Author: Maren Deepwell

#ReclaimOpen25 Here we come!
It’s nearly time for Reclaim Open, and it’ll be my first time taking part in this special conference. You can read all about the conference on the Reclaim Blog, or take a look at the documentary that premiered at the last Reclaim Open. Taylor Jadin shared this with me recently and I LOVED watching it.

About the video: As Reclaim Hosting welcomes its 10th year, we’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on the principles that got us here. Namely, the open web. The Reclaim Open conference is all about that concept, and we want to capture it in as many meaningful and lasting ways as possible. We don’t want this documentary to only capture Reclaim’s thoughts on the open web, but to invite and include the amazing community joining us here to document their own perspectives and stories about this topic.

What I’m most looking forward to (many things)

There is A LOT to look forward to… so in no particular order:
- I’m excited to see the student showcase of the winners of the Reclaim Student Competition
- There’s the opening keynote by Bonnie Stewart, with the theme “Rewilding voice in a time of enclosure”
- Also on the plenary schedule is a panel hosted by Jim Groom “On Writing” and as an avid listener/viewer of this series I am especially looking forward to that
- Not to forget is the amazing artwork created by Bryan Mathers (including the images in this post) and seeing those come to live
- There are a host of social sessions around the DS106 Daily Create, an Open Education board game and the intriguing sounding “An Archivist goes to the Playground – Exploring and Describing Chicago Park Playgrounds” as well as “Improvising the future of digital storytelling”
- I am excited to read “My website is a junk drawer” and also “Lessons from Rewilding Landscapes… in the Wild”
In short, there is not much of the three days I am not looking forward to. And of course there’s also the people to connect with, to chat and share inspiration.

My session (is a blog post)

As I am mainly working with the team delivering the conference I didn’t want to present live as well. Luckily the first day of the conference is in a new format, a blog-a-thon, and so I made a submission in the form of a blog post for that instead. If you are wondering what’s involved, here is an explainer to get you started – but one of the joys of working with the team and trying out new things is that whilst we do have a plan, we don’t exactly know all the details up front and there’s a certain level of winging it involved 😉

I decided to submit a blog post about blogging (of course), specifically about blogging as a superpower in professional practice. My session will be on 4 November and you should check out the full schedule to explore keynote speakers, as well as other presenters and bloggers.

Join in!

Register now to join in, November 4-6, as this wonderful community comes together on the open web, via federated social networks, on the radio and on a blog near you. This is one event you don’t want to miss.
22/10/2025
Year 3. BOOM.

This month marks the anniversary of my business, and there is much to celebrate, and to be grateful for!

Patterns new and old

Once of the things I’ve noticed a lot this year is different patterns: first in terms of how I work, and how my activity is distributed across the year, and also in terms of what I like to do and how my curiosity shapes the work I do. One of the ongoing tasks this year has been to record my work and update my CV more regularly, and that’s given me an interesting perspective on how I return to similar interests, and also how a narrative emerges over the years. My career doesn’t follow a typical arc and like many people who work in education and technology I trained in different disciplines and bring that with me to the digital context. Although it’s only been a couple of years since I started to work as a consultant and coach full-time, it’s been 15 years since I first started working as a free-lancer on projects, and I’ve been revisiting some of these as I’ve charted my skills and experience. It’s interesting to re-examine how some of the things I’ve worked on over the past twenty years fit together in retrospect, with new patterns emerging.

Innovation

I’ve been able to work on a lot of new, innovative things this year and that’s been a joy. I love not knowing what the end product will look like, and I love the exhilarating process of creating something new, something that’s a first! It’s not always easy, and it certainly brings a lot of risk with it, but I’m good at navigating unknown unknowns.

One of the projects I’ve particularly enjoyed working on is Reclaim Open, a “one of a kind” conference that’s evolved each time it happens, and this time is no different. I’ve also loved developing my own new offering, Long Distance Leadership Postcards, for which I have nearly completed the first year and which has been a joy to work on.

