Stop Learning Start Integrating with Amanda Parker (#067)

What if the reason all that personal growth work "isn't working" has nothing to do with the courses, the books, or the teachers — and everything to do with the step you keep skipping? In this solo episode, Amanda Parker gets refreshingly honest about the trap so many seekers fall into: collecting wisdom faster than we can live it. After years of coach training, psychic development, and shamanic study, Amanda realised she could be a quoted expert on topics she wasn't actually embodying — knowledge that lived in her head, not in her bones.

That gap has a name: integration. And closing it, Amanda argues, is where real transformation happens. She shares why continuous learning can quietly become a form of procrastination, why the self-help backlash misses the point, and what changed when she gave herself permission to stop buying new books and start living what she already knew.

You'll also hear the story of a gloriously collapsed layer cake (proof that reading the recipe is not the same as baking it), a practical 30-day experiment framework Amanda uses with her own clients, and a compassionate word for the neurodivergent brains among us who chase the dopamine of new — plus what's waiting on the other side of sticking with one thing long enough to develop quiet confidence.

If you've got a stack of half-read self-help books and a backlog of exercises you've never done, this episode is your permission slip to pause, digest, and let yourself catch up to everything you've already learned.

How to Get in Touch:

• Website: www.amandaparker.co/
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/amandaparker.co/
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/amandamparker/
• Substack: substack.com/@theamandaparker

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Transcript

[00:00:00] There's many different people who also have burnt out on, like, the self-help world, and I think that's also why we see a lot of people talk about the fact that self-help or all of this personal growth doesn't really work. The truth is, it all works. Like, it's all brilliant, and you can find 100 different teachers who can guide you down a path that will work for you.

But if you're not actually giving yourself the time and the permission to fully integrate the things that you have learned as you're going along, then no, it's not really working

Welcome to Don't Step on the Bluebells, the podcast where personal healing and transformation take 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 [00:01:00] everyday life. And don't forget to hit subscribe and never miss a new episode Hello, and welcome to today's episode of "Don't Step on the Bluebells." I'm your host, Amanda Parker, and today we're talking about integration. So for those of you who might be new to this whole world of spiritual development or personal growth, you might not really know what I'm talking about.

But bear with me, because I wanna share just a bit about my own journey with integration, where I stand with it today, and what that might actually look like for you, and potentially also what kind of permission you could be giving yourself in between all of the different, you know, growth goals that you might have in your own life.

So first and foremost, what do I mean when I talk about integration? So we live in a society and a culture where we really want to be growing all the [00:02:00] time. We are constantly surrounded by content on Instagram or LinkedIn or TikTok, whatever your channel may be, that is telling us the different ways that we can grow into the person we wanna become or that we can run the business that we really wanna be running or even have the relationships that we really want to be having.

And what happens is, if you're anything like me and you love to learn, you love to grow, you will have signed up for 25 different courses. You will have a stack of books like the one that I have behind me, maybe a quarter of which you've actually read, and you'll always have something new on your list of things that you wanna learn or ways that you wanna grow.

And when we are continually searching for growth It means that very often we're not actually taking the time to take the things that we've learned [00:03:00] and figure out how we want to implement them in our own lives. So I know that this is a trap that I have fallen into so many times, especially in the beginning of my growth journey.

Like, I thought that I could just take course after course after course, find teacher, teacher, teacher, mentor, book, book, book, and I could just sort of read it all, take it all in, learn it all, et voila, poof, that it would just be a part of my life. And so I went on this mission to learn as much as I could, but the truth was I just kept learning, and so much of what I learned stayed here up in my mind.

So it stayed as intellectual knowledge, wisdom even, but more from my head, from my mind, than actually from lived experience. And I came to notice over the last couple of [00:04:00] years that I had a lot of wisdom, a lot of information, but I wasn't actually living those truths. So I knew them to be true. They felt right to me or they felt true, or I had spent a lot of time studying them, so it felt like my own reality, my own truth.

In reality, I wasn't actually living or acting out the things that I knew This showed up for me in my coach training, this showed up in the psychic development that I did, in the shamanic practices that I learned. It showed up in so many different parts of my life that I could be a quoted expert on so many of those topics.

