#054 Year-End Reflection Questions to Close Out Your Year with Clarity
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Why do we set the same goals every year and wonder why nothing changes? Amanda Parker reveals the practice that shifted her from autopilot living to intentional design—plus the free Year End Reflection Guide that helps you understand your patterns and create a genuinely different 2026.
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“If we actually learn how to hit pause and slow things down, take stock of where we are today, how far we’ve come, what has changed in our lives, then we’re actually giving ourselves a chance to decide what we want our future to look like. And that comes from a really grounded and empowered place.”
Today's Guest
Amanda Parker
Amanda Parker is the host of the Don't Step on the Bluebells podcast and an intuitive guide that helps people to deeply trust their inner wisdom, quiet the external noise, and intentionally create a life fully aligned with their true self. She is a Certified Professional Coach (ICF PCC, CPCC) and spiritual guide using a unique blend of shamanic and energy healing practices to support you on your journey towards inner knowing and deep self-trust.
Amanda is a Reiki Master Healer and a member of the UK Reiki Federation, and has trained in psychic mediumship with the College of Psychic Studies and shamanism with the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.
Amanda has worked in the field of leadership and personal development since 2017 - supporting clients from organizations such as World Bank Group, World Economic Forum, UNICEF, Zalando, Nestle, and LinkedIn. She previously worked in wildlife conservation with the World Wildlife Fund - supporting projects in forest and wetland protection across South America.
Amanda is a native New Yorker who has been living in London for the last 3.5 years, after over a decade in Berlin, Germany. She now lives in North London with her husband and their two cats, Zaki & Oreo.
How to get in touch:
Website: www.amandaparker.co
Instagram: @amandaparker.co
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandamparker/
Podcast: www.dontsteponthebluebells.com
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Show Notes
If you've ever found yourself setting the same goals year after year without understanding why they don't stick, this episode offers a different approach.
Amanda Parker gets honest about her own journey from living on autopilot—jumping from job to job, saying yes to everything, and feeling like life was happening to her—to learning how to intentionally design her life. The shift didn't come from more ambition or better goal-setting. It came from learning to reflect.
In this year-end episode, Amanda shares the practice that changed everything for her and hundreds of her clients: honest, structured reflection. Not the surface-level gratitude list kind, but the kind that helps you understand your patterns, acknowledge both growth and challenges, and make conscious choices about what comes next.
She also highlights the podcast episodes from 2025 that resonated most with listeners—covering everything from money mindset to personal branding to intuitive business coaching. Each offers a different lens on the same core question: How do we come home to ourselves?
The episode includes Amanda's Year End Reflection Guide, a framework she's refined over eight years of using it herself and with clients. It's designed to help you take stock of where you actually are (not where you think you should be), recognize how far you've come, and create a vision for 2026 that's grounded in truth rather than wishful thinking.
If you're tired of repeating the same patterns or ready to approach the new year with more clarity and intention, this episode gives you both the perspective and the practical tool to do it differently.
Key Takeaways
Reflection creates the foundation for meaningful change - Without understanding your patterns, goal-setting often leads to the same results year after year.
Autopilot living is more common than you think - Amanda spent years reacting to life rather than consciously choosing her path. Recognition is the first step.
The Year End Reflection Guide offers structured self-assessment - Eight years refined, this framework helps you assess where you are and vision forward from a grounded place. Free at www.amandaparker.co
Slowing down creates space for better decisions - Pausing to reflect allows for intentional choices rather than reactive ones that keep you stuck.
Intuition is a developable skill - Learning to quiet external noise and listen to inner wisdom changes how you make decisions. Episode 33 explores this further.
You can shift from reacting to designing - Moving from unconscious patterns to intentional creation requires honest self-assessment and different choices.
The podcast reaches 78 countries globally - Healing wisdom resonates across borders, creating a worldwide community of listeners doing this work together.
What We Talked About
Celebrating 54 episodes released in 2025, reaching listeners in 78 countries
Top episodes of the year: Money Mindset (Ep 34), Healing with Photography (Ep 31), Transpersonal Coaching (Ep 37), How to Get Paid to Be Yourself (Ep 53), Why Healing Isn't Enough (Ep 43)
How reflection shifted Amanda from autopilot living to intentional life design
Why reflection matters more than goal-setting for creating lasting change
Moving from reacting to circumstances to consciously choosing your path
Framework for honest self-assessment, celebrating growth, and visioning forward
Learning to quiet external noise and take aligned action
The beautiful selfishness of doing healing work that serves everyone
Guest Quotes
"I continue to bring these messages of hope and healing and bring you the healers who have been doing this work sometimes for decades. These are really the masters in their craft who are here to support every single one of us on this planet to be able to live lives that are more aligned with who we authentically are and help us really come back home to ourselves."
