You can listen to this episode here: Listen to Ep 48: Reading the Feedback From Your Year
You did the hard work of listing what actually happened this year. But a list isn't the same as understanding. In this episode, Blaze walks you through the second stage of the year review: reading the feedback. Gathering the real, lived evidence of what your efforts produced. She shares her own honest accounting: the garden that finally bloomed after a summer of "nothing's happening," the orthodontia that transformed her daughter's smile appointment by appointment, an email list that grew three subscribers at a time, and the viola that got set aside when life kept filling the hours. Along the way, she untangles the difference between what was complete, incomplete, and never going to be possible - and offers a liberating reframe: the things that fell by the wayside fell because your energy went to things you'd choose again anyway. You're not failing; you're just reaching signpost 3 of a 100-signpost road.
🌿 In this episode we explore:
- Sorting your year into complete, incomplete, no-longer-relevant, and not-going-to-be-possible-for-now
- Why unexpected demands (floods, repairs, appointments) legitimately consumed your hours — and why your self-concept hasn't caught up
- Gathering real evidence of what worked, like the garden, the orthodontia, the email list, the 40-listens threshold
- The honest math of long timelines: signpost 3 of 100, and why instant-result culture makes that feel lonelier than it is
- Why the viola didn't happen (and why qigong might— the things that fit your real life get done)
- Blaze's honest tally of trade-offs, including choosing a first-year garden over expansion projects
- The liberating conclusion: your derailed plans were derailed by choices you'd make again — that's alignment, not failure
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back. Last week's episode, we talked a lot about how do we do a year in review. And we're not doing it in December, we're doing it.
in September to really get into it and look at where we are so far in the year and where we're going.
When we do this, it's to the purpose of being able to place yourself in a context, in space and time.
So last week was about figuring out what were those events and what happened. And if you go back and listen, if you haven't already, you got to hear mine.
And I talked about some of my emotional journey with building the podcast and what I had hoped and where I hope it's going and my purpose in it, but also things like building a garden and
ideas I had about where I thought I was going, like things like working out more and taking walks every week and playing the viola and getting better at it that never happened at all. So this week,
I want to help us look at all of those things that happened and didn't happen.
and start to learn the difference between unfinished and complete or incomplete things and figuring out how all of this lines up with how we believe about ourselves, our values,
what was possible and what wasn't possible. I think that the whole purpose of these kinds of reviews for me
is to help me understand for myself what was possible and what was never going to be possible. And I find so much comfort in recognizing that
when I fill my time with certain actions and things, whether it's because I had to react to a situation like the flooding in the basement that happened that I had to fix that just took over a week.
and things like coordinating for people to come work on solar panels and all of this stuff.
Things out of your control sometimes fill up your space. When you're dealing with health concerns and issues for yourself or other people,
Those things are acute, right? They come up, they happen. You have to deal with them in that moment in time and there's no delaying.
And sometimes they're chronic and they keep coming back and you keep having to deal with them and they need to happen. And here's the important part from this is that we all only have the 24 hours in a day.
And if you had filled them all up in your mind about how you were going to fill every hour of every day, every moment with accomplishments or direction or energy.
When those unexpected things come up, they pull away from that. They derail plans, they alter plans, and they change them, and your reality changes.
but yet our self-concept and the things that we still expected of ourselves somehow we still believe because we haven't taken into account all of these things.
that we should have accomplished all of that anyway, that our year should have included even more.
that maybe we should have done so many more things. And it makes us feel better about ourselves. And I don't want that for any of us, I want us all to really have
a good awareness of how much we do and where we've been and what we've been battling in life or what we've been dealing with.
all of it is important. And you're going to notice too, if you do this for more than one year in a row, that your years are going to contrast and build differently.
When I look at like my 2024, it started out like so full of promise and excitement and prospect.
and going to fund runfares and hanging out with my brothers and traveling to go see a solar eclipse in person like it was incredible.
I had experienced like a real earthquake, like that I actually felt move all of the things in my office for like a full 30 seconds. Like it was incredible to me. It felt like there's some magnificence of nature. My business had taken off. I was really doing a lot of one to one. And then everything just kind of crashed out when my brother died and I couldn't
think or hold space for anything after that.
other than just being sad and trying to figure out what even happened. And that stayed with me.
through so much of 2025 and that wasn't in my control.
It's something that I just had to go through and do. My 2025 into 26 was really built.
on what I felt and learned and made sense of from that experience.
And I'm still experiencing, and I always will, this confusion.
about my brother and losing him, coupled with my belief in myself and my hope for my own future and for everyone's future.