But the truth was that I didn't really feel like I was engaging with it, and I often referred to that as, like, this inner knowing or this bone knowledge where something really sinks in and you know it because you've lived it. And [00:05:00] that is actually what I'm talking about when I'm talking about integration.

So if we are in a perpetual state of growth and learning and expansion, it probably means that you're not actually giving yourself the time that you need to integrate everything you've learned and to allow your body, your mind, your spirit to catch up to that knowledge. As someone who would often just pile on learning one on top of the other, I started to realize that the only way that I could actually internalize this wisdom and make change in my own life, so going beyond knowing something and actually seeing the impact of that in my world, that I would have to hit pause on the learning.

And that basically for me meant stop reading new books. Don't buy the spiritual development books. Don't buy the self-help books. Because I always found it so [00:06:00] exciting and interesting to learn all of this stuff, and then I started to notice when I have the self-help books in my hand, I would dread getting to the part of the chapter where they would say, "Okay, and now back to you.

It's time for you to do these exercises." Because I was so inundated with exercises and tools and activities that I hadn't done yet that were all sitting kind of like in this like backlog in the back of my head. So every time I'd get a new exercise or a new tool, it actually just felt more overwhelming and frustrating, and I realize that I'm not alone in this.

So there's many different people who also have burnt out on, like, the self-help world, and I think that's also why we see a lot of people talk about the fact that self-help or all of this personal growth doesn't really work. The truth is, it all works. Like, it's all brilliant, and you can find 100 different teachers who can guide you down a path that will work for you.

But if you're not actually [00:07:00] giving yourself the time and the permission to fully integrate the things that you have learned as you're going along, then no, it's not really working, then it stays up here as information that you have, but it doesn't mean that it actually impacts your life. So how can you actually close that gap?

The gap between the learning, the doing, the trying, the seeking, and making changes in your life. Well, I believe that reading or the courses is actually a form of procrastination for doing the work or making the changes that you actually wanna make. So it's much easier to consume information that tells you how to live a better life, how to bake a better cake.

Like, I can read 25 cookbooks that tell me about great cakes, but I'm not gonna actually understand how to do it unless I put the ingredients together myself, and I'm the one actually standing at the [00:08:00] mixing bowl trying to, you know, make every-- I'm gonna say squirrel 'cause that's a word that my husband uses.

Squirrel all the ingredients together in that bowl and pour it into the baking pan, put it in the oven, and find out what happens. There's a really good example of this because it was about a year or two years ago, I found this killer vanilla cake recipe online. It was, like, amazing. I say amazing 'cause I made the cake, and it was really amazing.

But I had never made a cake in layers before, and I decided I wanted to try this. So I got out two different size baking tins. So in my mind, you have one that's a little bigger, one that's a little smaller. The smaller piece is gonna sit on top. You put something nice in the middle, and then you can ice the whole outside, and you've got a beautiful cake But the reality was that they, they weren't filled fully in the same amount, so they were slightly different heights.

I put the [00:09:00] icing on before the cake was actually cool. I put the smaller piece on top of it, and it was kinda melting. Then I put all the icing on, and it sort of, like, melted in because everything was still hot. It literally looked like a pile of, well, shit. It was a chocolate icing. The cake looked horrific, and I was, like, honestly super embarrassed just looking at it.

But the truth was it tasted delicious. But I just didn't know that I needed to cool the cake first, and I didn't know that I would need to make special, you know, precautions to get it to look nice instead of, like, looking like one big melty glob of chocolate. So this is something like I looked at the recipe, everything was there, all the details, it was perfect, and then actually when you went to make the cake, when I actually went to bake it, everything that I learned along the way was quite different.

So this is exactly what we're talking about with integration. Now, if I were to make that cake, I would do it [00:10:00] differently. I would cool the cake first. I'd make sure that the layers are even. I might even use different color icing or frosting for the different layers so that it looks really intentional, et cetera, et cetera.

So when you want to actually start integrating the information that you've been taking in all along, it's really important that you ask yourself, first and foremost, what's your goal? So what is it that you really wanna focus on? It's one thing for me to say, "I wanna write every single day." Great. Why? Why do I wanna write?