"If we actually learn how to hit pause and slow things down, take stock of where we are today, how far we've come, what has changed in our lives, then we're actually giving ourselves a chance to decide what we want our future to look like. And that comes from a really grounded and empowered place."
"I used to just jump from thing to thing, activity to activity, job to job. And I never really understood why I was making those changes. It often felt like life was happening to me or that I was just operating on autopilot, always saying yes, yes, yes to the next thing."
"You might think that I'm doing this for you, but the truth is, it's also for me. Every episode I record, every conversation I have with one of these remarkable healers and guides, something changes within me. Something unlocks. There's deeper clarity and awareness of what I'm building and what it is that's most important to me."
"This has been a year full of different challenges, different points of inflection and growth for me. I know for all of you as well, it's a year that has definitely flipped the script on what normal means. I don't think I know a single person who is living the same life that they had imagined in 2024."
"Finally, learning how to tune in to quiet the noise from everything around me to hear what my own inner voice wants to share, and taking action from that aligned place. This has been an absolute game changer for me."
"After eight years of creating this guide and also completing the guide myself and helping hundreds and hundreds of people supporting them to go through that process of reflection and to really create that vision and hold themselves accountable to what it is they want, this is invaluable."
Resources to Learn More
Podcast Episodes Highlighted:
Episode 34: Healing with Money Mindset with Lena Nia
Episode 31: Healing with Photography with Laura Antonia Abbott
Episode 37: Healing with Transpersonal Coaching with Jules DeVito
Episode 53: How to Get Paid to Be Yourself with Beth Hocking
Episode 43: Why Healing Isn't Enough and How You Can Shift Your Energy for Business Growth with Joanna Chancellor
Episode 33: How Listening to Your Intuition Can Change Your Life (Solo episode)
Tools & Guides:
Terms & Tools to Dig Deeper
Aligned Action Taking steps and making decisions that are in harmony with your inner wisdom, values, and authentic self rather than external pressures or expectations.
Autopilot Living Moving through life unconsciously, reacting to circumstances rather than intentionally creating your experiences; saying yes without discernment or awareness of personal desires.
Discovery Call An initial consultation conversation to explore how coaching or support might help you achieve your goals and determine if there's a good fit between coach and client.
Energy Protection Practices and techniques used to maintain healthy energetic boundaries, prevent energy depletion, and shield yourself from absorbing others' emotions or negative influences.
Highly Sensitive Humans Academy Training and certification program founded by Jules DeVito to support and educate highly sensitive people and those who work with them.
Inner Wisdom The intuitive knowing and guidance that comes from within; your authentic self's understanding of what's true and right for you beyond external conditioning.
Intentional Living Consciously choosing your actions, responses, and life direction rather than defaulting to habit, societal expectations, or reactive patterns.
Intuitive Business Coach A coach who combines traditional business strategy with intuitive guidance and energetic awareness to help entrepreneurs build aligned, successful businesses.
Personal Branding The practice of intentionally curating how you present yourself and your work to the world; shaping your professional identity and reputation.
Reflection A healing practice of pausing to thoughtfully review experiences, assess growth, acknowledge challenges, and gain clarity about your journey and desires.
Transpersonal Coaching A coaching approach that integrates spiritual dimensions of human experience, exploring beyond the personal ego to include transcendent aspects of consciousness and growth.
Year End Reflection Guide A structured tool created by Amanda Parker to support deep reflection on the past year and intentional visioning for the year ahead; used for eight years with hundreds of participants.
Thanks for listening!
