Stop Finding Your Why

At some point, someone has probably told you to “find your why.”

I gave that advice last week.

I wish I hadn't.

In this episode, I’m getting more personal than I ever have on this podcast.

I’m sharing what one of the hardest years of my career has done to me physically…

what happened when I defaulted to the weakest advice I could have given…

and what the research actually says school counselors should be doing when purpose isn’t enough to keep you going.

If you’ve been trying to survive this year on nothing but passion and willpower- and it’s not working- 

This one’s for you.

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All names, stories, and case studies in this episode are fictionalized composites drawn from real-world circumstances. Any resemblance to actual students, families, or school personnel is coincidental. Details have been altered to protect privacy.

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Ready to spend a few days this summer with me, geeking out over school counseling and preparing for your best year ever? Grab your ticket here before this limited-seat event sells out!

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This work is part of the School for School Counselors body of work developed by Steph Johnson, LPC, CSC, which centers role authority over role drift, consultative practice over fix-it culture, adult-designed systems and environments as primary drivers of student behavior, clinical judgment over compliance, and school counselor identity as leadership within complex systems.

Transcript

Hard Year Shows Up Physically

urnout Explained By Demands And Resources

top The Loss Spiral With Boundaries

utonomy Competence Relatedness Come First

icroactions That Rebuild Engagement

uild The Floor Under Yourself

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Today I'm going to tell you about a piece of advice you've probably been given. And I gave it last week and it wasn't just unhelpful, it did damage. If someone has told you to remember your why, or you've told yourself that and you've tried and it's not working, and you're starting to wonder if the problem is you, stay with me because it's not you, and I can prove it. I think maybe everybody assumes that my school counseling job is just a piece of cake because I'm so passionate about it, because I'm so on fire for my colleagues, and because I'm always neck deep in research papers, citations, and what's really happening in school counseling across the country. But the truth is, I have the same challenges you do, same crazy caseloads. I'm one to almost 700, same dilemmas, same fears, and this year has been one of the hardest of my career. And in light of all of that, I did something last week that I wish I hadn't done. I was talking to a group of school counselors who trust me, who come to me for guidance. And I told them to remember their why. Me, the person who reads the research, the person who looks at the evidence. I handed them in that moment the weakest possible support I could have offered. And I knew it wasn't good enough the moment it came out of my mouth. It's not what you think. And what I found when I went to the research changed the way I understand everything we've all been through this year. Hey, school counselor, welcome back. We've been spending the last several months challenging assumptions and we're not stopping. But today, I need to talk to you, not about the school counseling work or about the research, but about what the work is doing to you. Because I know many of you have times in the day when you think, I can walk out the door and never go back. And if you're not okay, nothing else that I teach you will matter. In this episode, I'm gonna tell you what a really hard year has done to me, including what it did to me physically and what the research says we should be doing instead of chasing our wine. So if you're ready for some straight talk, my friend, some clarity in your work and maybe a little bit of rebellion, you are in the right place. I'm Steph Johnson, and this is the School for School Counselors podcast. So if my voice sounds a little different today, not sure if it's gonna get picked up by the microphone or not. Yeah, I started getting sick, and today would be the day before I go back from spring break. I'll let you do the math on that. So let me fill you in on the rest of the story I was talking about. We were in the mastermind last week, and my members and I were talking through a lot of the things we're seeing in our industry. Things like school counselors being replaced by so-called SEL teachers or behavior coaches with zero counseling training, outside organizations that are infiltrating schools, billing is starting to come into the picture with metrics and competition and almost no public advocacy for the profession. We also talked about the overwhelm, just the sheer relentless overwhelm. And in the middle of that conversation, I looked at them and said, we have to stay connected to our why. We have to stay connected to why we keep showing up day after day. Man, I heard that come out of my mouth and I thought, Steph, you know better than that. I did mean what I said, but I also knew that that was not good enough. And I think that all of you deserve to know why. Because if you've been trying to survive this school year on nothing but passion and willpower and it's not working, it's not because something is wrong with you. It's because that kind of advice has a ceiling. And the research is very clear about where that ceiling is and what you can do when you hit it. That's what this episode is going to be about. All right. I'm going to give you three concrete research-backed moves that you can make starting today. And none of them, thankfully, involve finding your why. But first, let me back up about a month. Because about a month ago, I was