Summer Break and Self-Care

The blog will be taking a break over the next week or so for a bit of a summer break. I hope everyone out there is also taking care of themselves over the summer and finding time to reflect, recharge, and reinvigorate.

Mirror Mirror: The Importance of Reflection

Judging by my completely unofficial tally of Facebook and Twitter, most schools are now out for the summer.  My friends and colleagues, teachers and school counselors, are all reveling in having wrapped up their school years and are excited about their upcoming summer plans.

Unless of course, you are me, in which case you still have a week left of classes and finals, and then graduation the following Monday.  But really, I'm not envious or anything.  No sir, not at all.

However, even though you may be done with your official duties for the year, and even though you may have one foot (or maybe two) already on a beach or at a campsite, you're not quite finished yet.  During the actual school year, we are usually running around at the highest rate of speed possible.  We are implementing preventative programs, gathering data, and dealing with in-the-moment crises of all sorts, large and small.  If we are lucky, we have some time to examine data on our programs and interventions to determine their effectiveness as well as to decide upon any possible changes for the next year.  Usually, though, we have very few moments during the year to look back and really reflect upon what we have done, determine if it was effective, and what our goals might be for the next year and beyond.

Remember graduate school?  Ah, those halcyon days of yore.  Reflection was mandated as part of the curriculum.  Supervision, both at your internship sites and your universities, was an essential part of helping you to grow as a school counselor.  Some of you had to write up case notes.  Some of you had to journal about your experiences.  Most of you had to have conversations with experienced professionals inside and outside of the schools on a regular basis that helped you to determine the effectiveness of your interventions and also assisted you in thinking about how you could change it here, tweak it there, or take it to a place of more depth.  Once you finished your degree program, you were declared knowledgeable and sent off into the world, but those supports that helped you to look back on your work and examine it more closely may not have followed you into the professional arena.

Thus, it becomes incumbent on us, once we are working in the schools, to make sure that we are including reflection as a vital part of our work.  As mentioned before, during the year you have probably had some time to look back on your work on a micro-level: this program here, a classroom lesson there, a six session group in the middle of the year.  Many of you trained in the ASCA Model have gathered data on your delivery services and have analyzed that information as each of your individual programs came to their conclusion.  However, now is the time to take all of these mini-reflections and look at them in the larger, macro context of the entire school year.  With the school year complete, you are now able to take all of the pieces of your year--groups, lessons, individual counseling, crisis interventions, career units, etc.--and fit them together to get a complete picture. 

Your end-of-year reflections can be formalized, at a given time and place, or they can be more laid back over time as the summer goes on.  They can be something you do with your immediate supervisor, with your team of counselors if you are part of a larger group of counselors, or on your own.  Some of you probably prefer to sit down with paper and pen or a computer to write or type your thoughts, and some of you simply want a quiet space to contemplate and think.  The beauty of this reflection time is that you can do it anywhere at any point, such as at the beach or by the pool (a suggestion I heartily endorse).  Here are some thoughts and questions to help guide your musings:

