Review Your Year Without Judgment: An Honest Look at What Actually Happened

You can listen to the full episode too! Listen to Episode 47: Review Your Year Without Judgement

By September, nine months into the year, most of us are carrying some tension regarding the roadmap we started with vs. the actual road we traveled.

In this episode, Blaze guides you through a clean, judgment-free year review. Not to fix anything, not to score yourself, but to get real about what actually happened, what created movement, what kept repeating, and what fell flat. She shares her own year in full detail: the podcast reboot, a garden built with crow/raven supervision, a water tank emergency, perimenopause curveballs, and a surprising rejection of AI for her work beyond simple descriptions and summaries. If you're done comparing yourself to curated highlight reels and ready to see where you really stand, this episode is your foundation.

🌿 In this episode we explore:

• The year-review process: noticing what actually happened vs. what you planned before judging
• Blaze's road trip metaphor — where you lingered, stalled, accelerated, or detoured
• Questions to ask yourself: what produced results? what kept showing up? what fell flat?
• Blaze's 2026 highlights: podcast launch, garden construction, raven nesting, family trips, solar panel and water tank fixes
• The perimenopause surprise: heat intolerance, body changes, and modeling self-acceptance for her daughter
• Her AI reckoning: where it helps vs. where it undermines creative ownership
• Why real gatherings matter: belonging, connection, and holding space for real people (and why Blaze hosts the Sept 23rd equinox gathering)
• A preview of next week: how to look at this year's reality and decide what to do next

🌟 IMPORTANT: Blaze didn't mention this live on the recording — the Autumn Equinox Gathering is Wednesday, September 23rd at 7pm Eastern. This is the why behind her gatherings: real belonging, real connection, real people supporting each other through honest reflection. Register here to join us

Hello, my friends. This week is a really interesting one. I want to talk about reviewing our year from the perspective of what actually worked this year and what didn't for you.

And this is gonna be different from worrying about whether it lined up with who you feel you are, whether it is what you wanted to have happen or it isn't what you wanted to have happen.

This episode is not about deciding what you want to do next or any of that stuff.

It's actually about how you can take an honest look at your year and take some notes for yourself.

And I think when I do this, it helps me get a greater sense for who I really am.

Energy that I've actually been holding and what's been expressing in my life, and I want to help you to do this process while refraining from self-judgment.

So we'll talk about where the judgment comes up and how to ease yourself away from that or when it's appropriate to look at it.

Because I think that judgment comes up when we see a contrast between what happened and what we wanted to have happen, or what we actually did and who we believe we wish we could have been or wanted to be in that moment.

This is completely normal and human. And that's also really valuable information.

But I think that the important part first is to take the assessment, right, to figure out what it is that's been happening? Where are you going in life? What is the road that you've actually traveled?

And then later, probably in the episode after this, we'll talk about comparing what you learned in this week's journey with the roadmap that you thought you were gonna take.

So let's start with that metaphor. Like you started the year and you had a little map for yourself about where you might be going and what you might be doing. And now that you've been on that road trip for like nine months, we're gonna look at it and say, okay, where did you go?

Where did you linger? Where did you get stalled out? Where did you accelerate way faster? Like, did you change plans halfway through? What ended up happening?

For real, so that you get a real lived sense and like your mind gets the ability to really wrap around: This is what happened.

It's not the template that you started with, we have to look at like what is the actual lived thing that you did before you can do anything with that.

So often in life, I think we've run around with this idea of who we are and this idea of what we said we were going to do or that we think we wanted to do.

And the dissonance starts building up as we've deviated from that original mental plan. And if we hold to that too tightly, I think that's where we end up making ourselves ill and stressed out and upset. So this for me,

When I do this kind of review, is kind of this un-structuring of all of that stress so that I don't have this vibration of what I think I am that is at odds with what I've actually been. It lets me get a little bit more real and a little bit more calm, gives me some perspective.

And then from there, I'm able to find the good, understand myself a little bit better, see why I might have made the decisions I made, and then help my brain and my heart and my emotions realign with that in a way that feels good and makes sense to me and helps me understand like, "Oh, it makes sense that this would have happened. It makes sense that this is how I handled that."

Once I understand all of those things, I can relax again. It helps my whole nervous system to just chill out and calm down and be here and make better decisions moving forward.

