School for School Counselors Podcast

Habits for School Counselor Hustle

• School for School Counselors • Episode 119

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Ready to Tame the School Year Chaos? In this episode of School for School Counselors Podcast, host Steph Johnson dives into the power of building habits that stick—even in the whirlwind of school counseling life.

Discover how to manage your ever-growing to-do list using James Clear’s proven habit loop framework: cue, craving, response, and reward.

Steph’s got you covered with practical tips for mastering new habits (without chasing perfection) and shows how small wins can lead to big changes.

Grab your free Habit Planner here

00:00 Welcome and Introduction

00:59 The Importance of Developing Habits

01:40 Listener Review and Personal Introduction

02:57 Balancing Responsibilities and Habits

07:24 Understanding the Habit Loop

16:41 Implementing Habit Stacking

23:08 Consistency Over Perfection

26:37 Upcoming Topics and Action Plan


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Resources:

Clear, J. (2018). Atomic habits: An easy & proven way to build good habits & break bad ones. Avery.

Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., & Sheeran, P. (2016). *Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence.* Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198-229.

Lally, P., Van Jaarsveld, C. H., Potts, H. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). *How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world.* European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998-1009.

Neal, D. T., Wood, W., & Quinn, J. M. (2006). *Habits—A repeat performance.* Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(4), 198-202.

Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2007). *A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface.* Psychological Review, 114(4), 843-863.


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Speaker 1:

Hey there, school counselor, welcome back to the School for School Counselors podcast. I'm so glad that you've joined me for this episode. It's been so heavy on my heart here in the last week or so, so I actually had a different episode prepared for you, but this one was just leaning on me so hard. As we are coming through September, we're ending the beginning of the school year, excitement. The reality is starting to wear in for so many of our students and our staff, and we're heading headfirst into Shocktober, and so there's so much that's going to be happening. Right, the pace has been frantic, it's been frenzied, and we know it's only going to get more and more interesting. I know the good news is we are not going to be bored while we are at work for any day that we're there, but the bad news is we're going to have to come up with some better ways to manage some of the responsibilities in our programs, and so that's what I want to talk about this week as we talk about developing habits. Now, before you roll your eyes and think, steph, I don't have time for one more thing in my day, I don't need to talk about habits. I know how to make things happen. I want you to stick around. I want you to listen with an open mind because you know, if you've been listening to the podcast for any length of time, I'm always striving to bring you the most up-to-date, the most empirically validated research that I can find, and often it's going to challenge what you assume you know. So hang in here with me. I promise I'm going to make it well worth your time. Hey, before we jump into that, I would love to share another one of the amazing reviews that we received for the podcast recently from Glenda the Good, and they titled their podcast review Great Resource for New and Seasoned Counselors. Then, underneath those five shiny gold stars they gave us, the review went on to say this this is my second year as a school counselor, but my 38th in education. Steph gives great advice and encouragement through her podcasts. She also shares wonderful resources and ideas that are easily implemented. So happy to have found this resource. Thank you, glenda the good, for that. It just touches my heart when all of you are willing to take a few minutes and leave a positive review on the podcast. You have no idea what that means to us, both in helping get word out about the podcast, but also to know that all this time and preparation is worth something, that it's reaching you and it's making a difference. So thank you very, very much, that it's reaching you and it's making a difference. So thank you very, very much.

Speaker 1:

Before we go any further I always forget to do this I just want to introduce myself. I'm Steph Johnson, the founder of School for School Counselors and a full-time school counselor. Just like you, you know, I often get asked the secret I'll put that in quotation marks of how I get everything done. I'm a busy person. I work full-time as a school counselor with a student population of just under 700 students as a solo counselor. This is a treat for me this year. Last year I had almost 900. So this has been a treat this year.

