects of poverty on academic achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(31), 8664-8668. doi:10.1073/pnas.1608207113

Friedman, R. S., & Förster, J. (2005). Effects of Motivational Cues on Perceptual Asymmetry: Implications for Creativity and Analytical Problem Solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(2), 263–275. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.88.2.263


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Speaker 1:

Hey there, school counselor, welcome back to the 101st episode of the School for School Counselors podcast, and I could not be more delighted that you've joined me, not only because I just love visiting with you each and every week, but because it's summertime right now. I know you have lots of other things to do, lots of other fun things to go, experience and explore, and I'm just so honored and humbled that you spend a little bit of your summertime with me. So hopefully I'm going to make this well worth your while. Today I'm going to give it my very, very best shot, and this week I'm going to be talking about something a little bit different than normal. We're going to get a little existential here. It's going to be kind of an interesting analogy, but it was something that spoke to my heart. You know, as I mentioned, we're in summertime. I'm enjoying the summer with my kiddos. We're running around town. I'm a later in life mama, which means you know it tuckers me out pretty quickly but I love spending time with them in the summer and doing neat and unusual things that we don't get to do during the school year.

Speaker 1:

We are looking forward to going and seeing the new Inside Out movie, which, if you haven't seen it yet. I'm sure you're looking forward to it too. It's kind of like a school counselor rite of passage, right, and we're all going to have to have seen that movie before school starts back up in August or September. But I was thinking about the original movie. I actually caught a rerun of it on the TV the other night and I was watching it and something hit me in that movie that probably should have hit me a long time ago. I don't know that I ever put a whole lot of thought into the movie Inside Out, but when I saw this I just felt like my brain was exploding and the first thing that I thought about was you. So let me tell you about how I see you within the movie Inside Out. I want to talk about what it means to be the emotional anchor for your campus, what the burden of that role truly is and how we may need to re-evaluate the level of joy in our school counseling programs so that we can reduce over-reliance on our skill set. Now, if that doesn't make any sense to you right now, I promise it will once we get done. But I'm just so excited to have you here for this conversation Now.

Speaker 1:

If you remember the movie Inside Out? You remember that little Riley has all these emotions in her brain right, and they're all doing different things, they're all responsible for different functions and Joy's role in Riley's happiness is to kind of keep things moving. Joy's role in Riley's happiness is to kind of keep things moving. She's kind of the elected mover and shaker of the group and she's the one that kind of keeps things turning. If things go wrong, she typically thinks of the plans. She's the one that you know is keeping the memories and wants to keep them all happy. She has a lot of responsibility on her shoulders, has a lot of responsibility on her shoulders and above that, it seems like the other emotions expect her to be able to fix everything. Even I remember Sadness asking her at one point you can fix this right.

Speaker 1:

Everybody was looking toward Joy to be the hero and I don't know that she felt equipped completely to do that job. She was giving it everything she had. That I know. She had some moments of doubt about whether she was going to be able to pull this thing through too, and I'm sure she felt the pressure of all eyes on her as she tries to embark in writing all of the things that have gone wrong, and I realize I'm stretching a little bit, but still I think it's something worth considering because we often serve as the joy on our campuses. I'm talking about the character, the personification of joy. Not that we are the only ones that bring the joy, but we often serve the same roles that joy served in the movie Inside Out.

Speaker 1:

We are often looked to to fix things right Because we all have that secret, magical wand in our closets that everybody knows we have. We just don't talk about. Right, if only that were true. We're often expected to keep things humming, even when they're going desperately wrong, and we are often looked to as the ones who should have some answers. And sometimes we are faced with situations that we don't have the answers to, or we're faced with making changes that we don't have the latitude to really be able to drive home, because there are other factors at play. There might be economic factors, there might be family relationship factors, there may be mental health factors and very organic diagnoses. There are all these things going on, but we're often looked to as the ones that should be able to solve those problems, and that is a huge weight.