So I'm going to start talking about how we're going to look at your year. So I want this to really be a clean and reality-based reflection without trying to fix anything. It's just about noticing your year.

So this is about looking at your results, looking at patterns of things that have happened and what your reality on the ground was.

So some of the questions we're going to look at is maybe, What produced some results for you this year that you're really proud of? Like, were there actions that you took that resulted in really great gains? And what were those? And what were the things that you actually did?

Not even the why you did them yet. It's just: What did you do?

You're gonna look at what created some movement in your life. And you're not only going to look at the things that you did that created movement in your life, but events that happened.

Things that maybe you had to react and scramble and react to that also created a lot of activity and movement in our lives.

You're going to look at what consistently showed up for you. If there's a person or a circumstance or like a repeating event that just kept happening,

It's okay and good for you to go like, wow, this just keeps happening. And start to document like, well, what is it exactly?

What is the cadence of this repeated experience that I either loved or I hated or I was indifferent about?

What was it? Because once you see a pattern like that, from there, when we look at it, we're able to go, "Oh, okay. I see what starts it."

I see what sustains it. I see where I might be able to disrupt that pattern or I might really like it and want to reinforce it.

So that's important for us to notice. And you also want to look at your year and see what happened or that you planned or that you tried that maybe didn't translate into anything tangible for you.

The kind of stuff where you put an effort and you realize like your efforts have produced nothing or you just feel like nothing has happened yet.

So we do this to really just get a sense of what's happening.

I'm going to share mine and be really honest with you because it's important to be real about our lives and what we're trying to build and what we hope to happen versus what actually happens. And it helps all of us, I think, get a...

A better idea of what's a more reasonable expectation. I know that when I hop online, when I watch my kid watching YouTube, when I see anything out there.

I've been feeling so disheartened, like all I'm getting shown is everybody's success stories or about all the work they put in that then paid off like immediately or fairly fast.

And you're getting like this really quick snippets that tell a structured story in our brains and our hearts love that. But it's not the full story. And it leaves out huge swaths of information about what it was actually like to live that experience.

So I like reminding myself in moments like this, to look at my real, like my lived experience, my lived road map, what happened.

And then from there go, "Oh, perhaps I'm farther along than I think I am. Perhaps this is the actual pace of how things happen."

And my pace might not be as fast as someone else's, but it might be more steady, or it might be more tumultuous than someone else's, and it might produce different results, and that's okay.

Again, I think the first half of figuring out where we're going next or coming to terms with our lives is to just be honest about what really happened.

So for me, if I start looking back at the beginning of the year, I know that I was at the very beginning of building this podcast, like it was a brand new idea for me. I was restructuring my entire business. So I've been a life coach for nine years now.

And well, not quite. I guess 2019. Maybe it's coming up on there. But... as I moved through the loss of my brother and my actual lived energy levels in 2024 and 2025.

I didn't have the capacity to work one-to-one with people as much as I had before and my perspective about everything had changed. And I realized that I couldn't keep doing things exactly the same way that I had and I needed time to grieve and I made space for that.

So coming into 2026, I had re-envisioned my whole business model and I said, "You know, I really would rather talk about seasons of life."

Talk about grief, talk about life, real life and death. Transitions, how it feels to be in certain periods of your life, how it feels to live through different seasons, how we handle beginnings and endings and I've talked about this a lot too with tattooing, talking about

Owning businesses, selling businesses, collapsing businesses. And it felt like I had just lived through a mini version of that.

But because I had done it before unexpectedly, this one I was able to choose a little bit more about how I wanted to change things.

I didn't want to give up what I love doing, but I did see that it needed to change.

So in December, I had started the podcast only for like three or four months before.

But it only began live in November. So it was only a month in. And I was looking at how do I describe what it is to live through a whole year following more of a seasonal model where I try to mimic the energy and move with the energy that I'm really actually feeling and what I feel coming from nature and in my lived experience and share that with the world.

So that was what I was dreaming about and figuring out. I had actually managed to get some, some media presence out there and have a few things published on AP News and have an interview and have a magazine cover and that was really cool.

But most of that was really structured not because I think I'm amazing or anything. It was me like paying people to feature me in a move to say "maybe if I get some media coverage, people will actually find this podcast." And I would love them to do that because I think

It's the one useful thing that I feel like I can do right now at that moment in my life. And so I really went hard into that and began.

