Maren Deepwell

Author: Maren Deepwell

  • CEO Days Revisited

    CEO Days Revisited

    Time flies… I can’t quite believe that it’s been three years since I retired my CEO trainers along with the job title and became my own boss.

    Little did I know what the future would have in store for me when I made that transition, and three years into the new chapter I still have that same curiosity but fortunately, some things have also become clear.

    Making a big pivot takes time

    A big career transition is a process and I didn’t hurry it. This sounds like an obvious truth, but every time I thought I had arrived somewhere, I realised that I was still in it. So I intentionally focused on enjoying or at least being present in the moments of transition and change. It wasn’t always comfortable and it took a lot of energy to gain the rewards of the process.

    It also took time for my life to take on a new rhythm instead of one shaped by the milestones of an organisational year: year end, conferences, travel and so forth.

    One day I released that I had stopped thinking about it, and instead had found a new cadence that determines my year now.

    Returning to ALT’s Annual Conference this year, which happily takes place in Cardiff in October, feels not like a return to old grounds but a new opportunity to share my work and get feedback from peers.

    Keeping what matters most…

    Making a big career transition is an opportunity to reinvent yourself, and in those heady first days I felt little desire to take things with me. I needed space and I needed to gain some perspective. Once I had that, I was able to keep doing what mattered most to me.

    All Things Open

    I started working in Open Education during my years as CEO and quickly developed a deep interest in and commitment to all things open such as open source technology, open educational practice, open research and publishing and open leadership. Indeed my work now focuses much these elements, and I continue to work in the Open Education Community more than any other.

    Running a Business

    I LOVE running an organisation, and my approach to leading my own company is in practice very similar to how I went about leading a charity. I still have an operational and strategic plan, I produce quarterly budgets and reports, I have impact measures, values and use open source technologies for IT wherever possible. Apparently, you can take the CEO out of an organisation, but I can’t take it out of me.

    It’s a huge asset, not just for my business, but also for coaching senior leaders and strategic consultancy.

    Travel

    Giving keynotes was one of the greatest joys of my CEO days, and especially towards the end there were some wonderful trips that I have the best memories of: like travelling to the ETUG Conference in Kamloops and to Hong Kong for a keynote at a CMALT event. Post-pandemic travel has been far less frequent, so I enjoy the rare opportunities all the more now.

    Later this year I am heading to Brisbane to give a keynote (and a leadership workshop) at the Ascilite Conference, and I am thrilled that this event, which has long been on my wish-list to attend, has invited me to speak.

    Collaborations

    Working with interesting people that bring out the best in me is one of the things I was very lucky to have from the very beginning: Jim Groom and the team at Reclaim, Emma Procter-Legg and her colleagues at Oxford, Lynne Taylerson and AmplifyFE colleagues, and later coaching clients and other consultancy projects.

    Working from home and running my own business with me as the only employee can certainly be a solitary pursuit at times, but these days my weeks are so busy that I find the quiet moments, like this Monday morning, a welcome change of pace from meetings and working in collaboration and I am grateful for both.

    “Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!”

    Ever since I listened to the audiobook version of Project Hail Mary, the alien Rocky’s outbursts of “Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!” have stayed with me, and become a shorthand for bouncing up and down with joy and amazement. It’s a good reminder to myself to find ways to truly celebrate the milestones*, whilst living in a timeline that encourages anything but.

    Instead of championing and celebrating my successes when they formed part of a single team’s efforts or in service of one community with a cause, I now get play my part in the work of a whole range of organisations, teams and individuals. I get to be part of projects that benefit more leaders, more students, more communities, and for that I am very grateful indeed.

    Three years ago I was sad to retire my CEO trainers, to say goodbye to working for an organisation that had been my home base for 15 years. Moving on has given me the bigger canvas I needed to develop as a leader and to take that next step in my career to think bigger, and create more impact.

    Thank you for an amazing three years, and thank you for the adventures ahead of me.

    *Milestones like recording my 150th podcast episode this summer, or passing 250 professional coaching hours. Or running successful projects and events. Getting the best feedback for teaching and training. Travelling to events and giving talks. And offering at least ten percent of my time free for pro bono work, and volunteering as a mentor for national initiatives. Running my own business in as ethical and sustainable a way as I can.

  • Coaching for the new term

    Coaching for the new term

    It’s September, and I get that back to school feeling once again as the new term starts. My coaching inbox, which is always a bit quiet over the summer, starts to fill up with emails from clients ready to continue their work, and new enquiries from folk who are looking at the year ahead and need some support to:

    • start a new job or a more senior role with confidence;
    • find a better balance between work and the rest of their life;
    • tackle a long term goal such as writing a book, getting a promotion or giving a keynote.

    I love the first conversation with a potential new client, hearing about their priorities; and to discuss together how what I can offer might fit with their needs. Each engagement is as unique as the individual its tailored to, and for each coaching looks a little different.