struck by Bell's palsy. I don't know if you know what that is, but basically, one half of your face looks like you've had a stroke. And the really crazy thing about this was I didn't even know what happened. I had been smiling so rarely that when I went to work on Monday with this half-paralyzed face, nobody noticed anything was different. That's crazy, right? The paralysis was invisible because no one was used to seeing me smile very much anymore, anyway. But what made me leave work in the middle of the day on that Monday were these strange, weird zaps that I was feeling through one half of my face. It was like electric shocks that wouldn't stop. And so I went into the doctor thinking something minor was going on. And the doctor asked me, hey, Steph, you understand that your face is not working correctly, right? And I disagreed with her. I fought back until she got a mirror to prove it to me. Y'all, my body was keeping the score even when I had lost count. Looking back, it should have been no surprise. This has been, hands down, one of the hardest years of my career. And I say that as somebody with almost 30 years in public education, who has endured things like the world's worst principal, the deaths and murders of several of my students, working on a campus that served high needs foster children and group homes. Y'all, I've seen and done a lot. And ironically, I'm on one of the so-called easiest campuses that I've ever worked on. Now, I can't tell you all the details about what's made this year so hard because I would like to keep my job for now. But when I sat down and intentionally listed all the major things that have happened this year, things that I have never encountered before in my career. So we're going beyond the behavior issues and the lawnmower parents and the politics, way beyond all of that. I still was able to count 12. 12 in nine months. Let me see if I can give you some examples without getting myself into too much trouble. Um, active, ongoing psychosis in the classroom. More than one subpoena. Challenging a campus organization that was invited onto my campus to provide at-risk support, but wasted no time in setting up a competing school counseling program. And also the loss of my most important colleague relationship on my campus. And y'all, that's not even all. And I want to tell you something that I really haven't said out loud to anybody. There have been days this year where I felt like I didn't want to go back. And I don't mean like I need a mental health day or give me a second. I mean days where I sat in my car in the parking lot and genuinely asked myself if I could walk through the doors. And I know so many of you are nodding right now because you've been there too. And that's why I'm hitting pause on our regular kind of episode today. Because the critical work that we do is important. And we'll get back to all that research back stuff. But I realized I've been spending months telling you what the research says about your school counseling program without stopping to ask what your school counseling program is doing to you. I have been trying to run on purpose and my why for months. Months. And the truth is when you keep getting punched in the face by things you can't control, your why starts wearing really thin, doesn't it? Teachers who are surly to you all the time, administration that works from an authoritarian viewpoint, telling you what to do, sometimes even distrusting you, student behaviors that are off the charts, angry parents, lawnmower parents, kids who are so addicted to their phones and their screens that they are desensitized to almost everything, and mental health concerns escalating all around us, but no one wants to address them beyond scrolling social media to find validation, right? We have tons of things making school counseling so much more difficult than it should really be. And in light of all of that, I sat in that room and said, reconnect to your why. And when I heard myself say that, I thought, God, Steph, that is not enough. Because one, I know the research. And two, I had just lived the limits of that advice in my own body. So let me tell you what I really know from both the research and from living through this this year. Because once we see this, y'all, we will never unsee it. Researchers, Arnold Baker and Evangelia Demarauti, have spent over two decades studying what actually causes burnout in the workplace. Their framework is one that I've talked about on the podcast before. It's called the Job Demands Resources Model. And it was first published in the Journal of Applied Psychology back in 2001. I want to walk you through the defining insight really carefully because really this helps reframe the entire school year. Think about your job as having two sides. On one side, you have the demands, the caseload, the crisis calls, the paperwork, the emotional weight of sitting with kids in pain or kids who are extremely dysregulated. And on the other side, you have your resources, supportive colleagues, autonomy, administrative backing, the permission to do your job the way your training says you should, and time to actually think. Now, here's what Baker and Dimerati found. Hard work alone is not the whole story. You can handle hard work. You've been handling hard work your entire school counseling career, right? But burnout becomes much more likely when demands stay high, while the resources that help you cope with those demands disappear. That's the combination that breaks people. The job gets harder at the exact same time that everything that used to help you manage the hard job is taken away. So let me see if I can say that in an even better way. It's not that your job is hard, it's that your job got harder while your support disappeared. So when I reminded myself of that, I felt like somebody had finally described my year in a language that made sense. It