So the beginning of my year was this journey of beginning to record again, I hadn't done a podcast in like two years, two and a half, three years. So it was like a reboot.

And I was a lot more specific about what I wanted to cover, and I was more clear with myself about having a purpose to this podcast, and it wouldn't just be me talking about whatever came into my mind. It was really going to follow the theme of the seasons and us dealing with emotions and particularly speak to women who might be going through similar life experiences as myself because it's so much easier to talk about that and I don't ever want to portray myself as someone other than I am. So being really true to myself was important then.

As we moved from December into January and February, I was really starting to dream up, well, how do I want this to look? And what do I actually want to accomplish this year?

And my ideas on that were that I wanted to commit to my 52 episodes a year with the podcast.

I wanted to have a garden again. Like I realized how much I've been putting off having an outdoor experience here in this home in my life, in part because I had been caretaking a lot and I felt like sometimes I feel like my role is to defer to what other people want or what the household needs.

I don't even want to say what they want. It's like what they need or what's going to happen anyway. So one of the things that I think I'm good at in life is noticing patterns and figuring out where things are playing and where they're headed.

And I'm good at fitting myself into that and molding myself to it. But historically, I haven't been great at figuring out how to shape it myself so that it goes somewhere I want it to go.

So I'm learning that this year and I was like, "Okay, I want to have a garden again." So I was starting to figure out, well, what kind of garden?

And I was also realizing that AI was really starting to develop and become this big thing.

And so I begin to dabble in chat GPT and figure out if it could help me plot out my ideas. So I used it extensively for my garden and I actually started using it to help me figure out my, my arcs, I guess I would say, for the podcast, and it was around spring when I realized that I wanted to be able to record in batches.

And make each episode, like I would already know where the next episode was going, so I could actually like refer to it in the current episode. What a concept! Like it hadn't occurred to me before that that was possible. So I got excited about it.

So I really began to ask questions and set up structure and talk about like, who do I want to talk to? What kind of keywords can I use to help people find this? Where am I supposed to be posting? So I did a lot of like deep and heavy research.

And that felt really aligned with the season as we moved into March, April, May.

It was time to actually start executing some of these ideas. So my big ones was I wanted to walk. I definitely wanted to spend time with my kid as she's coming out of school into the summer, so I was planning for that.

And I wanted to build out this, the gardens. So I was gathering materials and then in April I started building them.

And I also want to say there were family and personal stuff going on there that I won't talk about fully in the podcast, but understanding that we are at a different phase of life in my household and I needed to have more vigilance about things happening in the house.

So I'm gonna add that there to say like there were more things going on than just easy write-it-on-paper and go ahead and execute it. There was like emotional components and actual time restraints.

Oh, there was basketball. There was fixing the solar panels because the app started to not work correctly early in the summer, maybe late spring. I actually think it was March, April and it took the months to figure it out and fix my app. So there was that.

There was trying to decide what I was going to do financially and stuff because I had reduced my business so much now do I even want to still have one because if it's going to cost me more to have my business than having the business pays me then that's not worth it.

Sometimes I think this is me. Now when I listen to other people's podcasts or I see that they have businesses, I never assume that everyone's doing great, even if they portray themselves as doing great, because I know the reality behind the scenes is often

People are doing things and they're doing it for a love of the work or a belief like they care about their mission. So I was seeing that a lot.

And their life might not be producing the results that they want. So my results had been that...

A very slow build. By the time we hit April, I think I was maybe having like 40 listens on an episode. That's not very much, but it was building and I was starting to build a library and I had my vision for where I wanted things to go. So I'll share it with you guys.

I'm really wanting to build a resource for humanity. I guess that sounds really broad, but for people.

When they're thinking about how do I be true to myself? How do I find my own personal rhythm? How do I move through seasons of building and of receding, of caretaking and of growth and falling back, like all of those things.

How do I find myself in that and choose to take care of myself well and be satisfied and happy and feel like I have purpose in my life?

I want a resource for that.

And I want it related to seasonality. I want it to be related to natural rhythms and helping people to really be in tune with that and how to find it in themselves.

Because I know not everyone is compelled to go outside and be this nature person like I do sometimes.

But even so, you all have your own natural rhythms. I get really excited about this stuff, so that's what I wanted to build. So I have this vision, and I was trying to plot out at that point how long will it take before I have enough listeners to think that anyone might ever partake in the course that I've built or want to work with me one-on-one again and will I be ready for that?

