President’s Letter: Practicing with New Resolve

It’s the New Year, that wonderful time of the year when all the end-of-year holiday activities are behind us and we begin thinking about our New Year’s resolutions. We all know how that plays out. I always wonder why those well-thought-out, good-intentioned resolutions never seem to last past a month or so – at least for me. And to be quite honest, resolutions bring many anxious moments and hard-to-maintain expectations to the forefront and I stress about getting the results I wanted.

I’ve decided this year, I’m overhauling my New Year’s resolutions and framing them in a different light: not as something I resolve to do, but rather as something I will practice – daily – doing. I am hoping that putting my energy into practicing new skills regularly will give me the ability to do the thing causing me to make a resolution in the first place. We need to eliminate anxious thinking, not add to it!

This month we are focusing on student anxiety. When I read about the topics in this issue, I recognize that my students in middle school, and all students, are dealing with more and more stressors causing more and more anxious feelings. Not only general anxiety, but test anxiety and, since the late 1970s, technostress has been escalating off the charts! The list doesn’t shrink but keeps growing, and that’s where all of you come in.

As school counselors, we are in the best position to work with students on ways to practice dealing with anxiety and anxious thoughts. We have tools to share and can take a proactive approach with our students in the classroom, in groups and with individuals. I hope you will find some insights and support from the newsletter this month. We all need ways to deal with stressors in our lives.

I wish you the best of the new year, and if this year turns out to have challenges like most years do, I hope that you’ll have tools in your toolbox to survive and even thrive through those times. I hope you and your students will join me is practicing skills like mindfulness, deep breathing and other coping strategies that lay the groundwork for us to be able to resolve these struggles on a more permanent basis. Hopefully, we can call upon those skills next time we need them – because we have made them part of our daily practices.

Contact Lyn Bush, NCSCA president, at president@ncschoolcounselor.org.