Doing something completely new, whether its a talk, workshop, a new coaching client or a project, has been a huge part of my year and has stretched my thinking and my abilities in new, exciting (and sometimes scary) ways.

Anthropology

Up until this year I’ve had little opportunity to use my Anthropological training in my work, at least explicitly. But more recently I have become more and more interested in the rich and exciting work happening in digital heritage, digital humanities and cultural institutions, giving me a new area to learn about and work in.

I’ve also found that the research for my PhD feels both timely and relevant again especially during the current social and economic upheaval and I’ll be sharing a post soon on that topic. I’ve been writing more again recently, and found ideas emerging as I was preparing for an AI-related workshop, so prepare for an “AI in the cemetery” Halloween.

People

Free-lance life can be a little lonely at times, but I am lucky (and work hard at) being able to connect with colleagues old and new very regularly. I have a wonderful group of fellow coaches who I meet up with regularly, alongside my mentoring sessions for 1 Million Mentors. And there are some much valued coffee mornings, often virtual, with fellow free-lancers, swapping tales of projects, and collaborating on new ideas. I’ve loved all the wonderful conversations I’ve had on my podcast, too!

This year I’ve also travelled more, to attend conferences and to deliver in person workshops and leadership days, which has been invigorating and joyful, and a nice balance to the days and weeks working solo from home. Although of course my trusty dog Posey is always by my side.

I am super grateful for all the stimulating, inspiring days, the work life balance being my own boss has brought me and the exciting firsts I have been part of over the past year. Here is to Year 3! Boom!

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20/10/2025
Coaching moment: Focusing energy
This time of year always feels busy, with so much going on, and yet it’s also a season when there’s less daylight time, and colder months are starting here in the Northern Hemisphere. Whether at work, in leadership practice or in relation to personal goals I often have conversations with my coaching clients about wanting to accomplish more whilst feeling that there is less energy.

One of the tools I find really helpful to think through these kinds of moments is a remix of the Wheel of Life (a popular coaching tool used to reflect on different priorities). I find this tool very versatile, and have adapted it for example in the context of hybrid working. In my work coaching leaders and managers, we use this for quick self-assessment that always offers some new insights. If you’d like to give the hybrid working version a go, there is a dedicated episode of my podcast complete with resources you can check out.

Identifying priorities and focusing energy

Typically however the focus of this exercise is on assigning a score reflecting how things are currently going, and then reflecting on these, e.g. what was easy to score or hard; what scores feel satisfactory, and which don’t and so forth. It’s designed to help identify priorities, and to check in with how things are going. What I find especially helpful at this time of year, however, is to focus more on what energy I have and how I want to spend it between now and the end of the year. This small shift in emphasis opens up a different reflective frame and I use a basic template of the resource to help do that.

In the example below, I have used general categories to reflect, using darker shading to indicate in each area how much energy to spend. It can be hard at first to recognise that there isn’t enough energy to spend maximal effort on everything, all of the time. Often what happens during this exercise is that we can identify several areas which can be maintained fairly easily, and find one or two areas which require more energy. That helps giving a sense of not being as thinly stretched and instead focus energy where is really matters. I have used the terms “little” or “medium” but you could also use a number scale, i.e. energy out of a max of 10 for example.

Reflective prompts

If you’d like to give this a go yourself, here are some reflective prompts to get you started. There are not listen in any particular order, but simply designed to help get you thinking.
- What areas can be maintained with minimal energy?
- Where do I spend most energy?
- Where does my effort have the biggest impact?
- What can I do less or pause?
- When do I next have time to replenish my energy?
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15/10/2025
Books, books, books.

It was bookshop day on 11 October, which got me thinking about books. This year I am working on changing small habits, making small changes, in an effort to make more ethical choices and also to support local businesses more, as well as finding more joy in small things. I wrote a post a few months ago with an update and since then, things have moved on nicely, specially when it comes to my favourite habit: reading.