And I hadn't even thought about seasonal gatherings yet at that point, so that didn't even exist.

I was committed to building my garden. I was talking with my kid about that. And it was right around this time that I started hearing ravens a lot outside, and this was just an incredible delight to me. I've been obsessed with corvid's my entire life.

It started with wolves, it quickly transitioned into ravens and crows. And then for decades, we didn't have any ravens in this section of Connecticut. So to have ravens coming through even occasionally over the last few years.

Very occasionally one would fly over me while I was walking. I'd hear him make noises. I'd... do a little clunk back and we got to know each other, and I already had a good relationship with the crows because I always have a good relationship with the crows.

Anyway, as I was building the garden. The ravens were coming by a lot, and then eventually the noises changed, and I was like, gosh, they're like really whiny, whiny, loud, obnoxious right now and that's not what I know of these creatures.

And it took me, I'm ashamed to say like a month and a half, two months to realize like, oh wait, these are babies! Like the really obnoxious whiny voices of the ravens are children.

And for me to start counting and being like, oh, we've gone from like two to now we've got like seven. What's going on? You know, like it's impressive. So I think we had two adults, a sub-adult from last year and then four young ones that were born this year.

Were hatched. I don't know how we want to say that. But anyway, that's the reality of the spring and the summer is me outside every day, hauling dirt, hauling...

hauling cinder blocks, digging holes, realizing that I'm hugely out of shape.

But getting it done, getting back into shape, starting to plant stuff, ordering things, realizing that I had extra left over, so I built a tiny... like mini garden that mirrors my garden from my daughter, helping her build her fairy garden, and the entire time having this family of ravens come by.

Observing me doing this and becoming a regular part of their scenery. So then as we move into like June and July,

It's the height of the summer. We now have...

We've got summer camps. My daughter wants to try not going to camp this year for most of it. We're traveling down to Virginia and Philadelphia and doing

The first big trip we've done as a family in very long time, like maybe we went up to see... the full, the full eclipse back in April of 24, but we haven't done anything like that since.

So we did a whole week with my dad. It was amazing, but a very busy time. So recognizing that energy demands are high, travel is high, stress is high.

And our water tanks downstairs in this past month, like overflowed. We had to do repairs. I had to do expensive work and fix things. I put gutter guards on because...

I was tired of us climbing on the roof trying to clean out the leaves. Lots and lots of house maintenance happened over this summer.

Lots and lots of family, looking out for people, doctors appointments, maintenance.

And me realizing that I'm going through my own hormonal changes and things that are hitting me in ways I hadn't anticipated. So, heat intolerance is - who even knew that would be such a thing! I was taught, or at least I understood, like hot flashes, that people like it suddenly hot and...that it passes. But for me, it's always more like I go for a walk, I slowly get too hot, and then I come home and I just can't not be hot.

It won't go away. So be hot and have ice packs on my head and on my chest and on my shoulders. And I've always been a person who's cold all the time, who wants to wear a sweater even in the summer, whose hands and feet are cold. And it just suddenly flips to the other extreme where I'm like, I'm radiating heat all the time.

Clothes are too much. I can't take it. Working out is hard. And then I'm like, oh, I'm gaining weight. I'm unhappy. So all of those things are also happening.

And then my daughter had like the theater camp for three weeks. We have friends coming over. There's all the fairs, all these things happening. So here we are in September.

And that's a full year for me, a big arc. I've also been monitoring the business. I learned that I did want to batch things out. People started asking to be on my podcast. What a freaking miracle! That was incredible. I couldn't believe it.

I really have enjoyed that so much and I have decided that I wanted it to be not the format of this podcast, but like a supplemental or an addition. So if someone comes on or has something to talk about that fits in with the seasonal arc that talks about the issues that we're discussing. I want to have them on and I want them to bring value to the people listening.

And I want to, again, always think about this as building this wealth of knowledge in this big library for everybody that over years will accumulate and become something that, my goal is that this supports me so that I can actually help my husband to retire and not have us be poorer and stressed out in a few years.

So I've got like 10 to 12 years to do this. And hopefully by then, my business is bringing a profit.

So that's the reality of my year. I am sure I have plenty of ideas about... how fast I wish things were going, how much better I wish I was doing at things like playing my viola.