    Learn more about my coaching work

    Some of my clients love regular check-ins and count on me to provide that extra accountability to keep them on track. Some prefer to go and work towards their goal and arrange the next session when they are ready to plan the next step.

    Since I’ve been coaching professionally for 5 years now and have over 250 hours of coaching experience, I’ve developed a much better feel for the clients I can make the biggest difference for, and if what I can offer isn’t a good fit, I have a network of coaches I can refer to as well.

    If you are new to coaching and would like to learn how it might work for you, get in touch and try a free session.

    Get in touch
  • Newsletter, September 2026

    Newsletter, September 2026

    As I am writing this month’s newsletter, the sun is drying the remnants of last night’s thunderstorm. After months of drought, heatwaves and wildfires, rain has returned to South Wales.

    The end of summer brought many highlights, including the DS106 Radio Summer Camp, the start of new projects, working with new coaching clients and preparations for the next academic year as well as the upcoming conference season.

    September!

    As you might gather from the featured picture this month (the result of one of my recent painting lessons) I am very much looking forward to this new season, the “new pencil case” time of year.

    The podcast returns!

    The podcast is back from its summer break and we’re be back with fresh episodes on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Castsor via RSS Feed .

    I love the line up of Special Guests already confirmed for the next few months, so there’s plenty of interesting conversations coming up.

    Recent blog posts

    Have a good start to the new academic year… and as always, thank you for reading 🙂

    If you’d like to subscribe to the newsletter, head over to LinkedIn.

  • Adventures in Analogue II

    Adventures in Analogue II

    This seems to be the time of year when I blog about my adventures in the analogue world. Most of my work and much of my friendships are happening online in some form or other, so this is post is about the things that are happening offline, in the analogue world I treasure.

    A photo of my painting desk, with work in progress, a book about learning how to paint, colours, paletes.

    Painting

    I started painting a while ago, and mostly focused on seascapes to begin with as that is where most of my inspiration comes from. On a summer trip to Oxford however I picked up a book promising “Art in 15 Minutes” and ever since I have been learning how to paint with the help of its projects with great joy. I would not normally choose the motifs or the colours the exercises focus on, but I am learning much about mixing colours, working with shadow and simple perspective. As you can see in the photo above, the small, postcard-size canvases I use fit very well with the templates in the book, and so I paint away happily most days. It’s a very relaxing activity, but also fuels my creativity no end.

    Landscape view of Taff valleys near Cardiff
    Photo of the view from a local woodland path towards the sea.

    Running

    Since the Vancouver Half Marathon in early May, my running distances have decreased, but I have kept a steady training schedule of 3-4 runs most weeks. I can’t say that it’s been particularly easy given conditions haven’t been particularly helpful, but I am very proud to have kept going after that big milestone race I was training for over a long period.

    Parkrun has made a welcome return in my schedule, and I am very grateful for several local community events to choose from every Saturday.

    A photo of books, cards and stationary which I picked up on a recent visit to Hay-on-Wye.

    Reading

    Reading has been A LOT of fun this summer. I have read too many historical naval novels (thank you, Patrick O’Brian) and also a lot of other fun reads, whilst failing most of the time to track them as I had hoped to do this year.

    I catch up on the app I use every now and then when I remember, but by then I have likely moved on to new books already. Some recent highlights:

    • We Burned So Bright by TJ Klune: An original story-telling voice and an end of the world scenario spin a tale of an existential road trip. I loved it.
    • wild things by laura kay: a summer romance read with a wonderfully diverse cast of characters that I spent a very happy afternoon devouring.
    • The Secret World of Weather by Tristan Gooley: my current read, and absolutely fascinating. I stood in the nearby rugby field with a compass, checking which direction the wind came from and watching the cloud. Highly recommended.

    I’ve also been re-reading Richard Osman’s cosy crime books in anticipation of his new one coming out. Joy.

    Postcards that arrived this month

    Pen Pal

    One of my lifelong hobbies is writing letters, and over the years I have had many pen pals. Some come and go, others stay for many years. My mother must be my most long-standing postal correspondent but I have a few friends with whom I have sent many letters, cards and small parcels back and forth across continents and oceans. It may be out of fashion (and many postal services are creaking), but it brings me much joy and connections.

  • Road to Nowhere

    Road to Nowhere

    I love the song Road to Nowhere by the Talking Heads. I am listening to it right now, just as I am typing this.

    This post is a bit complicated, so let’s see if I can put it all together and make some sense out of it:

    It all started with the DS106 Radio Summer Camp, an online, radio-based conference that happened for 12 hours on Tuesday (and it was FABULOUS). I always play the song as part of my set, as I associate it with all the things that I treasure about being a citizen of the open web and the DS106 community.

    …would you like to come along? You can help me sing this song. And it’s alright…

    At the end of a long day of connecting, chatting and sharing tunes on the airwaves, I started to read a book I recently bought in town (TJ Klune’s We Burned So Bright). It’s a story of a road trip, during the apocalypse. There’s a black hole approaching that promises the end of the world and against that backdrop a journey across the US brings many encounters and adventures.