wasn't that I was losing my edge or that I'd lost my passion. It was that the demands of my work kept climbing while one resource after another was being pulled out from underneath me. And I bet if you're honest with yourself, you can trace that same kind of pattern in your own year. That's why find your why fails. Because find your why is a demand-side intervention. It's saying, hey, your work is beating you down. Well, just care about it more. Dig deeper, reach further into the well. But the well isn't low because you stop caring. The well is low because the system has been draining it for years. They've been taking away your resources while continuing to pile on more and more demands. That's not a motivation problem. That's a resource problem. And you cannot solve a resource problem by trying harder to feel inspired. And if you want to know what this looks like specifically in school counseling, Kim and Lambey published a comprehensive review of school counselor burnout research in the Professional Counselor in 2018. And you know what they found? That higher burnout was associated with non-counseling duties, large caseloads, lack of supervision, and lower occupational support. Every single one of those is a resource deficit, not a motivation deficit, not a purpose deficit, a resource deficit. So when someone tells you to find your why, including when that someone is unfortunately me, what they're actually doing is asking you to solve a resource problem with an emotional pep talk. And that doesn't work. The research is very clear on this. And quite frankly, my school year is very clear on this. So if find your why isn't the answer when you're having the kind of year that I'm having and you're probably having too, what is? I want to give you three things you can do. And just to kind of give you a roadmap so you know where we're headed, the job isn't to reconnect to your why. Okay, that we are not going to talk about that. The job is going to be to build the conditions that make your why possible. That means first we have to stop the bleeding. Then we have to figure out which of your core psychological needs is the most crushed. And then we're going to make the smallest possible move to feed it. So let me show you how we do all that. When you're in the middle of a difficult school year, every single day costs you something. It costs you energy, patience, optimism, your sense of professional identity, sometimes your sense that your work even matters. And the research shows that once that loss starts, it actually accelerates. Psychologist Stephen Hopfall published a theory in 1989 in the American Psychologist called the Conservation of Resources theory. And kind of the main idea is this psychological stress occurs when your resources are threatened, when they're actually lost, or when you invest resources and get nothing back. That last one, investing resources and getting nothing back, is what's happening every time you pour your heart into connecting to your why, and the system gives you nothing back in return. But there's more, and this should get your attention. Hobfall identified something called a loss spiral. When you lose one resource, it makes you more vulnerable to losing the next one. And losing that one makes you more vulnerable to losing the one after that. And once those start hemorrhaging, your autonomy is gone, your collegial support is gone, your counseling identity is being disintegrated. It's like each loss sets up the next one. It's not a linear process. It's not A, then B, then C because it's compounding. It's like tons of tiny snowflakes piling up on themselves, one on top of another, on top of another, until one day they finally create this huge avalanche. And you're standing there wondering how everything collapsed so fast. But it didn't happen fast. It was building the whole time. I'll tell you what my lost spiral looked like this year. The first thing was I lost a relationship with my person, my go-to, my ride or die, my wingman. And when I lost that, I lost the feeling that the other adults around me were on my team and that we were working toward the same thing. And once that went, the next hit came. I was forced to accept this community intervention program on my campus that directly undermines my school counseling program. It undermines my training, my judgment, and all the things I've built on my campus. And then once that happened, in conjunction with all the other student concerns and mental health concerns and parent concerns and all the things, I lost my smile. Literally lost it because the palsy took it. And nobody noticed because I hadn't been smiling. That's a loss spiral. Each loss sets up the next one. And all the why in the world was not gonna stop that. So here's what you can do: audit your resource streams. Sit down when you have five extra minutes and write down the top three things that are costing you the most energy right now. And let's be specific about what I mean right here. Because I'm not talking about huge systemic problems like my caseload is too high, or the district doesn't value school counselors, or no one's advocating for us. Those are real and they matter, but you can't fix those by next week, right? I'm talking about the things that are draining you currently, this week, personally, the specific energy leaks that you can actually reach. Here are some ideas just to kind of get you thinking. The colleague that dumps on you every morning before you even set your bag down. The recurring meeting that accomplishes nothing but eats up 45 minutes of your week. The habit of checking your email at home and carrying those issues into your sleep, the paperwork that you're doing that nobody reads, the behavior calls you're called to consistently and nothing gets better. Those kinds of things. And for each one you identify, ask yourself can I eliminate it? Can I reduce