That was on my list at the beginning of the year. I totally wanted to do that. And I was like, yeah, we're going to get back on track.

You're gonna walk every day again. You're gonna be playing your viola again. You're gonna be working on your business in X, Y, or Z-Y.

But the reality of it when I look back at it is that isn't how it played out. Lots of things got accomplished, many, many things. I feel like I've made some great financial decisions.

There have been some emotional things that have come up, such as like my dad and my brother and I coming up with like a grave plot for my brother.

Realizing that we could get our own grave plots together so that our whole family can be together when the time comes and feeling like I really belong there. So that was massively emotionally nourishing. But also at this time of year feels really sad to me and also really happy. Like it just has so many emotions.

And I think it's important for me to address that and talk about it. Maybe not about that in this episode.

But all of these things made up the context of my year. All of the people that I had to drive different places, all of the places I had to take myself, all of the like many, many doctors appointments and things, sorting for myself, for my daughter, for my mother-in-law,

Helping my husband to coordinate all of his stuff, actual work, actual trips.

Business stuff, house things. If I write them all down, the list is pages long and massive of things that were actually experienced. And my involvement in all of them, this is all from my perspective, so I was like hands-on, highly involved in every single aspect of all of this.

If you were to look at your life and go through your whole year and write down the whole thing, you're gonna find just like me that you have a long and varied list with varying intensity and demands of things that did happen to you this year, things that you did accomplish, work that went as you hoped, work that did not go as you hoped,

Things that came about that you didn't expect, ideas that you developed such as me realizing, particularly in this era of AI that I really want my business not to rely on that at all.

I got very angry at AI when I was using it to help me come up with titles. So I would record what I want to record and just talk like I'm talking and then say, "Great, it's helpful when I'm doing transcription. It's helpful for me to throw in a transcript and say, 'Hey, can you help me come up with show notes?'" I'm fine with that. But I didn't like that it would give me titles that maybe were titles to other people's books or other people's work and it made me so angry and I'm like, I never want to have my work do that.

So I've now kind of rejected the use that I was using it for and realizing like, yeah.

My original opinion of AI kind of still stands is that it, it eats everything that we make, and it can only spit out things that were already made.

It is helpful at organizing sometimes, but when it comes to a creative work, I feel like I need to have my hands in it. It's my creative work, so I want to be me being creative. I do not want something else to tell me what to say. And I don't need it to do that because I actually know what I know.

And I care so much more now about experts. So that's another thing that I would put on my list of things that actually happened this year is like my big reckoning with how I use technology and how I want to use it in the future, what I see it doing and what I want to protect my kid from.

Things that I want to do for my work and me realizing that having group gatherings, even online. I still think that's great.

It is so important where I see people's faces and they see mine, and we see each other and we're gathering and holding each other in a space where...

We're real people. We're not screaming into a void. We're not talking to someone that we're not sure if they're a freaking robot or not.

Because that drives me crazy and it's the antithesis of what I'm hoping for.

I'm looking so much for belonging in my life and creating spaces of belonging and of impact to like real people living real lives.

So that's become an even deeper, greater purpose for me.

So when we get to next week and we're looking at how do we place that and how do we look at it...

What we might talk about (what) was finished or incomplete or how we want to judge or discern. I'd say discern, what to do next or what really happened and find the emotional meeting and pattern out of it.

You need to kind of have all of that information and have that context for what motivated you and what went awry. So that's what we're going to like really look at next week is:

How do you look at that big list of all the things that actually happened and then put them in a context that makes sense to you so that you can hold it?

This is the work that I love doing with everybody live when we get together. I get to answer actual live questions and help you guys sort it. And it helps me understand more of what we're actually doing.

Because this work is really built around you and what you need and the interaction between us and figuring out how to create these spaces that I think the world desperately needs right now, where we feel like we're being held and supported and nurtured in real life, not in ideal land where some corporation is trying to sell you some shit.

I just want to have a real experience and help people with something practical that helps them in their everyday lives.

Yes, awesome.

So that's my year.

Please, if you feel compelled or you're inspired by this, take an assessment of yours (your year), and if you have time or you're thinking about it.

Next week when we're talking about how we review it, you're going to get an even broader sense of how to bring in your own rhythm and meaning and make sense.

of everything that you learned from this week's review. Sending so much love to you. I can't wait to see you next week.

Have a great week until then.