What was your biggest insight from this episode? Let me know @amandaparker.co
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Episode Transcript
Amanda Parker: 00:00
It is super exciting that we have been able to bring so many of these rich conversations to life. It would not be possible without all of you tuning in to actually listen. And that's why I really wanted to take the time to honor this journey this year and to really highlight some of those episodes that for me have been absolutely life-changing. You might think that I'm doing this for you, but the truth is it's also for me. Welcome to Don't Step on the Bluebells, the podcast where personal healing and transformation takes center stage. I'm your host, Amanda Parker, and I'm a fellow seeker on the journey of personal growth. Join me as I delve into the stories of gifted healers, guides, and everyday people who have experienced remarkable transformations. Listen in as they share their practical wisdom to enrich your everyday life. And don't forget to hit subscribe and never miss a new episode. Welcome to today's episode of Don't Step on the Bluebells. Today I've got a special episode for you, short and sweet, and we're going to be doing a bit of a wrap-up of the year. This is going to be the final episode for 2025. And I want to say first and foremost, thank you so much for all of your support this past year with the podcast, for every time that you listened, downloaded, shared, linked, or engaged with the guests who have come onto the show. Every single bit of your support means so much, not only to me, but to every single person who has come on here, sharing their journey, sharing their story and the ways that they support people like you and me to really move forward on our healing journey. So I am so grateful for all the support that you've shown and hope that we continue to deliver in exceptional podcast and programming for 2026 because that is really what it's all about. So I want to share that this has been a year full of different challenges, different points of inflection and growth for me. I know for all of you as well. It's a year that has definitely flipped the script on what normal means. I don't think I know a single person who is living the same life that they had imagined in 2024, or if you think back two years, three years, five years, 10 years, nothing today looks like it used to. So it's really important to me that I continue to bring these messages of hope and healing and bring you the healers who have been doing this work sometimes for decades. These are really the masters in their craft who are here to support every single one of us on this planet to be able to live lives that are more aligned with who we authentically are and help us really come back home to ourselves. So if that is the only message that you take from a year of listening to Don't Step on the Bluebells, then I've done my job well. The good news is that we have hit 53 episodes, including today's episode, that is 54. I almost can't believe that I'm saying those words. We have listeners tuning in from 78 different countries. That is a number I almost can't imagine. I'm gonna tell you where some of our listeners are tuning in from. So we've got people in the United States, we've got people tuning in from Germany, from the Netherlands, we have people tuning in from Sweden, we've got listeners who are coming to us from Singapore. It's really remarkable when I take a look at all of these numbers. Germany, Singapore, Canada, Portugal, the US, the UK, Qatar, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Australia, Italy, Poland, Georgia. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for all of your support and for taking the time to be here with us. I know that these messages are helping people all across the globe. It's not limited to just the English-speaking audience, even though, of course, I am speaking in English and my guests come on speaking English, but I really pride myself in bringing you incredible guests who are coming from all corners of the globe so that you can find the people who really resonate with where you are in your own journey. So, something else I really want to celebrate with you, that we have a few episodes that have really stood out over the course of the year. And I just want to call your attention to it because perhaps you haven't had a chance to listen yet, and this might be your nudge to go do so. So we've got the top episodes from 2025. We have an episode number 34, Healing with Money Mindset. That was with Lena Rimashauskinya. Definitely go have a listen to that one as we're entering 2026, and you might be thinking about your money goals or your vision or what it is you want to create in your business or career for the year ahead. We have episode number 31, Healing with Photography. This was with Laura Antonia Abbott, who's an incredible artist and photographer. She creates these really truly remarkable creations, partnering with her clients to deliver healing in the scheme of art and helping people to feel seen and have these visions that they have come to life. We have episode number 37, Healing with Transpersonal Coaching. That was with Jules DeVito, a woman who is truly remarkable at what she does. Not only is she a transpersonal coach, but she is also a woman who teaches people about being highly sensitive. So she runs the Highly Sensitive Humans Academy. She runs a number of different trainings, helping people to also become certified as coaches in that methodology, but also really bringing light and shedding light on what it means to be highly sensitive and to move through the world in that way. We have our most recent episode called How to Get Paid to Be Yourself. That is with the remarkable Beth Hawking, who I had the pleasure of getting to know this year via LinkedIn. So that's episode number 53. Beth is a fountain of wisdom about personal branding, authority, positioning, and she uses her own story of total transformation, especially in this last year, of what it took to go from being the girl next door to becoming an absolute authority and powerhouse in her industry, in her niche, and the healing journey she went on to get there. One more episode that I'm going to tune you into is why healing isn't enough and how you can shift your energy for business growth. This is episode 43 with Joanna Chancer, another powerhouse coach. She works with people. She's an intuitive business coach and mentor, and she really helps people tune into the energetics of what's going on behind the scenes in their business and in their own lives so that they can create the business they're really actually dreaming of. If you follow her on Instagram or you tune into the episode, you're going to get a taste of how Joanna really helps people to come into their own and to hear the messages behind the scenes that they're not always able to hear themselves. I'm going to give another shout out because I have started this year doing episodes that