Speaker 1:

But in addition to working full-time in my school, I have a family. I have a teen and a tween in my household that are running to lots of different events and lessons and goings on. I'm also married and my husband has a very unpredictable schedule, and then I'm running school for school counselors. You may see some things that are easy to see on the outside, like social media pages. We have three of those the emails that I send to you during the week podcast episodes and things like that but then there's also a ton behind the scenes that you don't see, like scheduling, paying the bills, building and managing and implementing materials in the mastermind, maintaining the website, consulting with other people, answering emails and questions.

Speaker 1:

There's just so many things that are going on in my world, and so, again, I get asked a lot of the time how in the world can you possibly manage all that? Now, the real answer is often I don't feel like I'm doing a very good job right. There's always things that I wish I could do better. There's always things that I wish I could do better. There's always more that I wish I could get to, but for the most part, I feel like I'm holding in there pretty well, and so if there is a secret I would have to say the secret is my habits. I think without my habits, I would be an even bigger basket case than I feel like I am now, but I have developed the routines, procedures and structure to carry me through my day, and that's really what I want to talk with you about this week. How do you build habits that stick even when life gets chaotic?

Speaker 1:

Now, right before I recorded this podcast episode. I hosted a data discussions session with my mastermind group and we were talking through all of the different ways that we're collecting data on our campuses what data we're grabbing, why we're doing it, what's the outcome and what are things looking like along the path. And we have lots of folks in that group who attend our data discussions events religiously Every single month. They're there wanting to learn and grow and improve their efforts, but at the same time, they're experiencing a lot of roadblocks in doing the kinds of things that they want to do. And as we were talking this afternoon, I mentioned, you know, I don't think it's because of lack of willpower, I don't think it's lack of education or intelligence. I don't even think it's lack of time. What I really think it is is just getting so bogged down in our mental space that we can't even stop and conceive that there would be anything else that we would need to be working on right, because we're constantly putting out fires, we're looking at the next thing that needs to happen and we're just not sitting and thinking about capturing use of time data, because it's not a habit yet.

Speaker 1:

But once we develop those habits, then it just becomes a non-negotiable, if you've ever tried to implement a new habit intentionally. It's sometimes like herding kindergartners, which is also like herding cats. Right, you're trying to put everybody together and get everybody in a straight line, but there's always somebody and usually more than one that's running off in the wrong direction. We have to have habits in our lives to help us manage our time, to help us stay on top of our self-care and to be effective at work, especially with the helter-skelter way that our days unfold, right, we don't even know what's going to be confronting us when we walk in the doors each morning. We've got to have some habits in place to make sure that we're doing the right thing and that we're making our work sustainable, that we don't constantly feel like we're in reactive mode. Our habits can really help us with all of that.

Speaker 1:

Habits come from what we call the habit loop. Charles Dewey and the Power of Habit talked about cue, routine, reward, where we experience a cue to the behavior, so something reminds us or compels us to do something Routine, which is where these habits actually become the habits. We're actually doing them, and then reward. We get something out of it and that's how we sustain that habit loop. Now, if you've worked with me regarding habits at all. You'll know that I'm a huge fan of James Clear and his book Atomic Habits, and he reimagined this cue routine reward loop as cue craving, cue craving response reward. So we changed it up just a little bit and I want to walk through the pieces of this loop so you can think about the components you have in place currently or perhaps some areas where you could stand to improve. Now these are not super intense. They shouldn't be very time-consuming or detailed, but you do need to think about whether or not you actually possess them.

Speaker 1:

First is the cue, and in my experience this is the piece most people miss. We think that just by exerting some willpower we're going to be able to remember to do this new habit, and we know from research and just human nature that that's not the case. We have to have something to make it obvious to our brain that this needs to happen. This needs to happen. James Clear recommends overt cues to get started with, things like sticky notes or notes to yourself or alerts on your phone or calendar reminders Something very in-your-face and non-negotiable to remind you to implement the new habit. Remind you to implement the new habit. You can also put some procedural cues in place where you say, after I do X, then I'm going to do Y, and you're creating a bit of procedural memory for yourself, that one takes a little bit more effort.