Speaker 1:

When you become the campus emotional anchor. It feels like tons of high expectations from your staff, from your bosses, from parents of your students, and sometimes from the students themselves, and sometimes from the students themselves, and we get called upon to fix things a lot right. That's why, when around School for School counselors, we're always reminding you that you're a helper, not a fixer, because we tend to get into that fix it mentality and some of that is because we're constantly being pushed that direction. Here are some things that we are often called to help fix. I'm going to read from my list and this is not comprehensive, but I want you to think in your mind, as I'm walking through this list, how many of these you've been called to intervene with in the past school year.

Speaker 1:

What about academic concerns Failing test, anxiety? What about behavior concerns like disruption the new catchphrase defiant or bullying? What about emotional or mental health concerns like grief, depression, anxiety? How about social concerns like conflict, bullying, ostracization that's a mouthful when kids are ostracized by their peers. What about family concerns, divorce, traumatic households, high-intensity households, families living in poverty? Then think about things like suicidal ideation, traumatic events, college applications and all of the stress involved with that. Helping students determine career trajectories, chronic absenteeism, truancy, y'all. I could go on and on.

Speaker 1:

We know there are so many things that we're called on to help intervene with on our campus and it gets to be a really heavy feeling job if we're not careful. There's the pressure and the unrealistic expectation of everybody wanting us to fix this, the constant need to address problems and to resolve problems Y'all that can wear you out If that's all you're getting day after day. Here's a problem we need you to fix it. Here's a problem we need you to fix it. And you're worrying in your mind the whole time. Man, you know, I hope I can make some headway with this. I don't want them to think that I'm not good at my job. Have you ever thought that it's a dangerous line of thinking? But we all do it and I can speak from experience because I do it too.

Speaker 1:

When we start to feel this emotional toll from all of these needs coming at us from all directions, we start to experience some things that can rock our world. At first it kind of starts easy. We get a little role ambiguity sometimes thrown in there, meaning you know, our roles are kind of amorphous. Sometimes our duties and responsibilities aren't exactly what we expect or anticipate, or perhaps what they should be. We get thrown into things without even knowing why we've been tasked to do them. We just know that we've been told to do them, and it reminds me of my catchphrase I tell people all the time hey, man, I'm paid to follow directions, that's what I do. Have you ever experienced that where you have this role, ambiguity, and you think why is it in my wheelhouse? But it's there and that's what we do?

Speaker 1:

You can also start to experience things like work-life balance concerns, where you're having trouble leaving work at work and having home time at home, decreased job satisfaction, because you just feel this heaviness, right, this weight, these expectations pushing down on you a lot, and sometimes that can even lead to impaired personal relationships. This is when it starts to get scary, because this means that the heaviness and the weight is starting to bleed through from work to home and personal life, and we want to be very, very careful. When we start feeling those kinds of things, when we feel like that work-life balance is in jeopardy, when we feel like it's impairing our personal relationships, it is time to stop and self-assess. It's essential. We've got to do it, because if we don't nip this in the bud now. If we don't find a way to stop feeling like we have to perpetually be the joy of the campus, then we slip into some real scary things, things like compassion fatigue. I hope you've never experienced that in your career, but it's highly likely that at some point you will. Compassion fatigue is when for lack of a better phrase your give a damn is just gone. It's really, really hard to feel that empathy and to have that buy-in with your students because you're just so tired of caring, of helping, of intervening. It feels completely overwhelming.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes we can also slip into vicarious trauma. We see and hear the worst things that happen on our campuses. Unfortunately, that's just part of the job, that's part of the work that we do and I think most of us are okay with that. We got into this job knowing there were going to be some hard things. There were going to be some things that were really difficult to listen to, a lot of things that were almost impossible to understand, and we're okay with that, unless we don't get the time and space and autonomy to process what's happening. Because when we see the worst and we hear the worst and we consider the worst on our campuses and we often do that behind closed doors. Confidentiality prevents us from talking to others on our campus. Hey, you'll never guess what so-and-so told me. This breaks my heart. I don't even know what to do with this, unless you're in a good professional consultation group. The opportunity to debrief those situations are few and far between, and so you have the threat of slipping into some vicarious trauma. And all of these come together to create this giant snowball, just rolling down the mountain faster and faster until eventually you get to burnout. And we don't want you to get to burnout because we want you in this career, happy and healthy, for a long time. We need amazing school counselors, just like you, but those risks are high. They're high. So we need to be vigilant about the risks of burnout in our profession, particularly when we are seeking to be the joy on our campus.