it? Or can I put a boundary around it? So we're not rebuilding the entire plumbing system here. We're plugging the leaks we can reach. And some of these, honestly, you're not going to be able to control. That's just the reality of our work. But conservation of resources theory tells us that protecting remaining resources matters, especially once our losses start to compound. The goal is to stop more preventable losses before they accelerate. So you don't have to fix everything. You just kind of need to stop the free fall. Let me give you a quick example. Let's say every afternoon teachers are sending you students for things that aren't really counseling referrals, right? There are classroom management issues or kids that just need a break. Every time you absorb those, it costs you time. It costs you focus. It costs you a little bit of your professional identity. And those are resource strains that you can name. Can you eliminate that? Probably not completely, but maybe you can create a referral form that asks teachers what they've already tried. Maybe you can block that hour for some scheduled sessions and communicate that to the rest of your school staff. So you're not fixing the problem, but you've plugged a leak. And according to Hubfell's theory, that one small act of protection starts to slow the loss spiral. And right now, that's what's going to keep you in the game. Then, once you've slowed the bleeding, the next question isn't what's my purpose? It's what do I need? Researchers Richard Dien and Edward DC have spent over 40 years building one of the major frameworks in motivational psychology called self-determination theory. You've probably heard about it. Their landmark paper was published in 2000 in The American Psychologist. And if you hear nothing else that I say today, hear this. Humans have three basic psychological needs, not wants, okay, needs. I'm going to walk you through each one because understanding these is the key to understanding why you feel the way you do right now in the school year. The first is autonomy, it's the sense that you have some control over your own actions and your own decisions, that the way that you spend your time and the choices that you make in your work are at least partly yours. When you have autonomy, you feel like a professional exercising judgment. But when it's taken away, you feel like a puppet being moved around by somebody else's agenda. The second need is competence, the sense that you're effective at what you do, that your skills matter, and that you're actually good at your work. When you have competence, you feel capable and confident. But when it's undermined by role confusion, by being asked to do things outside your scope, or by never getting feedback that acknowledges your skill or even that's grateful. You start to wonder if you even know what you're doing anymore. And then the third need is relatedness. The sense that you are meaningfully connected to other people who understand you and who value you. This is not surface level professional talk. This is real connection. When you have relatedness, you feel seen. But when it's absent, or worse, when it is replaced by surveillance or suspicion, you feel extremely alone, even when you're in a school building full of a bunch of people. Now, here's how this can change everything for us. Find your why treats purpose as the engine of motivation, as if your sense of meeting is what is driving everything else. But through a self-determination theory lens, it works the other way around. That feeling of purpose, that fire, that sense of this is why I do this work. It doesn't come from nowhere. It's more likely to be sustained when autonomy, competence, and relatedness are being fed. When you feel like you have agency in your work, when you feel effective, when you feel connected to people who get it, that's when your purpose shows up. It's a result, it's not a starting point. Which means when those three needs are being crushed, no amount of why finding can compensate. You cannot willpower your way past a thwarted psychological need. It would be like telling somebody who hasn't eaten for three days just to think about how much they love food. The thinking isn't the problem. The hunger is. And so for many of us, these needs aren't just going unmet, they're being actively crushed. Your autonomy isn't just unsupported, it's being overridden. Your competence isn't just uncelebrated, it's being undermined. And your relatedness isn't just absent, it's being replaced by suspicion and surveillance. Sound familiar? And this isn't just theory. A study by Fernay and colleagues published in Teaching and Teacher Education in 2012 looked at 806 teachers through this exact lens. They found that changes in perceived classroom overload and student disruptive behavior predicted changes in autonomous motivation, which in turn predicted emotional exhaustion. The conditions drove the motivational collapse, not the other way around. So when I ask myself this question, which need is most crushed? My answer was autonomy. For most of my school counseling career, I've had a high degree of autonomy on my campuses. I have built school counseling programs from my clinical training. I've made decisions based on my professional judgment and pretty much had the freedom to run my program in a way that not only I could stand behind, but that inspired the confidence of my administrators around me. But this year, that autonomy felt very threatened. I lost that safety of my most important colleague relationship on campus, the one person who had my back, who understood my work, and who stepped back and gave me room to operate. And when I lost that safety net, everything else felt so much more exposed. Then that community organization moved in and wasted no time in setting up what amounts to a competing school counseling program. And I was told to