    I haven’t yet finished it, but it’s a beautifully written book, and very much a book of our times. In one chapter the Golden Records get a mention, and it really captured my imagination. If, like me, you don’t quite recall, the Golden Record is a “phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth” which was launched into space in 1977 on the Voyager spacecrafts.

    The day following the summer camp, I was working on a postgrad module about leadership and organisational culture, and as part of that research I was seeking some inspiration in the work pioneered by Lou Mycroft. As it happens, Lou just posted a newsletter that really chimed with me on Joy and the Planetary Crisis, a great read and full of valuable, practical reminders of what we can do to make a difference every day.

    One of the questions Lou leaves us with is this: Ask yourself, ‘What am I fighting for, today?’. And that is where this post comes in.

    I was thinking what I would put on my own version of a Golden Record, what I would treasure enough to tell the universe about, even in times of apocalypse (and this summer the climate crisis has certainly focused my mind on those times).

    Most of my list would be about the people I love. my husband, my family, my friends, my dogs. Some books, art, music. There’s a lot in the world I love and want to protect, and many experiences I treasure. Blogging and radio, too.

    On Tuesday I felt that once again. How important this lifeline of connection and community is to me, and how joyful it was to cut across the digital noise and celebrate the things we are curious about and the stories we want to share. If our 12 hours of radio became a Golden Record, it would surely give anyone listening a sense of hope and joy, of what we hold dear and what we want to protect and fight for.

    Thank you DS106 Radio for making it happen. #4life.

    Thank you to Chahira Nouira, Simon Horrocks, Phil Walker, Clint Lalonde, Martin Weller, Alan Levine, Mark Corbett Wilson, Sarah Honeychurch, Joe Murphy, Taylor Jadin, Alexis Block, Laura Gibbs, Sam Hooper, Jason Teitelman and especially Jim Groom, for everything.

  • Rookie (or a year of mentoring)

    Rookie (or a year of mentoring)

    For the past few years I have volunteered as a mentor for the 1 Million Mentors programme, a national initiative that provides free career focused mentoring for 16-25 year olds. This week another year of mentoring comes to an end, and so I want to reflect on how it went and what I take away from the experience.

    Confidence and Perspective, the image featuring in this post created by Bryan Mathers / Visual Thinkery, relates very well to how I felt as a mentor and at times when putting myself in the shoes of my mentee.

    Rookie year

    This was my first time mentoring a final year undergraduate. As my previous experience as a volunteer mentor was with mentees looking to move into post-16 education or training and my professional coaching clients are mostly in employment already, you might call it a ‘Rookie’ year for me. It was all about finding my way in the very fast moving, competitive undergraduate recruitment market.

    That is my first take away from this year: it was a new challenge that kept me on my toes, and that is always a good thing.

    AI and recruitment

    Both in my work with clients and in my own experience I have come up against how far and how deeply AI-powered tools and platforms are changing recruitment. However, I found the practices we encountered through our mentoring work even more stark and opaque. Entry-level, science-based jobs lend themselves well, it seems, to automation, and that can make the process of applying for opportunities difficult and disheartening (at all stages of one’s career, but especially, I would say, at the beginning).

    That brings me to my next take-away: authenticity is key to making any part of the recruitment process meaningful. Any practice that doesn’t allow for that deters good candidates.

    Connecting in safety

    Much of my work happens on the open web and I am an advocate for open practices, including open leadership practice. That said, this year’s mentoring experience really made me question how well we are doing in Higher Education to help students gain not only skills but also the confidence to connect in a way that feels safe to them.

    Kudos to the mentoring programme, which provides excellent training on safeguarding and sharing information. But beyond the confines of institutional provision, the open web, especially social media platforms like LinkedIn, soon became problematic or felt unsafe.

    My take away here is that there is a palpable pressure to optimise yourself and your online identity which is in conflict with the aforementioned desire for authenticity and finding meaningful work connections and opportunities.

    Students welcome, but…

    One of the sessions that made me reflect the most was a day when we looked at professional bodies and industry organisations that were explicitly trying to welcome students and recent graduates.

    As soon as we dug a little deeper, the friendly welcome turned into incomprehensible next steps. There was little to go on for a student looking to learn more about a specific career path or connect with professionals in their chosen field.

    Having worked in this space for much of my career I was disappointed to see just how hard to navigate this was – and just how much confidence was needed to take that first step into a new profession.

    This resonates closely with my coaching work, in which building confidence is a theme for both emerging and established leaders – particularly when connecting or collaborating online.

    Home and work

    Lastly, and this made me reflect a lot on how to build confidence and find perspective, is the role of home study and home working in all this. In my research for my new book I’ve come across data that indicates strong disparities between how established and new employees experience virtual work, and this affects early career workers still more.

    Food for thought for me and my research, and a highly complex challenge for leaders and their institutions.

    Thank you!

    I am deeply grateful to my mentee and to the programme for a highly rewarding experience, and I am already looking forward to volunteering again next year.