• Start with what went well.  Start with your successes.  This is vital and important.  Take some real time to look back and relish in the moments, the programs, the groups, and the conversations that went well.  We are way too quick to immediately jump into everything that went wrong and then into how we can fix it.  We allow the negative to become our focus, glossing over or even ignoring the many, many things that were successful and the amazing impact we are able to have on students, families, and education.  It is a long school year, and we, like the other members of the educational community, work very hard and put a lot of ourselves into our jobs.  Take that time to be proud of what you have accomplished and to celebrate it.  Only then should you move on to the rest.  That being said...
• Prevention:  Most classroom lessons, large group presentations, and programming that has a set calendar date fall into this category.  Many of your groups may also fit in here.  First, on a micro-level, were each of these programs necessary?  What was the impetus--school district or school mandate?  Was there data that demonstrated the necessity of the program, or was there just a popular push to have it?  After they were complete, did data (attendance, grades, discipline referrals, surveys, interviews, etc) support their effectiveness?  If the answer is no, is this a program that should be continued?  Altered?  Timed differently?  There is no point in continuing to invest your time and effort into a program that is not effective and for which there may not be a real demonstrated "need."  If any of these programs did not have a great impact, it may be time to consider eliminating it, changing-it up, or moving it to a different time in the year when perhaps that particular issue is more prevalent and on the forefront of peoples' minds.  Additionally, is it a program that is relevant to school counseling?  If it takes up a lot of your time and yet falls into the category of non-counseling duties, perhaps it is worth having a conversation with your administration about it being given to another person or group, or whether there is a way to streamline it so that it has less of an impact on your schedule.  Further, look at all of these on a macro-level.  Do you find that there is a good spread of programs throughout the year, or are there times when you (and the students, parents, teachers, and administrators) are trying to deliver and support six different and time-consuming interventions over a two-week time span?  It may be that this is unavoidable and that the programs are necessary within that window, but it is worth asking that question.  Even if they are all important at that specific time, are you able to perform at your best if you are stretched that thin?
• Reaction: Here is where you want to examine those situations that just seemed to "pop" up as the year went on.  You may have even chosen to run a group based on the growing needs of your students on a particular issue.  As concerns about students came up, did the referral system within your building work effectively so that you were able to intervene?  If not, what were some of the pitfalls?  How could you make it better for the next year?  As large crises came up, did you and the school team handle them effectively?  Did you have a documented plan?  Did you feel you had support from other staff within and outside of your school?  What might you do differently next year to make it more effective?  As you found that you needed to refer students and families outside of the school for additional help, did you have a referral list on hand that was helpful?  Did you have relationships with some outside support practitioners to help make the transition smooth?  Are there things you can do for next year to help make that process easier for you, your students, and their families?  Looking back, are there issues that seemed to pop up time and time again?  If so, would it be helpful to try to program a preventative lesson or presentation about that concern and collect data to see if it helped to head some situations off at the pass?  Would it be helpful to program time in the year for a group on issues that seem to always come up--grief and loss, divorce, social-skills?  Looking at it from a macro level, were there times of year where you seemed to deal with noticeably more crises or immediate issues (ex. before winter break, the end of the school year)?  Can you free up some additional time in those periods knowing they will be busier?
• Relationships: How are your relationships with other counselors in your building or district?  How are they with your administrators?  How are they with the teachers, the students, and the parents?  Oftentimes the key to your success is the strength of these partnerships with your stakeholders.  What did you do well to help to build and strengthen your bonds, and did it pay off?  Are there things that you might want to try to do next year to advance the communication between yourself and other members of your school community?  Inviting parents in for coffees or teas?  Setting up weekly or bi-weekly meetings with your administrator to share information about students and come up with intervention plans?  Using your time in the hallways to get to know the teachers in your building a bit more?  If you feel there is some part of your school community that you would like to know better, now is the time to consider ways to make that happen.

Through all of these reflections, the ASCA Model can help you to enrich the amount of information you have to work with.  Your Advisory Council made up of your various stakeholders (students, parents, teachers, administrators, and community members) can help you to examine your prevention programming and reaction strategies and give you additional perspectives that can assist you and/or your department to make decisions for the upcoming year.  A needs assessment of students and/or parents and/or other school staff can also give you more in depth information about what worked, what did not, what needs to be improved on, and how that improvement might take shape.  Then, you need to take stock of yourself:

• You as an individual, both professionally and personally.  Are you where you envisioned yourself being at the end of this school year?  If so, how were you able to meet that goal?  If not, was your goal realistic, and if it was, what prevented you from reaching it?  Did you have to stay at work every night until six, seven, eight o'clock?  Were you able to maintain an acceptable work/life balance?  Looking ahead, do you see yourself wanting to take on more leadership within your school, your district, or at the state and/or national levels?  Do you see yourself wanting to have more time for personal pursuits--hobbies, family, additional education?  When work became stressful, did you have a self-care plan that adequately met your needs?  Are there additional supports, either professional or personal, that you feel you need to put in place for the upcoming year?  What further training or education would help you reach your individual goals?

This last set of reflections is of primary importance, and, again, I feel we often gloss it over.  However, it is vital to examine your job within the context of your entire life to see if it is falling into place in the way that you expected, or if there are steps that need to be taken to put it into the proper context for you.  There may be things that you can do within your building or community to put your job into a place of balance, or there may be things you can do within your personal sphere that could also have a positive impact on achieving just the right note between work and life.  Remember that self-care is an ethical mandate, and that you can only be effective in your work if you yourself are taken care of. 

Once you have taken the time to reflect on these ideas and examined all the data and information, you can begin to pull together your calendar and programming for next year.  It is probably not realistic to think you are going to be able to change everything--I would recommend picking a few key things to focus on, change, or add, and allow those to be the goals for the year.  Maybe you were unable to run any groups this year, so perhaps adding one for next year in an area of demonstrated need would be a great way to start?  Maybe you want to examine an achievement gap in your building and help to facilitate an intervention, either on your own or partnering with other stakeholders?  It is important, also, to take your reflections and put them into a context of those that are immediate goals/changes and ones that may be more long term.  Perhaps you are interested in applying for RAMP, but doing it within a year is not going to work.  However, you can take steps this year to begin the transformation process that might allow you to apply within two years or even three.  Whatever your aims, taking real time to look constructively back on your year allows you to be proud of your successes and helps you to plan for the short and long term, both for your program as well as for you as a professional and individual.