Speaker 1:

Clear recommends the more overt cues to start with. But you need to have a cue and I can't tell you how many school counselors I've worked with, both in our data discussions and implementing initiatives through our mastermind and even in our Get the Job program, where when we talk about progress or lack of progress, I will ask about cues and find out that they've not created any cues. We give ourselves a lot of credit and we think we're going to remember to do these things. If I'm just intentional, if I just have enough willpower, I'm gonna get it done. But if you've ever gotten to the grocery store and couldn't remember your grocery list after you got there, you know Our brains are not as reliable as we often think they are. You've got to have the cue to make the behavior obvious. Second, you need the craving. There needs to be something that makes this behavior attractive. It could be even just the anticipation of a reward that makes a habit seem more appealing. We could build excitement in our brains for completing something that we don't really want to do by pairing that with something that we enjoy or something that gives us pleasure. I'll give you a couple of examples.

Speaker 1:

On my campus, I'm responsible for some IEP counseling. I love it because it's direct contact with kids and that's what I'm all about. But when I do IEP counseling, there are some additional roadblocks, because I'm constantly chasing kids' schedules to try to find them. In an elementary school, a lot of our IEP kiddos have other related services. They're going to speech, they're going to occupational therapy, they're going to academic resource time, they're going to any number of different programs on campus, and so tracking them down within their crazy schedules is really tough, and so I find myself just wanting to put it off. But when I remind myself of how desperately I want to be rid of the problem of chasing these kids around campus, I seem to find some more motivation to get it done.

Speaker 1:

Now, that's not a habit per se, but it gives you an idea of how we can conceptualize this to really make ourselves want to complete. So many times my use of time data has saved my rear end or it's provided proof in some sort of tricky conversation. So I don't need a tangible craving for collecting my use of time. The anticipation of being able to illustrate in black and white the needs of a student is more than enough for me to embark in that journey. Now, that may not be the same for everybody, and that's okay, but I'm just trying to give you some thoughts about how do we create a craving for the habit? How do we make it attractive? What's the payoff? Third, we need a response. The response needs to be easy.

Speaker 1:

So when we're looking to create a new habit and I'm just going to go with the use of time example for now, because I know that's one that a lot of school counselors either want to be able to do or are now mandated to do we have to reduce the friction around those habits to make it as easy as possible. If I'm looking to establish a habit of collecting use of time data, the last thing that I need is to have to sit down at my desk, remember what I did for the past two hours, find the right spreadsheet file, open that, scroll to the right day on the spreadsheet and then enter my information. If I have to go through all of those steps to complete that task, I'm just not going to do it. It's just too time consuming, it's too taxing and I'm probably not going to be in the mental space to make that successful. So instead it has to be stupid easy. I need to have that spreadsheet up and open on my desktop all day long, or I need to have a planner open on my desk that I can jot things down on the fly, or I need to schedule alerts on my phone to remind me enter your information real quick. It's got to be as easy as possible to implement it, because if you're going through 42 steps to start this new habit, you're just not going to do it All right. So we've got our cue, we've made it obvious, we have our craving, we've made the behavior attractive and we have our response that the behavior is made easy.

Speaker 1:

The last piece in Clear's framework is reward making it satisfying. In Clear's framework is reward making it satisfying. It does not have to be anything big. It doesn't have to be going and buying a new outfit or treating yourself to a latte or any of the other things you usually see people recommend. It could be very small and immediate, taking a five-minute break, enjoying a snack, but the research tells us that that can still significantly reinforce our habit formation.

Speaker 1:

Here's a silly example of that. I keep a candy jar for staff in my office. I love it when people stop by for a treat. It gives me the opportunity to check in with them, see how things are going, and I've had some of the best conversations just from people coming to get a little Snickers bar. But I have a special reserve in my supply closet. I know it's there and it sounds silly, but if I let myself go get one of those, it feels so special because it's different. It's not always out and available. My Ghirardelli chocolate squares are a treat. They feel like an indulgence because they're different from what's available to everybody else. So it doesn't matter how silly it feels. All that matters is does it work for you?