just accept it. On top of that, I had students with severe needs who required outside intervention, but I couldn't control whether parents followed up, couldn't control whether the students would even be accepted into the programs they needed to be in. And then I was navigating court testimonies, plural, with all the uncertainty that comes from that. So I felt like I wasn't driving the car anymore. I felt like I'd been locked in the trunk and been told to hush and just enjoy the ride. So I had to find one small place where I could take the wheel back. For me, it was really investing more deeply into a pilot program that I was running on my campus, getting very intentional about the data, the next steps, what the vision looked like beyond my campus and into my district, and really pouring myself into those effects for students. So every day for 10 or 15 minutes, I devote a specific pocket of time to analyzing and planning the next steps. And for 15 minutes, I feel like I have autonomy again. Like I am making the decisions I should be making. And that's what this looks like in practice. It's not a super dramatic turnaround or a transformation. It's one need, one small move, one week at a time. So here's your move. Ask yourself the question: which of the three needs, autonomy, competence, or relatedness, is the most crushed right now? Just pick one. Don't try to fix all three. Name the one that feels the most starved. Because the intervention is going to be different depending on the answer. If it's autonomy, do what I did. Find one place this week where you can make a decision that's yours. That's not coming from the building or the district. It's yours. Even if it's small. Choose a group topic. Choose how you structure a conversation with a student. Just reclaim one decision. If it's competence, do one thing that reminds you you're actually good at this. Think about a situation with a student where you made a difference. Use a more clinical counseling skill deliberately and notice that you did it well because you are a trained counselor. So heck like one for five minutes and let yourself feel it. If it's relatedness, have one real conversation this week with somebody who gets it. Not a vending session, not a can you believe what happened session. Just a real connection with somebody who sees you as a professional, but also as a human being. It just has to be a real connection. And then here's the last piece. This is where it all kind of comes together. You do not need to feel your why to act on it. Let me say that again. You do not need to be inspired, motivated, or emotionally connected to your purpose in order to do something that's consistent with it. You just heard me describe my 15-minute sit down with my data. That's something I chose on my own terms. And that wasn't just me feeding my autonomy. That was a values-aligned microaction. One small thing that looks like the school counselor I actually am. And here's why that matters beyond just feeling better in the moment. Remember Hobfall's loss spiral? There's another side to that. Gorjevski and Hobfall published a chapter in 2008 arguing that the same resource dynamics that drive burnout can actually drive engagement when they're reversed. A resource gain, even a little one, can start shifting your momentum in the right direction. One values-aligned action isn't just good for your soul. It is a resource deposit. It is a data point that is telling your nervous system, I am still a school counselor, I know what I'm doing, and this work means something. And it's not because you're just willing yourself to feel it, but because you're doing it. So that's what you've got to do. At the first opportunity, choose one microaction that reflects your school counseling identity. Write it down, put it somewhere that you'll see it, and then do it. That is not inspiration. Y'all, this is an intervention. So let me come back to where we started. I told a group of school counselors to reconnect to their why. And I meant it when I said it, but it wasn't good enough. Purpose matters, but you cannot access purpose when the conditions that make the purpose possible have been taken away. And so here's what I want you to take away from today. Don't find your why. Build the conditions that make your why possible. Stop the bleeding. Figure out which need is most starved, and do one small thing this week that looks like the school counselor you truly are. That's it. These are three things you can do today. And I want to say one more thing. Here's what I've learned from my own terrible, beautiful, exhausting school year. The why comes back. Not because you go looking for it, because you build a floor underneath yourself. And from that floor, you figure out you can stand up again. That your purpose was never gone. You just couldn't reach it from where you were standing. And for what it's worth, my face is recovering slowly. And two, that's not because I found my why. It's because I started protecting what I had left and doing one small thing each day that reminded me who I am in that building. If one of the things that you're missing the most is a space to think out loud with other school counselors who understand this work through real weekly consultation, not Facebook jipper jabber. That's what my school for school counselors mastermind is. The links in the show notes if you want more information. We'll be back to our regular kinds of episodes soon. I'll be holding the profession accountable, bringing the receipts, and challenging the things that need to be challenged. But today needed to happen first. Hey, I'm Steph Johnson. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast. In the meantime, the next time somebody tells you to find your why, know that you never lost it. You were just locked in the trunk. It's time for us to climb out, take the wheel, and go for a drive. Take care.