Self Care: Who is your most important client? You are.

I distinctly remember that throughout my graduate program there was a lot of discussion about self-care.  A lot.  I, however, had been a teacher for many years and had worked in two different residential-life programs with high-school students.  I was sure I could easily manage any demands that were put upon me from my future job as a school counselor, and I was so excited and enthusiastic about getting to work and eager to see one kid after another and assist them with their problems.  By the end of the program, I thought that maybe there was some overkill with regards to the whole "self-care" thing.  How hard could it be?

Two months into my first job, exhausted and overwhelmed,  I realized that it was probably the most important thing we could have covered in my degree program.

I am working this year with all of the new school counselors in my county, and true to form about a month or so into the school year there were signs of stress:  long hours, extra hours on nights and weekends, a never ending barrage of parents, students, teachers, and administrators coming at you via e-mail, phone, or in person.  We tend to get into this job because we are nurturing--we want to help others.  However, as I and others quickly learned, in your role as a school counselor you are being asked to "give" constantly.  The counseling relationship is indeed a relationship, but it is a one-sided relationship.  Unlike friendships where you give emotional support to your friends and they also give emotional support to you, the counseling relationship is all give and no take from the counselor's perspective.  All of our energy goes out to the students with very little coming back to us.  Further, in order to empathetic we must be willing not only to be open to feeling and understanding a student's joys, but we must also be open to understanding their pain (Shallcross, 2011).  Additionally, as school counselors we can often end up in situations where we are assigned many non-counseling duties, leaving us with less time to help our students, families, and staff members.  Combine this with large case-loads, throw in a lack of support from other counselors, a director, or your administration, and you can find yourself melting down fairly quickly (Falls, 2010).  Thus, this is the reason that good graduate counseling programs regularly talk about self-care--it is important for new counselors to already have some ideas and structures in place that will assist them in taking care of themselves.

Think about it.  If you are impaired and emotionally drained, how can you hope to help others deal with their own problems and feelings?  In a 2011 article in Counseling Today, Lynne Shallcross discusses how on airplanes, the instructions are always to place your own oxygen mask on yourself before helping someone else with theirs.  Why?  Because if you've passed out from a lack of oxygen, you will be unable to help anyone.  She quotes counselor and doctoral student Sandra Rankin:

"If you're gasping for air, you can't help other people.  Counselors who neglect their own mental, physical and spiritual self-care eventually run out of 'oxygen' and cannot effectively help their clients because all of their energy is going out to the clients and nothing is coming back in to replenish the counselors' energy."

Moreover, self-care is an explicit ethical mandate for school counselors.  In the ASCA Code of Ethics, E.1.b, Professional School Counselors:

"Monitor emotional and physical health and practice wellness to ensure optimal effectiveness. Seek physical or mental health referrals when needed to ensure competence at all times."

It is also in the introduction to Section C: Professional Responsibility of the ACA Code of Ethics:

"...counselors engage in self-care activities to maintain and promote their emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual well-being to best meet their professional responsibilities."

Thus, it is not only helpful but ethical and a best practice to develop a plan and a structure that allows us to replenish our physical and emotional energy so that we are truly able to help our students and clients.  I compare it to singing.  As a singer, my whole body is my instrument--if I am tense in the wrong place or sick or exhausted, I am unable to produce the best sound possible for my conductor or my audience.  Similarly, in the art of counseling, we are also the instrument.  If we are physically and emotionally exhausted, how can we hope to be able to empathize with our clients or stay focused enough on what they are telling us and showing us in order to best assess their needs and devise a plan to help them?

How can you tell if you or a colleague is beginning to fray a bit at the edges?  You might not do well with a crisis, you might find yourself being ever more cynical about students and your job, you might find yourself taking more and more "mental health days," you might withdraw more and more from family, friends, and co-workers, your personal relationships may be suffering, and you might become extremely defensive with any constructive criticism about your job performance (Williams, 2011).  Additionally, there are some great questions from Gerald Corey to ask yourself if you are concerned about impairment or burnout:

• Is my personal life satisfying and rewarding?
• Are my relationships where I want them to be?
• To what degree am I taking care of myself, both physically and emotionally?
• Would I be willing for other (school counselors) I respect to know about my professional conduct and decisions?
• Am I willing to express my vulnerabilities through consultation or peer supervision?
• Am I generally consistent in my practice? (Williams, 2011)

Your answers to these questions should help to guide you in determining how much impact your work is having on your whole life.