Everyone is like this big pile of contrasts and placing it in context helps you see how far you've come. So if I look at 25 and go, "Wow, I got almost nothing done," but at the very end, I found Momentum again and I found Inspiration and I started a new business model for myself because I had hope and I had purpose again in it and that's what I really wanted to do.
And then this is the year of me starting to really implement it. And dealing with the disappointment of realizing that
Everything I'm building is based on long timelines. It's not based on instant return.
And in a world that kind of demands instant returns or at least shows it to you everywhere where you want to watch something, you look up which service it's on and you can download it instantly and watch the whole season. You want to get a new outfit or something, you just go on Amazon and buy it instantly and it'll be here tomorrow with next day shipping. It is hard.
to go against that or try a different model because we don't have a lot of
evidence or tales being told about things like that happening. So it feels like for me that I'm kind of just like out there sailing alone in the middle of a lake.
I know that's not actually true. I know there are other people also running long game business models or
like long game lives, I guess, like where you have ideas about where you're going and things that you want to do that bring you joy and nourishment but don't necessarily bring you financial gain or anything like that.
either at all or not for a very long time. It's tough though, the experience of it.
So anyway, getting back to talking about contexting our lines.
This is the week where you want to look at the year that you just recorded, the year that you've just lived through and say, "Okay."
Right now, I might be thinking like, "Wow, I really didn't follow through on some of these things," or "I should have tried harder." And sometimes the feedback that you get from the world is
There's so many other things you could try. Why don't you do this? Why don't you do that? Why don't you do this other thing?
This is the moment where you look at what you actually have tried and what felt right for you. What actually did happen and how you responded and how you feel about that. And you then get to discern when people give you advice about ways that you can add to correct or course change.
if you actually want to do that or not, or if it is the right for you and the journey that you're choosing.
So many advices and things that we get are not tailored for us. They're tailored for the masses.
they're tailored to look good or to make a really flashy story.
And I really want you to hear that. That's so much of what we're advertised to and pitched in life about how to make businesses work, how to like succeed in working out or dieting or fix our hair even or anything.
is here's this amazing story of this easy thing that this one person tried and they give you a long story about their whole journey and how hard it was bubblegum. They found this one thing.
and they did it and it changed everything. And when they say it takes a long time, they're like in six months, you'll have results and you'll know.
And I'm so frustrated with that. And I don't know if you are too, but I suspect you are because we're inundated with it constantly. Like, I'm getting advertisements for like.
hair thickening stuff. I don't even know why. I don't feel like I have terribly thinning hair or anything, but maybe they're like, "Oh."
She's a perimenopausal woman. Let's give her lots of supplements and hormone things and workouts for people over 40.
And let's also tell her about how she can have this amazing shampoo that's going to change her life.
And here's the weird thing, like we get bought. We absolutely are like, really? Will that change my life? Will it make this one thing better?
It all comes back to us wanting control, my friends. We just want to control one thing and feel like one thing is going to work out.
my husband told me this the other day and it's going to stick with me forever where he's like, you know, it seems like you've had some years and
experiences, particularly like this year too, not just since Matt died, that you're confident Scott shaken and there's depression in there too and stuff going on. Maybe it's just sadness, maybe it's also depression, anxiety, whatever. But I think what you need more than anything is just to have something that you know you can do that you'll get a result from.
that you know that you can mark a success and not have it be this I don't know because I've been living a lot and the I don't know is.
And I went, "Oh, wow, yeah, that's absolutely true." And maybe that's what we're all looking for.
in the fall when we review our lives is we want the sense of control. We want to look at all of our efforts and everything that we did that we tried so hard to do and tally our successes.
And if we don't see that we had immediate success or success as much as we had hoped, or things didn't pan out the way we wanted.
It can feel really defeating and deflating and sad. And then we're just kind of lost and we don't know what to do. And that's, I think, when we become vulnerable to all of this marketing and someone else telling you.
Here's something that you can easily do that will change your life and blah, blah, blah. And we just want that so bad for our songs.
So I find the value in looking at my actual lived year to go
Here's some things that I actually did. And here's the evidence that I have.
Like, here's the feedback from it. So for me, the feedback from taking care of my family and making sure that everyone's okay is that we've all had our doctor's appointments. People are all right.
where my kids started orthodontia, so her teeth are actually looking physically amazing. So many, many appointments, lots of extra runs and drives when things pop off and aren't working right.
