About Time — Episode 52 | Season One Finale

A year. 52 episodes. One step ahead.

In this milestone episode of The Download, Jill Marshall marks the end of Season One and the completion of a full year of weekly publishing - a creative commitment that became far more than a podcast.

This episode is a reflection on showing up before you’re ready, building a creative playground without chasing metrics, and discovering what happens when you let intuition, curiosity, and craft lead the way. Jill reflects on what the past year has taught her about creativity, voice, time, technology, and trust - including how AI has supported (and occasionally misled) the process, and why perfection was never the point.

As the season closes, the conversation turns to time itself - not just the linear kind measured in weeks and episodes, but Kairos: the moment when everything aligns and something new is ready to emerge.

Season One ends here.
But The Download isn’t finished - it’s evolving.

✨ If you’ve listened along this year, thank you.
✨ If you’re new, this is the perfect place to begin.

In this episode:

• Why “shipping before perfect” changed everything
• The power of making the main thing the main thing
• Creativity as a playground, not a performance
• Reclaiming voice, confidence, and joy through weekly practice
• What AI can (and can’t) do for creative work
• Why time isn’t always linear — and what Kairos really means
• What’s next for The Download in Season Two

Timestamps

00:00 Welcome to The Download
00:34 One year in — reflections on 52 episodes
01:19 Why shipping before perfect matters
01:48 Making the main thing the main thing
02:28 Inspiration and creative courage
04:38 Sharing, connection, and creative fulfilment
07:34 Playing with AI and technology
11:22 What podcasting taught me
14:44 Time, Kairos, and alignment
16:17 Wrapping Season One — and what comes next

✨ That’s a wrap on Season One of The Download.
52 episodes, a year of intuition, creativity, reflection, and following the thread one step at a time.

If you’re new here, Season One is a collection of stories, insights, and moments that explore intuition in everyday life - from small synchronicities to life-changing Kairos moments. You’re very welcome to dip back into earlier episodes and follow the trail wherever it leads.

Season Two will return - changed, expanded, and evolving.
Thank you for listening, reflecting, and being part of this first year.

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Find out more about Jill’s best-selling fiction and storyworlds on girlpowerpublishing.com.

Find The Download Podcast on YouTube, FaceBook, Instagram,
Apple Podcasts, Spotify and LinkedIn

What if the year did not just pass you by, but quietly looked back at you?
What if it noticed the moments that never made the highlight reel or the end-of-year review?

In this end-of-year episode of The Download, Jill shares a moment of heightened perception beneath a tree on Christmas Eve, where sunlight flickering through the leaves appeared like a thousand twinkling eyes - Indian goddess eyes, faerie eyes - and carried a powerful feeling of being seen.

That moment becomes the doorway into a deeper reflection on symbolism, spiritual experience and the quiet ways meaning shows up in our lives. Drawing on Jungian psychology, mythic storytelling and timeless human relationships with trees, from the Bodhi tree of the Buddha to modern creative inspiration, this episode explores why lived experience so often comes before explanation and why symbols speak for us and to us where language falls short.

Rather than offering a traditional year-in-review or achievement-based retrospective, this episode invites a different kind of reflection, one that honours glimmers over goals, presence over productivity and the moments where light got through. It explores the unseen stories that rarely make it into highlight reels, the acts of care and connection that happened offstage and the small, luminous moments that pass in the blink of an eye.

With 2025 marking the completion of a nine-year cycle in numerology and the Chinese Year of the Snake, Jill offers a gentle framework for reviewing not just the past year but the themes and highlights of the last nine, not as a scorecard but as a guidance card. It's a way of noticing what you are ready to release with relief, what you are grateful for and what you want to carry forward with intention.

This is an episode for anyone who is tired of ‘Thank God that’s over’ thinking and curious about how reflection, gratitude and symbolic meaning can shape the year ahead.

In this episode

• A Christmas Eve moment beneath a tree and a feeling of being seen
• Trees and nature as witnesses, symbols and sources of spiritual insight
• Jung, Campbell and why symbolism matters
• Why experience comes before explanation
• The stories that never make the highlight reel
• A new way to reflect on the year without scorecards or KPIs
• 2025 as the closing of a nine year cycle and Year of the Snake
• Glimmers, gratitude and a jar of fireflies

Timestamps

00:00 A thousand twinkling eyes
01:30 Trees, presence and spiritual symbolism
03:45 Jung, myth and the language of symbols
06:10 Glimmers not goals, rethinking year-end reflection
08:40 The unseen stories that shaped the year
10:30 2025 and the closing of a nine year cycle
12:45 A guidance card for the year ahead
14:30 Final reflections, being seen and seeing clearly

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Find out more about Jill’s best-selling fiction and storyworlds on girlpowerpublishing.com.

Find The Download Podcast on YouTube, FaceBook, Instagram,
Apple Podcasts, Spotify and LinkedIn

What if your most meaningful successes can’t be counted?

In this 'milestone' 50th episode of The Download with Jill Marshall, we celebrate nearly a year of showing up, creating, healing, and sharing — not through charts or rankings, but through felt impact.

Jill Marshall, author, mentor and strategist, invites you into a soulful exploration of success without the spreadsheet. She challenges the cultural obsession with downloads, followers and optics, and asks a deeper question:

✨ “If the work changed you — or reached even one person who needed it — isn’t that a meaningful result?”

In this reflective, gently provocative episode, Jill shares:

• What it really takes for a podcast to survive to 50 episodes (very few do)
• Why she’s 'failed' at almost every traditional podcast metric — and why she’s totally fine with that
• The moments that mattered more than virality: creative breakthroughs, energetic healing, synchronicities, and emotional resonance
• Stories from communications, publishing and industry that reveal how deeply we’ve been trained to chase measurable outcomes
• Why creative integrity, connection, and intention leave a deeper legacy than algorithms ever will

This is an episode for creators, thinkers, leaders, and anyone feeling burnt out on the endless chase for “more.”
It’s an invitation to redefine success — on your own terms.

⏱️ Episode Timeline

00:00 – Welcome to The Download
00:34 – Celebrating 50 episodes (and the realities of podcast survival)
01:10 – Why traditional success metrics don’t tell the real story
02:03 – The surprising truth about podcasting “success”
03:35 – What meaningful results actually look and feel like
04:25 – How we became addicted to measurement
06:51 – The power — and cost — of creative integrity
08:54 – Shifting focus from virality to resonance
11:52 – The real impact that charts can’t capture
13:44 – Closing reflections and an invitation to redefine your own success

Related episodes:

The Quickening: Waiting, Transformation and the Threshold of Change

Cold Feet Creations: Comparing and Competing in the Creative Arts

Message Us!

Find out more about Jill’s best-selling fiction and storyworlds on girlpowerpublishing.com.

Find The Download Podcast on YouTube, FaceBook, Instagram,
Apple Podcasts, Spotify and LinkedIn