Speaker 1:

If you have listened to the podcast pretty avidly, you probably remember a few episodes that I've done about burnout in the past. One of those was episode 17. That was called Are you a School Counselor Headed Toward Burnout? It's Not All in your Head. So if you want to hear more about burnout or you want to just kind of explore the topic a little bit more, that's going to be a great place for you to start Now.

Speaker 1:

There's some research published, and I told this on episode 17, but I'm going to repeat the story because I think it's just so fascinating. There was a study done by Friedman and Forster 2005, and they had two groups of people who were going to complete a maze on paper so they had a pencil, they had a paper and they had to of people who were going to complete a maze on paper so they had a pencil, they had a paper and they had to. It was a picture of a little mouse and the mouse had to get through the maze to get to the piece of cheese at the end of the maze. In one of the sets of mazes there was a huge cartoon owl that was looming over the mouse, and what the team was studying was something called motivational cues. Would that small illustration, that tiny little 2D angry owl looking at that mouse, be enough to compel people to try to get the mouse through the maze faster? And so they set these two groups to completing these mazes. One group did not have the owl, the other group did, and I bet you can guess what happened Right. Either you've heard the story or I know you're super smart, you probably figured it out. That picture of the owl, even though it wasn't real and it posed no real threat, compelled participants to complete the mazes faster.

Speaker 1:

It's an interesting conversation and there are a lot of theories about why that may be. We're going to have the citation in the show notes of this podcast episode if you want to go read the paper just for fun sometime. It's pretty entertaining and interesting, but at the end of the day, I think the point that stood out to me the most was that often as we're working in our schools, we kind of feel like we have that something looming over our shoulder, like that owl on that page, right, just that. Sometimes it's a feeling of doom, sometimes it's a feeling of pressure, sometimes it's just the feeling of what if you know what I mean Like the unknown, or am I doing this right or is this good enough? And it's just over our shoulder all the time and it makes us start moving faster. It makes us start making faster decisions. It makes us start moving faster. It makes us start making faster decisions and we forget to slow down, we forget to think through things, we forget to reframe situations and we really begin to lose our bearings.

Speaker 1:

So we've got to be vigilant about recognizing the signs of burnout, because we don't want to be running through that maze as fast as we can trying to complete it because we feel this sense of dread or compassion, fatigue or vicarious trauma or whatever it is leaning over our shoulders. That's not where we want to be and this seems so heavy even talking about it, but this is the reality of the work that we do. We have lost people on our campuses that have no ding-dang idea what we do all day. They think they know right. They think they understand that we talk about feelings Sometimes they understand that you know we can come help with behavior intervention sometimes if needed. They know that they see us around a lot talking to parents or maybe putting kids on the bus or whatever it is. But they really don't understand the job, and I bet you really didn't either. Until you started doing it, you understood the potential for change, you understood the drive and the heart that led you to serve students in schools, but I'll bet you really didn't understand what exactly it was you were getting yourself into until you got started. And so we can't blame other people for not understanding our work.

Speaker 1:

But we also then have to be even more careful about creating circles of support, of consultation, where we can get what we need, so that we don't start sliding down into all this really scary stuff. So what do we do? What do we do then to avoid all this? Because we all know this is not where we want to be. I think it is necessary and this is where the title of the podcast came from I think it is necessary to eliminate some of the joy from our school counseling role.