are solo. So these are shorter episodes, just like the one you're listening to, where we can really deep dive into a topic. And some of the topics that I've covered have been around energy protection, around boosting your intuition, around trusting yourself and your inner wisdom. One of our top-rated episodes for the year is how listening to your intuition can change your life. And the truth is that this has been so life-changing for me. Finally learning how to tune in, to quiet the noise from everything around me, to hear what my own inner voice wants to share and taking action from that aligned place. This has been an absolute game changer for me over the years, but especially in 2025, where I've really worked hard to hone that skill. So if that is something that resonates with you, you're really looking to tap deeper into your intuition and inner wisdom, go ahead and give those episodes a listen. You can start with episode 33, how listening to your intuition can change your life. And if it resonates, send me a message, reach out. I would really love to support you on your journey of learning how to trust yourself more fully and how to tune in to what it is that wants to come out from within you, regardless of anything that's happening around you. So this is what's happening within the podcast world. It is super exciting that we have been able to bring so many of these rich conversations to life. It would not be possible without all of you tuning in to actually listen. And that's why I really wanted to take the time to honor this journey this year and to really highlight some of those episodes that for me have been absolutely life-changing. You might think that I'm doing this for you, but the truth is it's also for me. Every episode I record, every conversation I have with one of these remarkable healers and guides, something changes within me, something unlocks. There's deeper clarity and awareness of what I'm building and what it is that's most important to me. So I'm grateful that you also get something from it and know that it's also selfish, that I am doing this as much for me as I am for you. So you're hearing that I am having this reflection about the year that's just passed. And I want to say that reflecting itself is a tool. And it is, I would say, one of the most important tools that you can have in your toolbox for creating the life that you really want. And when I was younger, I didn't realize this. So I used to just jump from thing to thing, activity to activity, job to job, and I never really understood why I was making those changes. It often felt like life was happening to me, or that I was just operating on autopilot, always saying yes, yes, yes to the next thing, almost rarely saying no, if I'm honest. And I didn't fully understand what impact that was having on me, but it happened that I was, you know, maybe 10 years into my career before I first realized, wait a second, is this actually the work I want to be doing? Am I happy? And I think it's really important to note that there was a period of time where I actually learned about the power of reflection. And I realized that if we actually learn how to hit pause and slow down, unlike my tone right now, which I can tell is very elevated and excited. But if we actually learn how to hit pause and slow things down, take stock of where we are today, how far we've come, what has changed in our lives, then we're actually giving ourselves a chance to decide what we want our future to look like. And that comes from a really grounded and empowered place. And it's something that you might not get if you don't take that time for that initial reflection. So for the last eight years in December, I have created and launched the year-end reflection guide. This is something that I use every single year so that I can truly take stock of what it is that's happened, all these different ways my life has changed, both the good and the bad, the achievements that I had, as much as the hardship and challenges that I faced. And then after I've been able to truly reflect, there's a space to look forward and start creating the vision and the dreams of what you want the year ahead to look like. I can say that after eight years of creating this guide and also completing the guide myself and helping hundreds and hundreds of people, supporting them to go through that process of reflection and to really create that vision and hold themselves accountable to what it is they want, this is invaluable. So if you are listening and you're thinking, I really want to take the time just to see how far I've come and what's happened in my life and really get serious and intentional about what's to come, please go and download the year-end reflection guide. You can go ahead and find that on my website, www.amandaparker.co, or you'll find it in the show notes that are linked below in this episode. So I would love for you to do that reflection and let me know what comes up for you. Send me a quick email, let me know what your reflections brought up, connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know that's where I'm the most active. So you'll get instant responses from me over there. Or if it feels like you might want some more support towards those goals that you're creating for yourself, you can go ahead and schedule a discovery call. We can have a conversation and talk about what it is that you want to create and how I might be able to support you to get there. So go ahead, do your reflections, however feels best for you, and really give yourself the gift of going deep and being honest with what has happened and what it is that you really want. This is the absolute best way that you're going to support yourself to grow in 2026. I would love to say thank you once again for all of the support for everyone who has showed up, either listening to the podcast, sending me messages to let me know how the podcast has supported you or which episodes really resonate, for all of the support on social media and the comments that I keep getting about how moving these episodes are. I have goosebumps just saying it because it's really touching each and every time that I get that kind of response and that kind of message because it helps me know that this work matters and that it's actually making a difference. I'm not just sitting here speaking into a microphone looking at the camera in isolation, but it's actually a project and something that is touching people's lives and helping them to live a life that's more aligned with who they are and what they want in the world. So I am so grateful. I am so grateful for all the support in 2025, and I cannot wait to see you again next year. Thank you for tuning in, and I will see you next time. Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Don't Step on the Bluebells. If you enjoyed this conversation, please give the podcast a five star rating wherever you listen. And don't forget to hit subscribe and follow along so you never miss a new episode.