But it's working. Hallelujah. Evidence from putting in the gardens is that I actually have this gorgeous garden outside that has been producing flowers and growing
And I got to witness how it grew. And I love, actually, that for the first half of the summer, I was like, nothing's happening. Everything I put in is still...
the exact three inches it was when I put it in and nothing happened. And then I went away for that one week on vacation and I came back and things had grown afoot.
and stuff started budding and flowers were happening, so many of these things are still a little leggy and stringy, but they're in their first year.
I'm seeing what took and what didn't. I have feedback there, like actual lived physical evidence, which is amazing.
to say that my efforts paid off and not only did they give me a garden but they gave me a relationship with those ravens that I was telling you about last week.
that are incredible and make me feel like I'm part of this community.
also in doing that. Growing a relationship with my neighbor across the way, my daughter, and I love them so much.
Wonderful family, all of their animals. Excellent, just wonderful. And I love that they too are starting to have their own little relationship with these ravens and notice them more. And that's directly through
my enthusiasm and excitement about this stuff. Feedback that I have from my life.
that I felt like didn't really work out, but maybe I'm shifting and changing into. I wanted to walk more, I didn't, I found it.
really cold and so much snow early in the year. Then I was doing so much physical labor on the garden. I didn't worry about it because I was getting plenty of movement in there.
It's starting now. I'm beginning to go out for walks more. This is good. I'm finding that rhythm again.
Viola absolutely didn't happen. There's no way I could say that that was a success in any way, shape, or form.
I pluck at it maybe two or three times a week for like a minute and it's really sad to me because I had a year and a half where I played it every day for five or ten minutes and was starting to get a feel.
I want it back. That's my feedback is I want it now. And when am I going to place that in? And did I have time for it?
And I'm going to look back at my year again and say the first half was very much business building. I spent a great deal of effort trying to figure out
how I wanted to work on the course that I'm building, how I wanted to build the podcast, how
How did I see seasons working and what is the information that I want to do in part in this particular year and in each particular season in those arcs? So I planned out a lot. I did a lot of legwork there.
that is only now starting to get recorded and out there. Other feedback, things that I did that I thought were working terribly. I was like, "Oh, nobody's signing up for this email list. I'm like so sad." And then people started signing up for my email list. I get so excited. So welcome if you've joined from the email list. So excited. I also want to share a reality there is that.
There was a burst where three people signed up and then it's been quiet and crickets and I've been so...
Distressed? Like my emotional reaction there was "Oh my god, I must be doing something wrong. Clearly I suck." But then when I look at my actual numbers,
And this is again why I do these reviews is to look at what really happened. I hit a threshold of maybe 40 listens a week and I haven't yet gotten up to 80 as like, well, if it took 40 listens to have three people be ready to sign up, it might take 80 people listening per week.
for it to get to another three signing up, so it's just gonna take a long time. So now my question becomes different. Now it's how do I get more people to know about this podcast? And if you're finding it useful or not, I'm surely hoping that you are.
I so deeply want this to be a home for people.
the way that it is for me. I want people to feel heard and seen and to answer actual questions that real people have.
And the feedback here that I got from that is that people who do listen.
or who find it and read the show notes want to come and talk about these things that it is getting found.
At one point, I was getting two to five requests a week from people wanting to be guests on the podcast. Now, some of these were coming from bots again. The AI revolution is
good and bad and for me mostly annoying but helpful in some ways. So people are finding me which makes me feel happy because it means what I'm talking about is findable. People do want to talk about it. It is out there in the world. It's just not big yet. What I've built is still in a baby phase just like my little baby garden that hasn't had time to really become mature yet.
So the feedback is good. The results that I want are the results that are 10 years out and I'm not 10 years in yet.
So it's me trying to put myself on that roadmap, right, and see where I am in space and time and go, OK, you're not 10 years into the journey. You're only at like--
Signpost 3. And if you want to have the results of 10 years from now, that's like signpost 100. So you're going to have to just keep.
keep going, you're going to get there and the feedback is great. But you're just still early on this path. So keep climbing up that mountain.
I think it's important to share that again because I think we need more examples of honesty around how long it takes to build things that we care about, how long it takes to
see the results that we're hoping for and what it is to get results that we didn't anticipate or that might indicate results we hoped for on the way.
I also want to say there's no guarantee. I have no idea if I'm actually going to reach a point ten years from now where I'm profitable enough that...
retirement is possible. Who knows? I may end up getting lots of jobs, but in the meantime
The reality that I'm living is that I'm helping take care of my household, I'm helping raise my daughter, I'm helping with my mother-in-law, I'm making sure that this house stays put together in whole.
and I'm taking care of the pets and I'm managing the school year and I'm building a business.