Speaker 1:

And now that you've heard kind of what I'm aiming at this week, I hope that's making sense when we don't have to be the perpetual fixer of all the problems. We don't have to be the eternally upbeat person that says, no, don't worry, we got this, I can fix it, give it all to me, I can handle it, I'll carry it all. Because we can slip into that mindset pretty easily. We've got to be really careful about setting some realistic boundaries for ourselves and balancing our role between positivity and practicality. Is that making sense? So we want to be positive as much as we can, but it's not always practical to be that person on your campus. You can't always be called upon to be the cheerleader, to be the motivator, to be the problem solver. You're human, just like everybody else, so we have to become okay with not being joy perpetually on our campuses.

Speaker 1:

I think we've just got to figure out a way to balance the joy with some realism so that we can maintain the supportive, positive presence that we want to have without having to be the sole problem solver every time something comes up, having to be the sole problem solver every time something comes up. Basically, what we've got to do is eliminate the over-reliance on us, and it's a double-edged sword and people don't understand what you do and they don't understand how busy you are. It seems easy to call on you and when you can't come, they kind of tend to get persnickety. So we've got to really empower these folks to be able to handle some of these things themselves. Part of that can be modeling, healthy emotional regulation, modeling goal setting for students and with students, to really drive home how we can work with one another to achieve goals.

Speaker 1:

We can implement peer support programs. That's going to be something you're going to be hearing about a lot from us this year, and if you were lucky enough to hear episode 86, which was called a game-changing mentorship model for students. One of our wonderful members, lydia Larimore, presented her take on a peer mentorship program. We're talking about that peer mentorship model a lot in our mastermind. We are starting to tease out some different ways to administer that and we've got a lot of great ideas coming to the forefront about peer mentorship. So if you're interested in that, I urge you to get in the mastermind just to be in on the conversation. You know I'll tell you I'm going to be experimenting with a couple of different peer mentorship models throughout this next school year. I already have my administrators on board. We're super excited about it and I can't wait to see what comes out of it. Training teachers and staff is also going to be advantageous for you.

Speaker 1:

Basic counseling techniques, how to actively listen. We touched on this a lot Again in our mastermind. Just this past weekend we released a new behavior intervention playbook. Now our playbooks are designed to give you a roadmap of sorts for handling situations without the need to download any specialized groups or curriculums or activities. Right, because we think you're smart enough without all that stuff. You don't need all of that stuff. You've got what it takes already inside of your very smart brain and your very sweetheart.

Speaker 1:

So when we released our behavior intervention playbook, the focus really wasn't so much on what we can do as school counselors to intervene actively in the behavior although we did talk about that. But the bulk of the conversation was about how do we empower staff and teachers to take control so that they do not continue to undermine themselves in the classrooms and the hallways, so that they do not continue to undermine themselves in the classrooms and the hallways. How can we be a guiding light for them? How can we be a supportive, positive presence for them without having to jump into the fray ourselves? So it's a really interesting conversation going on over there about that as well. But be thinking about that how can you guide your staff into recognizing the outcomes that they all really want anyway? We want them to retain their power and not have to abdicate it to the school counselor in order to get a problem solved.

Speaker 1:

And then, last, I think we need to create a culture of shared responsibility on our campuses where we can step in and act as a guide in this situation, but we're not necessarily the one leading the charge, finding the solutions every single time. We need to promote a team approach to student well-being that it doesn't just need to be the counselor's domain, and sometimes that doesn't come from direct instruction. You must be involved in student well-being. But more just modeling, more just showing people the way and modeling through what you do each and every day, because if you're intentional about it, I promise you people are going to notice and then encouraging collaborative problem solving among your staff. I'm a huge Ross Green fan. I've got the book right behind me here if you're watching me on my shelf, lost at School. I think it's amazing and I think the collaborative problem-solving approach is so huge for so many of our students.