Speaker 1:

But if we can repeatedly cycle through this loop of cue, craving, response, reward we can create habits that are automatic. We don't even have to think about it, we just create them. A study by Neil Wood and Quinn 2012, shows that almost half of our daily behaviors are driven by habit. That means most of what we do is on autopilot. It's a form of procedural memory. So if we provide the context and conditions to develop the habit, y'all you can totally make this happen. So within that framework, there's also another pro move you can use to really implement new habits into your routines. It's called habit stacking. This is something that I talked with my masterminders about today in their use of time and their campus data initiatives. Habit stacking is attaching a new routine to one that already exists, so the new habit is writing the coattails of something that you already do.

Speaker 1:

I sent an email recently about one of my morning habits. I have a Keurig coffee maker in my supply closet. I even remember telling you man, be jealous of that's really glamorous. But every morning when I get to work, I go to the coffee maker and I start a fresh cup of coffee. That's the way that I start my day and I've just always, by nature, preferred to do it that way. Once my coffee is ready and I walk back into my office from the supply closet, the first thing that I do is check my emails that have come in overnight, and then I triage my calendar and my to-do list. That's the way I get my day going.

Speaker 1:

Before I started that habit stack, I would make a cup of coffee and then I would wander around and I would just kind of do whatever came to mind. I might see who was already at work. What's going on with them, how are they feeling? I might check my mailbox. I might have been making copies at the copier before everybody else got to work, but it was random every day and I never really felt in control of how my day was starting. Now, with my new habit stack, I don't even have to think about it, it just happens and I feel so much more prepared and productive in my day.

Speaker 1:

Now I'm not suggesting that you create the same habit stack that I have, but what are some ways that you can piggyback off of things that you already just do? You don't even have to think about it, they just happen. How can you piggyback some new habits on the back of something like that? Lally and team in 2010 looked at real-world habit formation and found that it takes an average of 66 days to form a new habit and that by linking new behaviors to existing routines, you actually accelerate that process because you're using the existing pathways in your brain to catalyze those new behaviors. James Clear says that we conceptualize it as after this current habit, I will do this new habit, and that's how you can really integrate these new initiatives into your routine without feeling overwhelmed or like you have to find a lot of time or like it's going to be too much. It needs to be super specific. As I'm drinking my morning coffee, I'm going to spend five minutes organizing my priorities for the day Super specific. And if you can do that, if you have the cues in place to remind you and you are diligent about it, typically in 66 days or less, you are going to reap the rewards of that practice.

Speaker 1:

Now, as we think about developing new habits, we need to remember that these habits have to be very small and very manageable. If you try to introduce too many habits at once, research tells us it leads to failure. It's just like herding those cats we were talking about earlier. If we try to grab them all at once, we're going to lose control of them. Right, they're going to be running all over the place and there's no way we can scoop them all up with two hands. But if we focus on one at a time, we're much more likely to get those little things where we need them to stay.

Speaker 1:

We talk a lot about cueing success in our mastermind, and I've talked about that already. It makes me think about a study cited by Neil, where there were some monkeys who were trying to earn drops of juice. They had a lever in their enclosures and a light that came on. So once the light came on they could push the lever and they would get a couple of drops of juice. And what they noticed was, when the monkeys were able to get the juice, of course they got that dopamine hit. They were very happy about that and so when they had the opportunity to push the lever, they were doing it because they wanted to get the juice and they were developing that habit. But because there was also a light involved, they found that eventually the monkey started getting the dopamine hit when they saw the light light up, before they ever even hit the lever for the juice. So that is what happens when we cue ourselves effectively.

