Bloom Your Mind

Ep 157: Yearly Reflection — The Questions That Matter

• Marie McDonald

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Every year, I used to get an email that stopped me in my tracks. It would land in my inbox, and I’d feel this immediate sense of clarity and groundedness. The email came from the CEO of the company I worked for at the time—a brilliant, mission-driven leader whose work focused on transforming education by building changemakers, not bubble-fillers. I respected him deeply, and when he shared best practices, I paid attention.

That email contained five simple reflection questions to ask at the end of the year and the beginning of the next. I answered them every year. And when I eventually left that role, I kept the practice.

Now, I record an episode like this every year to remind you to pause and reflect. And if you’re listening to this at any other time of year, here’s your permission slip: the year is a construct. Reflection works anytime. The more often you do it, the more powerful it becomes.

Research consistently shows that intentional reflection increases learning, clarity, emotional regulation, and follow-through. When we pause to look back, we extract wisdom from experience instead of rushing past it—and that wisdom is one of the greatest accelerators for turning ideas into real things.

Last year, I shared a set of reflection questions focused on what gave you positive and negative feelings and how you wanted to shift your priorities. This year, I went deeper with my students—and the results were profound.

Reflection Questions for This Year

  • What are you proudest of?
  • When did you feel most alive?
  • What did you learn?
  • Where were you deeply true to yourself?
  • Where—and how—did you abandon yourself?
  • How do you want to prioritize differently moving forward?
  • How do you want to grow?
    What do you most want to celebrate from 2025?

I recommend saving your reflections each year. Over time, they become a powerful record of your evolution—what mattered, what shifted, and how you grew into yourself.

I’ll end this episode with a final practice that is the MOST powerful I’ve found to launch you on the path you most want to walk for the year ahead. 

If you want support bringing your ideas to life, join us in the Bloom Room or the Moxie Mastermind. 2026 is the year of your moxie. Let’s go.

Mentioned in this episode:

  • Glen Tripp — CEO, changemaker, and longtime advocate for reflective leadership practices

How to connect with Marie:

JOIN THE BLOOM ROOM!
We'll take all these ideas and apply them to our lives. Follow me on Instagram at @the.bloom.coach to learn more and snag a spot in my group coaching program!

SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to the Blue in Your Mind Podcast, where we take all of your ideas for what you want and we turn them into real things. I'm your host, certified coach Marie McDonald. Let's get into it. The last of an era. Next year, so much is going to be changing in my work in the Bloom Room, in the Moxie Mastermind. We're going full tilt boogie in creating a movement behind all this work that we're doing and specifically supporting women in all the different ways that they need to create more balance in their lives, more regenerative cycles in their relationships, in their communities, in their work, in everything, through the Bloom Room and through the Moxie Mastermind. So this is a beautiful year to look back on for me and a beautiful beginning to a new chapter for me and for many others. So I'm excited for this closure today with all of you. I just got finished with our own personal holidays, our family holidays. And I have to say, like, I love a celebration. My husband teases me lovingly all the time for making everything special, like loving everything and making experiences out of everything. And I know that I do it. I do it naturally. I just I like to celebrate. I like to be in whatever special moments there are, which are every moment really. And uh, so holidays are fun. I go for it. I go full tilt boogie on that too. And so our Christmas holiday, we celebrate Christmas, and that holiday was really fun. The days leading up to it was fun. I took a couple weeks off just to be with my kids. And what I always realize is that the days after the holidays are my favorite. There's so much leading up to the holidays, and then the days after for us are so full of stillness and downtime and togetherness. We stay at my parents' house for a few days after the holidays, and they live up in the mountains on a bunch of acres, and we take walks and we play cards and we eat leftovers, so we're not in the kitchen cooking the whole time, and we laugh and lie around and uh go on more walks and jump puddles. It's just my favorite thing. And then in the last couple of days, I've been home just enjoying my kids, watching them get lost in books and playing darts with them and laughing and being together. So I'm hoping that wherever you are in your year and wherever you are in your life, that you're taking these moments as they're available to you, the calm, still moments and being in them as fully as you can. Like keep having this experience of being like, this is all passing, and how can I be more and more in the moment that I'm in? So that's where my mind has been at. And now I'm gonna share with you something that I do every single year and a little bit of the origins of it for our last episode of the year. So every year when I was at the innovation education company that I worked at for 15 years, my entire professional career was at this innovation education company pretty much. And I scaled it from very small to very big. So when I was working at this company, every year at the very end of the year, when I was finishing up all of my work before leaving for my holiday off for my days off, I would get an email in my inbox with the same title. I would see it pop up as I had my like coffee beside me and I was wrapping things up, getting like getting rid of all the loose ends, trying to clean out my inboxes and my desk and all of my last to-dos to leave fresh with a fresh mind and be able to enter in in the new year with a clean, fresh perspective too. I would get this email and I would see it pop into my inbox, and I would have this amazing feeling every year. This email always came from the CEO. He was this brilliant man, he is this brilliant man named Glenn Tripp, whose mission and passion was to revolutionize education, to make learning spaces and leaders and administrators in those spaces focused on building change makers instead of teaching kids how to memorize the right answer, be right all the time, win over others, right? And circle the right bubble on their Scantron. He had this mission to teach kids instead to think for themselves, how to contribute, how to be change makers, how to recognize areas of the world that need changes, how to have ideas for how to change those things. And we worked with Stanford Dschool to create a process to teach them the skills that innovators use to turn those ideas into real things in collaboration with others, moving through the hard stuff, staying determined, staying visionary, moving through all the challenges that come up when we're trying to change the world. And as you know, that's what I do now for women and for my groups. I combine all of the skills that I have in leadership, in business, and in working with the mind, both the conscious and unconscious mind in coaching to help people turn ideas into real things. So this is the context in which I got this email and the leader of this organization that influenced my path and my journey so much. So, in short, I had a lot of respect for this man and I listened when he shared best practices with me. He usually had a coaching approach where he asked a lot of questions. So when he said, Hey, you should do this, I listened. So if you want to get a hint or a hit of his brilliance, you can listen to the interview I did with Glenn Tripp on the podcast. So anyway, are you dying to know what was in this email or what? It was a list of five questions that came into my inbox every year. Five questions that we should all ask ourselves at the end of the new year and the start of the next. I did it every year because he was there in my inbox reminding me to, reminding me how important it was for 15 years. And I did it every year, and I kept all of them. And then once I developed my own, once I left the company, I developed my own practice for doing it on my own every year. And now I'm here recording an episode at the end of the year to remind you to take the time to reflect on your year. And you're, if you're listening to this at any other time of year, if it's not the new year, remember that we made this year business up. The calendar is our invention. It's a construct. Doing retros, reflecting, even answering these very specific questions about the year is available and valuable to you any time of the year. And the more you do it, the better. And here's why. Reflection of all types strengthens our learning, our decision making, and our follow-through. So if you look at research in