Earlier in the year I found it pretty easy to find alternatives to Amazon to buy paper books, but audiobooks provided a little harder, at least initially. I closed my Audible account and tried out the local library app, BorrowBox, and also Libro.fm. A couple of months on, here is what I found:

BorrowBox

I’ve come to love this app, which links to my local library membership. There is a small library near where I live and a couple of others fairly nearby, and I order books online and pick them up regularly. However, up to this year I never tried to borrow ebooks or audiobooks. Since I started using the app, that’s changed!

So far I have borrowed 18 ebooks and 25 audiobooks over about 6 months and I have really enjoyed being able to read more freely that I would do if I was buying them. Instead, I have tried new genres and authors and I have also read more non-fiction books.

The library is still in the process of digitising more of its collection, so that more and more titles are becoming available each month and I am finding plenty to read and explore even if the collection is patchy in places.

I shall definitely continue using this service and very much appreciate this free and open approach to reading. Big win!

Libro.fm

Starting to use this new audiobook app was pretty easy, and I managed to find and link to a local bookshop in Cardiff. Given that this is a US-based app I was pleased that there was a local option, and through that I discovered a new local bookshop, too, which now benefits each time I buy an audiobook.

I started with a membership which enables me to buy one title each month, the same I had with Audible, and so far I am on 7 titles for this year. Building up an audiobook collection afresh in a new app feels a little lonely, but I like using it and find it easy to do everything I want to do.

As I found, exporting audiobooks from audible is possible, if not completely straight forward, but more of that in another post.

So what have I been reading in the past few weeks?

In addition to ebooks and audiobooks I also read a lot of paper books, both borrowed and bought, and I don’t track what I read. However, these last few weeks I have enjoyed my reading particularly, so I have tried to make a list of everything I’ve read (in no particular order): Conversations with friends, Sally Rooney; V.E. Schwabs Gallant and the trilogy: a darker shade of magic, a gathering of shadows and a conjuring of light; 4:50 from paddington, Agatha Christie, Guilty by definition, Susie Dent, Sherlock Holmes; The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman; You are here, David Nichols, The Villa Ariadne and Margalit Fox’s The Riddle of the Labyrinth; and the Moonlight Express by Moisha Rajesh.

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13/10/2025
Turning over a new leaf

It’s Monday, it’s October 6th, and I am turning over a new leaf. Today is my first proper day back at my desk after a few weeks focusing on happy wedding celebrations with family and friends and a lovely honeymoon trip to Crete. The photo featured at the top of this post shows one of my favourite places we visited, the Minoan Palace at Malia.

So today is the start of a new chapter in more ways than one, and I feel happy that one of the priorities I set myself two years ago, namely focusing more on my life outside of work and finding balance, has been achieved.

There’ll also be some new developments on a professional front in the coming months, but more of that in a future post. For now, I’m focusing on getting my head back in the right mindset for work. As I’m also making the switch from late summer in Crete to autumn in Wales, I’m using the seasonal changeover as a way to help me gain focus. I find it really helps to change some things around to mark a new season or a new chapter, and in this post I share some examples of how I do that.

Exercise and healthy habits

Over the summer, I switched back to journalling in a paper notebook and it’s really helped me to invigorate my morning journalling. I don’t always follow the Morning Pages approach, as some days I feel the need to think and reflect and pause rather than keeping going no matter what, but I do aim for three pages of handwritten reflections each day. Most days it happens, some days I skip or write much less. All together, it’s been a fantastic tool for me over the past few months to navigate some choppy waters. So when my current notebook is full, which is nearly is, I’ll be sticking with this habit and opening a new one to continue my writing.

As an aside, I really enjoyed working on the topic of journalling in a professional context as part of my Long Distance Leadership Postcards. As the September topic I got to think a lot more deeply about how and why journalling can be such a powerful practice, which was really fun!

Alongside reflective habits my exercise and training schedule has been pretty good, and my year of 10k races continues in just over a month with the next race. I much prefer to run outside, but with the weather turning cooler and wetter, and the days growing shorter, I am incorporating more indoor activities into my routine, both in terms of running and strength training. Setting up a dedicated nook to store all my exercise equipment ready to use has been another little change that’s helped me get ready for the new season.

