Last week, we talked about the advocacy trap school counselors can fall into when we mistake awareness for actual change. This week, let’s take that conversation one step further. If explaining your role better isn’t enough, what actually helps you become influential inside your school? The answer may have less to do with winning one important meeting and more to do with what happens on all the days when you aren’t trying to convince anyone of anything.

Influence Starts Before You Make the Ask

Imagine standing at the copier 20 minutes before a meeting with your principal. You’ve got your talking points ready. You’ve printed the standards. You’re prepared to explain why a responsibility on your plate doesn’t belong to the school counseling program. Here is the hard truth: by the time you’re standing at that copier, much of what will determine how your argument is received has already happened. Influence isn’t just the argument you make, it’s the position from which your argument is heard.

Organizational research gives us some helpful language for understanding this. When someone without formal authority is trying to influence someone who does have formal authority, a common strategy is to point to an outside authority. Researchers call this a legitimating tactic. For school counselors, it sounds a lot like this… “ASCA says this is inappropriate.” “The ethical standards say I should be doing this instead.” “The National Model recommends something different.”

That information may be useful and may even strengthen your case. Yet the existence of a standard doesn’t automatically make someone act on it. Information can support influence, but it can’t substitute for influence.

The same is true for data. Data can be incredibly powerful, especially when it connects to something the decision-maker already cares about. That’s the key. Your principal probably isn’t lying awake at night worrying that your program isn’t perfectly aligned with a professional model, but they may be worried about chronic absenteeism, substitute shortages, behavior incidents, test scores, parent complaints, or a dozen other problems that are creating immediate pressure.

Those priorities are not necessarily distractions from your influence. They may actually be the doorway to it.

Stop Starting With School Counseling

This may be one of the hardest things for school counselors to hear, but your principal does not need to care about school counseling as much as you do.

You went to graduate school for this. You believe in the work and understand what a strong school counseling program can mean for students. It can be incredibly frustrating when the people making decisions about your schedule and responsibilities don’t seem nearly as invested in the profession as you are.

Still, your job isn’t to make your principal fall in love with school counseling. We waste a lot of energy trying. We explain why the program matters. We educate. We send articles. We talk about the National Model. We explain why small groups are important and why lunch duty shouldn’t be on our plates.

What if you stopped starting there and started with the problem your administrator is already trying to solve?

Instead of saying, “I need more protected time for small group counseling,” imagine saying, “We’ve got 38 sixth graders whose attendance has dropped below 90%. I’ve been looking at the numbers, and I think there may be something we’re missing. Can I show you what I’m seeing?”

The school counselor hasn’t changed, the expertise hasn’t changed, and the skill set hasn’t changed… but the conversation has. You’re no longer asking someone to protect school counseling simply because school counseling deserves to be protected. You’re bringing useful professional thinking to a problem they already know exists. That creates a completely different opportunity.

Your Expertise Is Bigger Than a List of Services

School counselors sometimes accidentally make their own role smaller by assuming that legitimate school counseling work has to look like traditional school counseling.

A student has an attendance problem, so we think about a check-in, a group, goals, or individual counseling. A student has behavior concerns, so we look for an intervention, a behavior chart, or another familiar strategy. Those approaches may be appropriate. Sometimes they are exactly what a student needs. Sometimes they aren’t.

One of the most valuable things a school counselor can bring to a campus is the ability to understand students well enough to see a problem differently. Consider an attendance intervention where students with significant attendance concerns become peer mentors for younger students facing similar struggles. Instead of treating those students only as the problem to be fixed, they are given a meaningful role in helping address the larger issue.

Or consider a PBIS initiative that intentionally recruits disconnected students and students with behavior concerns to become the people noticing and reinforcing positive behavior in others. Those ideas may not look like the traditional picture of school counseling. There may be no worksheet, feelings chart, or standard check-in involved.

Still, look underneath them… Motivation. Belonging. Identity. Peer relationships. Connection. Student engagement. THAT is school counseling expertise. Sometimes the greatest value you bring to your campus isn’t delivering another familiar intervention. Sometimes it’s helping people understand a student problem differently enough to create a better response.

When your administrator starts seeing you as someone who notices patterns others miss and develops thoughtful responses to complicated problems, something begins to shift.

They aren’t just thinking, “The counselor runs groups.” They may start thinking, “She sees things about our students that we’re missing.” That’s a completely different professional position.

Be Careful: Useful Is Not the Same as Influential

There is an important warning here. You might hear this conversation about solving campus problems and immediately think, “Okay, I need to become indispensable.”