Speaker 1:

And if we can empower our staff to get actively involved in those processes as well and to be able to lead them where we can just come in as an advisor or a consultant to the situation but not have to dig through all of the mud and muck trying to find the answers for everybody else, it's going to be amazing. All right, well, I hope that gave you something to think about, that you are not doomed to a career of being the perpetual joy of your campus. You can certainly bring joy to your campus and you can bring the positivity and growth mindset that you know that everybody needs, but you do not always have to be the problem solver, the one with all the answers, the one that's going to jump in and fix everything. You can fix it right. No, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I need to lean on you, my school staff, to come help me. I know you have what it takes. Let me show you some ideas. You have what it takes. Let me show you some ideas.

Speaker 1:

If we can move from the role of problem solver to the role of facilitator, where we are actively working to build a supportive and resilient school community, oh my gosh, the changes that we would see in education as a whole. The changes that we would see in education as a whole, because once folks learn that they have this power in them to handle these things and that if they try, they can be successful, they have a whole new outlook on themselves. And that's what we want for our students, certainly, but also for the adults we work with as well. We're working with a lot of folks right now that feel really beaten down in education, and if we can help empower and lift them up, the same time, we're helping to empower our students. Man, that's when you know you're doing something right. That's when things get really, really exciting. So, oh, I just. It gives me chills to think about it and I hope that you get as excited thinking about that as well, because I'm telling you what. That is where the gold is in school counseling.

Speaker 1:

So I encourage you, try to embrace this new perspective. Try to embrace the mantra of I'm a helper, I'm not a fixer right, and that you don't have to be the perpetual person of joy on your campus. It's okay to hand off some responsibilities. It's okay to delegate some of those things. It's okay to act as an advisor. You don't always have to be the boots on the ground for every single thing that happens. Save your energy for the things that really matter, for the things that are really intense. Your highest level needs, so that you can avoid the breakdowns of compassion, fatigue, vicarious trauma, burnout, all those terrible things we talked about. Compassion, fatigue, vicarious trauma, burnout, all those terrible things we talked about. Because my goal for you this next school year is to not only start the school year feeling the most optimistic and like the healthiest version of yourself that you could possibly be, but to be able to retain that all school year long, and I think this is one of the keys for most of us. So I hope that's helpful. I hope it kind of helps give you a different perspective. I will suspect this has been probably in your heart or on your mind at some point in your career and if it has been, I hope that I just gave it a voice and you, you're not the only one. You don't have to be the only joy on your campus.

Speaker 1:

Hey, before I go, I want to remind you we have released our free modern school counselor planner. It is out and it is absolutely free to anybody that wants it, and y'all, I'm telling you, this planner is a total game changer. It and y'all, I'm telling you this planner, is a total game changer. We offered it last year as well and so many people took us up on it thousands actually and we took feedback from everybody. We found out what worked, what everybody loved, what they didn't like, and we revamped it for the new school year. We made it even better than before and it's incredible what this thing can do for you.

Speaker 1:

Not only is it, you know, a tracker for you know keeping appointments or details or agendas, but it has some modified data collection built in. It has some wellness aspects in there, some really great reflection pieces for the ends of the semesters, some really great planning tools for the year, and we really strive to hand all of this to you in a beautiful package, in a planner that you're not embarrassed to take into a staff meeting or a district level meeting. There's no animals, there's no flags, there's no clip art on these babies. They're very polished, very professional and very, very functional. So if you haven't gotten your copy yet, I urge you, go grab it now.

Speaker 1:

Schoolforschoolcounselorscom slash planner and you'll get the download right there. We hope you get it and you love it, and then come back and tell us what you think about it, because we love hearing how we can improve and make it better year after year. This is our way of saying we love you, we support you and we're behind you all the way. All right, well, I hope you have the best week coming up. I've enjoyed our time together this week and I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. Until then, I hope you have the best week, take care.