cognitive psychology, it shows that reflection helps consolidate our memory. I talk about this all the time. Every time we retell a memory, we update the memory in our brain. We change it a little bit. So reflection allows us to integrate our experiences and then turn those experiences into insights that impact our behavior, allow us to change our behavior. When we pause to look at what worked, what didn't, how we felt along the way, we're more likely to improve our own performance in the ways that we want to and to repeat behaviors that we want to repeat, repeat the good ones, repeat the ones that move us forward. When we don't reflect, the inverse happens. We're randomly repeating all kinds of things, and our brain naturally focuses on the negative. So we might even have a proclivity to reinforce the negative behaviors we don't actually want to be digging into. So studies on goal achievement show that people who regularly reflect are more effective at adjusting how they're acting, their strategies, staying motivated, and maintaining their long-term commitment to their goals. Reflection, it actually brings us into the prefrontal cortex where we want to hang out as much as we can, but we don't naturally, right? The part of the brain that's responsible for meaning making and planning and intentional action instead of acting from the motivational triad where we want to do what's easy, avoid pain, pursue pleasure. So instead of being stuck in reactivity or habit, these reflective practices kick us into the part of our brain that helps us be who we want to be, live how we want to live. Life the way we want to life instead of on our habituated pattern of habit. So, in other words, reflection is not indulgent. It is quite the opposite. It's strategic. It's one of the most reliable ways to turn ideas into real things because it closes the loop between experience and growth. So last year, at this time of year, I shared three questions for your reflection. The first one was, what are the people, things, and experiences that gave you positive feelings this year? The second one was, what are the people, things, and experiences that gave you negative feelings this year? And the third was, how do you want to take that information and change your priorities and change the way you're lifing for next year? Yeah, different words, but something like that. This year, I have some different questions for you because I like to keep it fresh, but I do recommend keeping your reflections from every year so you can have the record of them. I recommend answering the same-ish questions every year if possible, but truly, that's not the most important part. The most important part is that you do it. The second most important part is that you keep them somewhere where you can retrieve them and check them out because it's really fun to see the record of your reflection. So I have two exercises for you today. I just did all of these with my students in the Bloom Room and my individual coaching clients over the last few weeks, and they just kept telling me how much it meant to them. For some of them that work with me, have worked with me for years, I read them the answers from last year from their reflection that we did together. And they were just blown away by how true to themselves they were. All right. So here are the questions that I recommend for this year, and then we'll close up. Number one, what are you proudest of from 2025 or from the last year? Number two, what made you feel most alive? Number three, what did you learn? Number four, where were you really true to yourself? In what ways? Number six, where and how and when did you leave yourself? Now, what I mean by that, I've talked about it a couple of times, is that we leave ourselves when we are not authentic to ourselves, when we tell the little untruths, when we smile and we don't mean to be smiling, when we say yes and we go places we don't want to be, when we overcommit instead of giving ourselves time and space to be relaxed and in our lives in the ways that we want to be. When we say things we don't mean, when we do things we don't want to, when we prioritize the things that are not our true heart's priority. When we allow ourselves to meet other people's expectations and people please instead of pleasing ourselves. And if you want help with this one, get into the Moxie mastermind, get into the bloom room. We focus all the way on this. So how and and when and where and with whom did you leave yourself last year? This was an important one. And then how will you prioritize differently this coming year? How do you want to grow? And what do you want to celebrate most from the year that has just passed to end on that? Alright, those are my reflection questions for you this year. I have loved doing them. And lastly, in the next couple of days, and again, you can do this any time of the year, but I recommend every year writing yourself a letter. Write yourself a letter from your future self and keep it every year. In the letter, stand in the shoes of yourself at the end of this year, the end of this coming year, a year from now, and tell yourself about everything you did. How did you do it? What did you accomplish? What are the things you were committed to? Why was it hard? And how did you overcome the challenges? What is it like being where she is? What advice does she have for you right now? And at the end, end it with her gratitude for you. Why is she so grateful for you? And then send your letters to me if you want to. I want to read them all. That's what I've got for you to end this beautiful year. I am so, so grateful to be on the other end of this microphone and this speaker that you're listening to this out of from you. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being in my world. It is such an honor to be recording this from you. I hope that you join the Bloom Room or the Moxie this year and deepen this practice, deep in this work with me. We are going all the way next year. 2026 is the year of your Moxie. Let's get into it. Let's go. That's what I have for you this week, and I will see you in the new year. If you like what you're hearing on the podcast, you gotta come and join us in the Bloom Room. This is a year-round membership where we take all of these concepts and we apply them to real life in a community where we have each other's backs and we bring out the best in each other. We're all there to make our ideas real. One idea at a time.