And I also do want to play viola and I'm missing painting. That's an interesting one that came up for me is when I asked myself, well, what am I hoping for more? And I'm like, oh, more creative opportunities, like maybe starting drawing again.
Definitely writing. Getting excited about writing a book to help put this in a different format and a different way for people to reach and then realizing, oh, that might also help.
with what I'm hoping to build out this community, so everything that I'm producing.
speaks about something that I'm passionate about and helps people to find this space.
So lots and lots of ideas, lots of feedback. There's also when I look at what's been going on physically for me and
just daily demands. It's me becoming easier on myself about what's possible and what can I do to support myself being healthy.
if maybe I'm not going to be the same size that I was before because my weight has shifted. Apparently I'm the same weight, but I am not the same shape and I'm unhappy.
And I think that's a story many people really do. But I'm coming to terms with it and going, "Okay, then what does that require of me? And what will make me feel better?"
So I'm looking at it not to judge myself so much, but to notice that I do have judgment.
and go, "How can I ease some of that?" So now that it's cooler, it's easier for me to go out for more walks. It's easier for me to think about doing weightlifting because earlier in the year, I was like, "I cannot if it's gonna be hot, even with the air conditioning."
I can't imagine doing weights and getting overheated like that and not being able to recover.
So figuring out what do I need to do? How do I need to hydrate? What works for me in advance or not? And so much of this is trial and error.
So making space for that, looking at where I want to go for the rest of the year and going, OK, I need--
I need/want to make space for more creativity, particularly around the business because I'm tapping back into that hope and desire to share and shift things for people.
but also to give myself like this outlet for creative energy and to feel like I'm making something. I love making something. I love writing. I love making art. I love working with my hands. I love talking to people. So all of these things are great and I'm gonna keep doing them.
And where might V Ola fit in there? And as much as I'm excited about it, I think that's the one that I've come to terms with. It's okay if that one doesn't happen right now.
So what I want you to hear when you're listening to me talk about all this stuff is I'm real about what happened and where I'm going and what I want.
But I'm also noticing some things are easier to happen than others. The blocks that I kept hitting up against in my year is scheduling.
I'm always gonna have interruptions just because this is the face of life I'm in. I've got a young kid.
I've got an elder, there's stuff going on all the time, and I need to be flexible for that, and that's just the reality of how it is.
And because of that, having any strict routine is going to be difficult. I have to work with that too.
There are sections of my days and days of my week that are more flexible and I can build into those. So that's where I'm putting all of this leak.
creative times being able to record. I know when people are more likely to be home and less likely to be home and when my quiet pockets are.
I take advantage of them. To me, that's me being in tune with the season and the reality and the environment that I'm living in. And I feel really good when I harness that well.
And I can be kinder to myself knowing that immediately following all of those productive times, it's gonna be a slam of me dealing with other stuff.
and not doing what I want to do. I'm coming to terms with that and going, "Okay, what do I need to do to nourish myself when I don't get to do what I want to do?"
What do I need? I am getting much more into reading again for a while. It was video games now. I'm like, no, I just really have books that I really want to
Read for inspiration, read for fun to turn my brain off, read to find hope again.
All of that's really good. I care about my garden. Their question was brought up by my daughter. Do we want to do another one next year? Her dreams involve having a huge another garden bed put in.
And my thoughts on it right now are with what money and also.
with what water, depending on what happens. Now this summer was way more wet than I had anticipated. I don't know if that's the norm or not, because everything keeps changing all the time.
But either way, until I know I have a big bowl of money to expend on building another garden bed,
I'm not going to do that. And in addition, I'm not entirely certain that having a vegetable garden
is optimal for the space and the amount of light that we get and the amount of water that we may or may not need.
So that one's on hold for me. It's not a hard no, but it's one of those things that I know
The desires are there, the demands are coming at me, and it's me going, "Alright, well, let's look at the reality of what's going on and what's possible."
So, things that we might be able to do, I'm gonna dream about later. I'm not putting it on my table to do right now because there's too much, there's too much to do. (laughs)
On my plate for maybe the springtime or over the winter is to decide what may or may not be possible for perhaps expanding the garden or not. Maybe it'll be about taking a plant like a pumpkin or something that my daughter wants to have and saying, "Let's try that in your garden bed and see how it does."
Now my garden bed, I've already planted full of perennials that are going to expand and get bigger than I need to pull back.
And I had a few annuals interspersed for little shoots of color and edibles in between. So I'm going to see how much space those provide once they die back. If any of them reseeded themselves and come back, that's great for me. But if not,
I might have space and I'm thinking my initial idea was Napa Cabbage's.
and like little greens so I might put those in the in between spaces. But we'll see.