Why is that important to me? And the truth is that, you know, maybe I really wanna be able to tell my story in a more cohesive way. Maybe I wanna build up the muscle of writing so that one day I can write a book, and then I'm already prepared. Maybe I wanna find a way to get all of those swirling thoughts out of my head, and I wanna be able to write every day so that I can clear my head before I do other work.

So you [00:11:00] wanna just get an understanding of why that thing matters to you. Like, what's the goal for doing that? So if there's something that you've been learning continuously Why are you learning it? Why is it important to you? What is it that you're hoping to get out of it? When you have a bit of clarity on that, it helps you to think about the way that you wanna integrate it into your life.

So I learned from my coach, and also something that I teach to all of my clients, it's really good to work in shorter experiments. So I will give myself a 30-day experiment, and I'll say if there's something, let's say that it's a new spiritual practice that I, you know, have been learning a lot of psychic channeling, and I know it all here, but I'm not really sure can I do it?

How's it gonna feel? And I'll give myself the goal of channeling every single day for 30 days to find out what happens, and guaranteed that what happens on day one is [00:12:00] vastly different than what will happen on day 23 or even day 18 or day 29. So I know that I'm gonna learn something about myself, I'm gonna learn something about the skill, and I'm gonna grow, and maybe I grow in confidence or maybe I grow in the knowing that that thing that I thought I wanted really isn't for me.

So you wanna make sure that you're giving yourself time to actually integrate I think there's something here might be worth noting for those of us who suspect that we have neurodivergence, so maybe someone who's listening who has ADHD or has some of those tendencies where you really like the dopamine hits.

So you really want to do the new things, and you want to have that new information, new stimuli, and then you get bored if you have to actually bring it to life. But I'm gonna tell you that the satisfaction that comes from developing mastery in something, [00:13:00] from actually allowing yourself to do the same thing over and over and over and develop a quiet confidence is, like, unmatched by anything that I could describe.

So you really want to do yourself the favor of allowing yourself to try something for long enough to find out if it's for you or not. And if you keep yourself in that perpetual cycle of trying to bring new things in, maybe that stimulates a bit of that excitement, those endorphins that come from something new.

But over time, and I've seen this with a lot of my clients, I've seen this in myself as well, you will also come with the frustration that develops from constantly doing new things and having a load of projects or ideas or thoughts that you never fully saw through until the end. It might be a challenge for anyone, especially [00:14:00] if that really resonates and you are potentially somewhere on that neurodivergence spectrum.

But it really is a remarkable feeling when you allow yourself to focus and to find out what happens if you allow all of this learning, all of this wisdom, all of this knowledge to actually integrate into your system, and you give yourself space in between taking on new things just to allow your own self to upgrade or uplevel into who you're becoming.

And this could show up even just as taking periods of rest. It could literally be that you take a week off from everything that you're doing, maybe a week off from work, or I don't know if you can take a week off of parenting, but maybe you call in extra support from, uh, beloved friends, family, or grandparents to come and help you.

But you wanna give yourself these periods of rest where you are not focusing on anything growth [00:15:00] related, and you allow yourself to just be completely Because on the other side of that, there's always so much energy and enthusiasm and excitement for what it is that you're creating. So I would love to hear from you.

This is what integration means to me, and I, I find myself very often needing to come back to that reminder that it's okay to take the time to integrate and to make decisions after that, rather than keeping myself always on a, a stricter schedule of things I wanna learn or need to accomplish or do. And I'd love to hear from you, what does integration mean to you, and what does that actually look like in your life?

So when you have a healing experience or you're learning something new or maybe you've just gone on some life-changing hike, how do you then bring that back and integrate it into your life, into your day-to-day? I'd love, love, love to hear from [00:16:00] you what that looks like, and I'm super curious, uh, what the response is gonna be to this 'cause I think this is quite a common affliction of our times, that we're always jumping from thing to thing without really giving ourselves that chance to fully be with what we have already learned and what we've already accomplished.

Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Don't Step on the Bluebells, and I can't wait to 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