Summer/winter wardrobe

Coming back from a few weeks away means that there is a lot of laundry to catch up on. And that is good timing as I am using it as an opportunity to pack away all the shorts and summer dresses, and bring out my big wooly jumpers, scarves and wooly hats. I started a few years ago packing away and rotating clothes and I’ve come to find this a great habit that helps with more than just freeing up storage.

I use a big storage bag that sits atop my wardrobe and every six months or so I bring it down and swap clothes in and out. It helps we tidy up and sort through things I don’t currently like or have forgotten I have, and it also feels like a nice refresh, as I discover something afresh every time. It feels like getting a new selection of clothes without buying anything new.

It also means that I refresh what I wear day to day, and a welcome prompt to check in with what I feel best in and which items bring a smile to my face. Years ago my mentor Margaret got me into wearing things that make me happy, and I’ve found it a good maxim to shop by.

Plants and pumpkins

One of the most fun things for me each year is to move my plants to their winter places. Some of my houseplants don’t like being near the heating or the wood burner, and so they move to spots that are cooler and less dry. Similarly, with a lot less sun some post are moving closer to windows to catch the precious light. Then I have a couple of plants that hibernate and prefer a cooler room, so they move to the winter quarters, too.

Other than a last tidy to collect seeds for next year and keep things ready for the colder months I don’t have a huge amount to do in the garden when it comes to plants, but I do have a couple of ceramic pumpkins that come out around this time each year, taking their place amidst the pots ready for spooky season.

All these small changes help me adjust mentally and prepare physically for the next few months, and by the time I am done I am ready to get stuck into this new chapter.

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06/10/2025
Reflection: Volunteering as a mentor

For the last few years I’ve volunteered as a mentor with the One Million Mentor programme:

1MM mentoring empowers young people to become the best version of themselves: building relationships -free of assumption and judgement – where they benefit from another’s experience and perspective and can think bigger, find their own answers and take the next meaningful step into their future. We recruit, train and deploy volunteer mentors, matching them with mentees, providing high quality support to both so that they are well prepared and can have an effective and impactful mentoring relationship. Our mentoring is one to one, for young people aged 14-25 years old, for 1 hour, once a month, for up to a year.

https://onemillionmentors.org.uk/

It’s a great national initiative that I am glad to be part of and I found the training really interesting, especially as most of my work normally focuses on coaching and mentoring leaders and managers. Being part of the journey to support a much younger mentee is a different proposition and I’ve learnt a lot along the way.

Entering a career

One of the key questions that I work on with my mentees is finding a way into a career, either via higher education or an apprenticeship, or maybe through local initiatives and training schemes. Most of the time, the kind of questions they have are very similar to the questions my coaching clients ponder: they think about what they want to do, what needs a new job needs to meet and what progressing pathways are available. They often wonder about whether certain qualifications or certificates are worth having, and are always keen to hear from peers who have gone through similar experiences.

Articulating skills

We also work a lot on articulating skills and strengths. Just like the reflective approaches needed later in one’s career in order to determine and champion one’s achievements, so do early career mentees need strategies that help translate capabilities into their CVs and applications.

It’s an awareness that’s very valuable to develop, but it can be difficult at any stage of professional practice. Developing confidence and reflective practice on what types of work might suit best is even harder when you don’t have a lot of experience to draw on.

Reading the landscape

One other question that we spend a lot of time thinking about is how to read the landscape of the sector or the broader area that the mentee is interested in. Is it growing or are there issues to be aware of? Are there a lot of jobs? What kind of professional bodies are there? What is the sector like for someone like them?

Often we come across really interesting sounding initiatives that are designed to help young people into the sector, but are clearly not designed for anyone to actually reach out directly. It can be intimidating and difficult to find a route in.

As we are just at the beginning of a new year of volunteering, I am mindful that there’s now more uncertainty in the job markets, and I am looking forward to supporting my mentee through the ups and downs of finding their first role.

18/09/2025