Because I'm not worried about that yet. Here's something that I want to share in reviewing all of that stuff and talking about it.
sharing all of that with you is helping me feel really grounded into
what already happened, what's possible, and what I might want. And it's become easy for me to see.
that I've done a great deal of caretaking, that I've actually made a really lovely thing in my yard.
that I've managed to maintain it and I can see the visible evidence of it every day, that's fabulous.
I love that even though I forget it because I see like my daughter has her braces and she's doing well every day.
to remember that that wasn't true nine months ago. Nine months ago we had just started and like things were not the same.
So realizing how much has happened just through sheer persistence and showing up and going with it.
and that that was an investment that we made and we chose that instead of building like a second crazy garden or going on a crazy vacation. So all of those things.
I know that when you look at your ear, you're going to find that just knowing all of it and seeing it all laid out before you really does help you go like, "Ah, okay."
and you start to understand your decisions better. Because when I look at it, I know that
no matter what has come of the things that I've tried to do or not do, I couldn't have made my decisions any other way.
I'm always acting based on my particular desire to connect, my particular value around being
in a space and time and connecting with my neighbors, connecting with the wildlife.
touching plants, being there for my daughter, like being there for my family, all of those things are decisions I'm going to make again and again.
no matter what. It's me wanting to like hang out and tell stories with my husband and laugh and share funny things and just
and be each other's best friend. I'm always going to choose that. And the things that get neglected or that got derailed.
If they were neglected by me, they were neglected because my energy went towards something that I care strongly about and that I was going to always make that decision anyway. And it makes it easier for me to look at where the shortcomings were and go, "Okay, that's fine."
Has my opinion or attitude changed about any of this? Am I ready to move my energy towards a new purpose or a different direction?
And like I illustrated with Fiola, probably not this year. I'm not against it. I am going to make some space and time for it, but I know that if I need to make a decision about something falling by the wayside,
It's probably gonna be lessening time with that. My daughter doesn't like hearing me play. I'm embarrassed to play when anyone's home. I have very few amounts of time when no one's around to hear it, so it's just gonna get neglected for a while. But I can do Chi Gong. No one has to hear or see me do that. So things that I can do, things that can happen, things that nourish me and help me feel more present and happy and alive.
I am wishing that for all of you as well and I hope that this talk helped you to maybe give some context to your own experiences and the things that happened throughout your year.
I am wishing you nothing but love and happiness this week. And I think this, um,
Oh my goodness.
Wow, that is a lot. Okay.
I am wishing you nothing but love and happiness and meaning from this week.
And then I think next week, when we come back, we're going to talk about cutting through illusion and comparison and our intentions versus reality so that we can really start to move from our own personal truth and our own emotional honesty about what's going on.
So we're going to move into some discernment about who we really are, and what was real, like the real meaning that we're taking from everything we did, and what might not be real. So that's usually like when it comes up in the form of judgment. So we'll talk about all of that next week.
I'm really looking forward to seeing you then. Have a wonderful week until then.
Related Episodes
🍎 The honest year review series: This episode is part of Blaze's 2026 Autumn arc on reviewing your year without judgment: first assessing what actually happened, then reading the feedback from your efforts, and next week, discerning meaning without falling into comparison traps. These related conversations approach the same ground from other angles: Trusting slow timelines, letting go of earned-worthiness, and pruning what doesn't serve you:
- Ep 47: Review Your Year Without Judgment: An Honest Look at What Actually Happened — Last week's foundation: the reality-based assessment of what your year contained, showing you how to lay it all out before making sense or meaning of it all
- Ep 41: The Ripening of Your Life: How to Trust the Process and Stop Rushing — Settling into the life you're actually living; how Blaze reclaimed her long-lost garden and learned that not everything needs your intervention to flourish
- Ep 33: Fun Isn't Frivolous: Reclaiming Joy for Over-Responsible Women — Decoupling worthiness from productivity, and treating joy as a human right rather than a reward
- Ep 09: Reflecting Without Shame — A Year-End Ritual — The original shame-free year-end reflection framework, using a garden metaphor instead of a scorecard
- Ep 29: How to Decide What to Keep Doing (and What to Let Go Of) — Seasonal pruning: allowing some things to fall away so what truly matters can thrive
🌿 Want help identifying where you are and finding the support that already exists?
The Living in Rhythm Starter Kit offers grounded tools to help you recognize your current emotional state, understand your nervous system's signals, and uncover the support systems already present in your life. It's a gentle guide to finding clarity and connection when you feel saturated.
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