Please hear us when we say NO. Don’t do that to yourself. Schools are very good at using up competent people. You’re capable. You care. You solve problems. People quickly learn that if they hand you something messy, there is a pretty good chance you’ll figure out how to make it less messy.

That makes you useful ,but it does not automatically make you influential. There is a huge difference between people seeking your labor and people seeking your judgment.

Listen to the language.
“Can you handle this?” or “What are you seeing?”
“Can you take care of that?” or “What do you think we should do?”
“We need you to run this.” or “I wanted your thoughts before we made a decision.”

One set of questions is asking you to do work. The other is asking you to think with the people making decisions. That’s the difference. Influence means people begin to seek your judgment, not just your labor.

You do not build influence by attaching yourself to every campus priority and volunteering to fix everything. Campus problem plus counselor willingness does not automatically equal advocacy.

The better question is this: Does this problem intersect with genuine school counseling expertise, and can I contribute something meaningful to how we understand or respond to it? That question has a boundary built into it. Not every campus problem belongs to you. Some do, and those are the opportunities worth paying attention to.

Start With the Problems They Already Feel

If you want to begin building more influence, consider asking your administrator a simple question: What are your biggest challenges this year, and where might school counseling actually be able to help? Notice what this doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean saying, “How can I help?” and accidentally volunteering yourself into 14 new responsibilities. It means listening for the problems where your understanding of students can provide something useful that isn’t already available.

Maybe your school is struggling with attendance or there is a behavior pattern nobody has figured out. Maybe disconnected students aren’t responding to the strategies currently being used. Maybe there is a recurring issue with peer conflict, motivation, school engagement, or belonging. Those are places where your judgment may matter. The goal isn’t to convince everyone in the building that school counseling is important in the abstract. The goal is to consistently demonstrate what happens when school counseling expertise is brought to a real problem.

That is the heart of what we’re beginning to call project-based advocacy inside the School for School Counselors Mastermind. Instead of asking school counselors to broadly explain why their profession matters, we’re looking at actual campus needs and asking where their expertise can make a meaningful difference.

You don’t have to tell people over and over what school counseling can do when they have the opportunity to watch it do something.

Credibility Builds Over Time

This kind of influence doesn’t happen because you say the perfect thing in one meeting. That’s actually good news. You don’t have to carry the pressure of finding the magical sentence that suddenly changes your administrator’s mind.

Credibility builds through repeated experiences. You bring thoughtful insight to a problem. You help create a response that fits the students and the campus. People see the outcome. You continue demonstrating that you can look at complicated situations and contribute more than another pair of hands.

Over time, you may notice the change. You start hearing about problems before someone has already decided what to do and assigned you a task. Your principal asks, “What are you seeing?” instead of, “Can you go handle this?” You’re invited into conversations because someone wants your perspective, not because they need someone to take something off their plate.

Eventually, your administrator might stop you in the hallway and say, “I’ve got something I want to run by you. What do you think?”

That may sound like a small thing, but it isn’t. You’re no longer beginning every important conversation from ground zero. You aren’t constantly trying to establish why your professional judgment should matter. They’re already seeking it. That’s influence.

Build the Kind of Expertise People Come Looking For

So let’s go back to the copier. The appropriate and inappropriate duties list is sitting there in the tray. Maybe you take it with you. Maybe the information is relevant to the conversation you’re about to have. Before you pick it up, though, ask yourself a few different questions…

What problem does my principal actually need help solving right now?
Is this a place where my school counseling expertise can genuinely contribute?
What am I seeing about students, relationships, motivation, belonging, or patterns on this campus that could help us think about the problem differently?

You spend a lot of time trying to sell your program, your services, and your professional judgment. Maybe what you really need to demonstrate is your ability to understand students and see possibilities that other people haven’t seen yet. Build that kind of credibility consistently enough, and eventually you may not always be the one asking for the meeting.

You may become the person someone stops in the hallway because they want your thoughts before they decide what happens next. That’s a very different kind of advocacy. It’s advocacy that doesn’t begin with, “Let me explain why my role matters.” It begins when the people around you have already experienced why your judgment matters.

If you’re looking for a place to keep thinking through these ideas, the School for School Counselors Hub and Blog are here to help you challenge some of the assumptions that make this work harder than it has to be. Inside the School for School Counselors Mastermind, we’re taking those conversations even further by working through real campus problems, real constraints, and the decisions school counselors actually have to make. The goal isn’t to make you louder or busier. It’s to help you build the fluency, credibility, and professional judgment that allow you to work more strategically inside the school you’re actually in.

You don’t have to become indispensable to become influential. You need to become someone whose judgment is worth seeking.