It may seem counter-intuitive to make time to take care of yourself, but in this job the e-mails, phone-calls, and needs of all of our stakeholders will never stop--there will always be something else you could be working on or "one more thing" you could do before you leave the office.  I am someone who has perfectionist tendencies--I like to have everything done right, every "I" dotted and every "T" crossed before I leave the office.  However, I quickly had to realign my thinking once I began working as a school counselor.  Here are some tips and ideas about how to either remain well or find your way back to wellness:

• Work to accept that you will never have everything done at the end of the day--this job simply does not lend itself to that concept.  It is okay to leave work at the end of every day.  While it is normal to need to stay late on occasion or to come in every once in a while on a Saturday, this should not be an every day or every week occurrence.  If you are staying late every single day, limit yourself to staying late only two days during the week.  If you come in every Saturday, limit it to one Saturday during the month.
• Set boundaries for yourself.  It is okay if you do not want to have a parent conference at 5 p.m. on a Friday and instead offer an alternative day and time.  It is okay if you are trying to leave on-time at the end of the day and ask a teacher to come back and talk to you about a non-emergency topic in the morning.  It is okay if you do not check your work e-mails after you leave work at the end of the day or over the weekend.  For example, I know that if there is a pressing crisis in the evenings or on the weekend with regards to work or my students, I will get a phone call from my boss.  Anything else can probably wait until the next morning when I am at work.  If you do not set some reasonable boundaries for yourself, people will expect to have access to you and your skills 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and it is important that you have time to recharge so that you can best address their concerns.
• Schedule time for healthy habits.  Find time to cook and eat a good meal.  Get as much sleep each night as you possibly can.  Go the gym, yoga class, or take a walk with a spouse/partner/friend/child each day.  Schedule these into your week and make them priorities.  I make sure that I hit the gym or do yoga at least 5 times a week for an hour at a time.  Oftentimes I am able to work out frustrations from my day on the treadmill or center myself through the healing breath of a sun salutation.
• Develop a list of pleasurable activities and schedule at least one or two per week.  We do this so often with our students who may be a bit down--find out what they enjoy doing, whether its attending a ball-game or going to the movies with friends, and then help them to make it happen.  We need to take our own advice--when was the last time you went out with your girlfriends and laughed yourself silly over drinks with chips and guacamole?  When was the last time you went to a basketball game with your guy friends?  When was the last time you attended one of your kids' school-programs that you weren't in charge of making happen?  Not only do these help to recharge us, but they also tend to be great "perspective-checks"--there is a world and a life outside of our jobs.  I am a singer and often have one to two rehearsals per week and also take private voice lessons--I find it to be a wonderful way to force my mind to focus on something wholly unrelated to my job on a regular basis.
• Engage with friends and family. I have always thought that everyone who works in schools--teachers, custodians, counselors, administrators--need to have friends outside of that school to talk to.  This is especially true of counselors, as so much of what we deal with is confidential information--it's not really appropriate to share our frustrations with a parent or the intimate details of a student's life with anyone in our buildings.  It is important to maintain those relationships with our friends, partners, and spouses and allow those to replenish us when we are down or emotionally drained.  I make it a point to find time to have dinner or brunch with friends or attend a party, even if I'm exhausted or feel I don't have time--in hindsight I'm always glad I went.
• Consider supervision--either formal or informal. This is probably worth a separate blog entry, but in short, as interns we have this amazing support network--our on-site supervisors, our university supervisors, and a whole lot of peer supervisors who are in our classes.  Then we suddenly get into our first job and a lot of that goes away.  Hopefully you have a mentor, other counselors, or a director who you can go to for help or additional perspectives, but many counselors are alone in their buildings a great deal of the time.  It is a great idea to consider joining a formal supervision group, especially if you are thinking of pursuing state licensure as a therapist, but if not even getting together with some other counselors in the area on a regular basis to share cases and check for best practices.  It can make you feel a lot less isolated, help to validate the good work you are doing, and give you great ideas for situations you may be struggling with.
• Seek out your own therapy if needed.  Sometimes, even with our best efforts, it is still too overwhelming.  Sometimes we get that case that strikes a little too close to home and counter-transference gets in the way.  Sometimes what is going on in our personal lives begins to effect our day job.  Thus, sometimes it is necessary to get therapeutic help ourselves.

In this way, with your oxygen mask firmly in place, you can continue to help others put their own on for years to come.

The following work cited is available for members on the American Counseling Association website:

Shallcross, L.  (2011).  Taking care of yourself as a counselor.  Counseling Today, January 2011.

The following works cited are available for members on the American School Counselors Association website:  
 
Falls, L.  (2010)  Fan the flame.  Retrieved from http://www.schoolcounselor.org.  
Williams, R.  (2011)  The importance of self-care.  Retrieved from http://www.schoolcounselor.org.