Speaker 1:

It could be your physical location. Have you ever gotten in your car and seriously thought about whether you should buckle your seatbelt? Usually not right. As soon as you get in the car you buckle your seatbelt. That's a cue. The environment for a lot of addicts can cue their cravings right. They don't even have to see or smell alcohol or drugs. Just being in the wrong environment can give them overwhelming cravings. You can also cue yourself by performing a preceding step. We just talked about that with habit stacking. First this, then that, and sometimes seeing a specific person can cue behaviors for us. There are lots of things in our world that can cue our behaviors, so you can do the same things After morning duty. I'm going to triage my daily intentions Things like that. These small wins will start to accumulate and create bigger successes.

Speaker 1:

Wood and Neal 2007 showed that these small repeated behaviors are more likely to turn into long-lasting habits because they feel less intimidating and they're easier to integrate into our daily routine. So keep it simple. Don't make it super complicated. How can you cue yourself to engage in these new behaviors? And then, last, I just want to remind you that this is all about consistency, not perfection. Developing new habits is not about being perfect. You are not perfect, I am not perfect. Slip-ups are part of the game. That's okay. Lally and team found that missing one opportunity to perform a new behavior did not materially affect the habit formation process, meaning you can't be an all or nothing thinker. You can't say, oh well, you know, I missed yesterday. I guess that all goes down the tubes. There's no sense in trying now, which sounds kind of funny as we talk about it, but you know and I know, our brains often go that direction.

Speaker 1:

Additionally, harkin and Team 2016 found that habit tracking and self-monitoring together significantly increase the chances of success in building new habits. This does not have to be complicated. It could be a habit tracker, it could be something on paper that you check off each day, it could be a habit tracking app, something like the Habit Tracker app. There's one called Habit Rabbit, there's one called Strides, or it could be something even as simple as a sticky note. It does not matter how you choose to track these new habit initiatives. The important part is that you self-monitor and encourage yourself along the way.

Speaker 1:

And then, last, if you can focus on the kind of person that embodies the habit that you want to develop versus the habit itself, you are more likely to be successful. So you might tell yourself I am a data-driven school counselor versus I want to collect use of time data counselor versus I want to collect use of time data. Same idea, really, at its core, but the way that we conceptualize it in our mind is a big deal. It gives us a little more self-compassion, a little bit more opportunity for reflection, and it helps us see ourselves as competent and capable of reaching our goals. You're kind of enforcing those habit building mechanisms from the inside out, which is going to make it feel so much more easy and effortless. All right, so that was a lot of information to throw at you. Who knew habits could be so complicated? Let me break it down for you and kind of try to bring it all together.

Speaker 1:

Habits operate in a loop. I like James Clear's conceptualization of cue craving, response and reward. We need to make sure that we have those components in place to urge us on towards success. Start small and focus on one simple task at a time. Use habit stacking to link new behaviors to the routines that you've already established, and remember that consistency is your goal, but perfection is not. You don't have to be perfect all the time, and I wouldn't want you to be, because then you would lose some of the best things about you that make you amazing.

Speaker 1:

Next week, the topic's going to change a little bit. In the podcast, we're going to begin a month of episodes focused on serving special student populations, and I'm not just going to be talking about special education in 504. We're going to take a global view of how school counseling looks when we're serving students with different kinds of disabilities. We're going to look at specific challenges we face as school counselors and some of the outdated practices that are still very common in our world. They hurt my heart. And then we're going to get you ready for your holiday outreach initiatives, because that often involves a substantial amount of your special student populations.

Speaker 1:

So make sure you hit subscribe in your podcast player. You're not going to want to miss any of these upcoming podcast episodes, I promise you. So your action plan for this week One subscribe to the podcast. Two start one new habit stack routine this week with a cue, craving, response and reward. If you'd like a planning sheet to help you out with that, go to the show notes here in your podcast player of choice and we'll have a link for you to download it lickety-split to get your habit stack going. I'll be back soon with another episode of the School for School Counselors podcast, but in the meantime, I hope you have the best week, take care and keep being awesome. I'll see you soon.