Maren Deepwell

Category: leadership

  • Reflect, reframe, regroup. Inspiration for when life is messy.

    Reflect, reframe, regroup. Inspiration for when life is messy.

    I struggled to find a title for this post, because describing what it is about will lead to expectations it is not likely to meet. This post is about how to stick with things, be they new habits or intentions, plans or commitments.

    In my work as a coach I often read and share books about habits and how to stick to them, and there is a huge wealth of information out there about how to be more productive from the ever popular Atomic Habits by James Clear to Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks and so on. I go through phases of finding one of these titles or authors that really chime with me at a particular time in my life, and I love their approach for a while, find the inspiration I am looking for and… move on.

    Alongside the books there is an army of podcasts about the same subject, and I am guilty of adding to the genre with my own weekly episode of Leading Virtual Teams. Through my coach training I have discovered a lot of amazing coaches many of whom share their expertise on habits and productivity on their shows, and my favourite of these is Katie Linder’s podcast for Higher Education professionals, You’ve Got This. Katie led the coach training I completed and I find her particular mix of reading, writing, being creative and productive really appealing. Definitely a recommended listen!

    But…

    And yet, of course, there is a but… . Because life is messy. Life keeps changing, and evolving and however much the data we collect through the devices and platforms we use would like us to believe otherwise, moving forward is not always a straight, upwards curving line. And not every season of life can be productive. I recently read a wonderful book, Ebb & Flow by Easkey Britton, which beautifully explored the concept of periods of ebb in life as necessary and valuable.

    That’s where for me conflicting desires arise: one the one hand I understand and appreciate that not every week, month or year can be super productive. Sometimes life just gets in the way. On the other hand, I am very used to pushing ahead with things or sometimes have a sense of being behind already, feeling frustrated and keen to make a change. At times like that, I use a couple of approaches to help find a path through the messy reality:

    Reflect: Need vs. want

    First, I find some headspace to reflect on what I need versus what I want. I think best when I actually write things down or talk to someone about it. Here are some prompts to think through this:

    • What do you want more of?
    • What do you want less of?
    • What would make things lighter?
    • What do you need to prioritise?
    • What do you need to finish?
    • What do you need to pause/stop?
    • What do you need to start?

    Reframe: Essential vs. desirable

    Next, I try to reframe the situation, to look at things in a different light. My own high expectations or sense of accomplishment is often the biggest barrier to feeling contentment, so my aim here is to be very clear with myself what is absolutely essential to accomplish and what is desirable. I often find that things drop off my plate once I can clearly articulate to myself what I really need to do, rather than all possible things I could be doing. Here are some criteria I use to sort things into the two buckets:

    • Essentials often are: time sensitive, external (i.e. someone else is waiting for this), income generating, high impact
    • Desirables often are: open ended, internal (i.e. only I wait for this to happen), unknown/low impact

    Once I have sorted my long list of things to do into these two categories, I take a look at what I identified in the first step, needs vs. wants and check that everything makes sense. For example, if I have a writing project I absolutely love doing and it helps to get me out of bed in the morning, then it might move from desirable to essential. Likewise, if I find I have overcommitted myself and I need to say no to more things, I go over my list of essentials again to identify things I can finish quickly or stop all together.

    Regroup: Grind vs. joy

    Then, I look at the practicalities and set out to tweak things to prioritise joy. What that looks like may be different for you, but these starting points should give you a sense of what to consider:

    Determine how many weeks stand between you and your next break. How long before you can take time off, go on retreat, travel or something else that offers a break from routine for you. A break, whether a change or a rest is essential to my mind. If you find there’s no let up in sight, take a moment and think hard about whether you can change that. What would it take to get a few days off?

    Once you found out how long you have to go, add a countdown to your calendar or other app.

    Then take a look at each week ahead of you. In my case I found certain days of the week in which I had much fewer commitments, so I moved things around to block out time for what I wanted more of (in my case creativity and time to get outside). I also took a look at what would be the hardest/busiest of times and started to schedule some time and activities around those days that would offer me some balance.

    Time to rest, read, walk the dogs and so on.

    I saw a post recently my a fellow coach, Mrs T, who coaches Headteachers, and in it she described how when days got very busy, her initial tendency was to fit in even more in any moments of calm. Fit in more tasks during breaks and taking work home in the evenings or at weekends. She then shared how nowadays her instinct is to step back and take a breath instead. I could really relate to that. When things get hectic, I used to try to be more productive, more busy still. The steps I have outlined above, to reflect, reframe and then regroup offer an alternative to being ever more busy. In that direction burnout looms.

    I hope you find more pockets of joy. Even when life gets messy. Let me know how you get on.

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  • Congrats Cohort! Coaching course completion

    Congrats Cohort! Coaching course completion

    Today is an exciting day as my coaching course Healthy Hybrid Habits for Leaders and Managers wraps up after four weeks. It’s been a wonderful experience to work with a cohort of 20 individuals this month, and if you haven’t yet discovered this project, you can find out all about the course on the dedicated course page.

    Time to celebrate…!

    As this is the final week of the course, it’s time to celebrate. It’s been a joy to work with everyone participating in the course over the past few weeks and initial feedback has been really positive. For my part, I hope that the course has been both inspiring and helpful.

    Healthy habits take time to get right and can be hard to make stick… . All the tools, readings and resources included in the course are there to support participants on their journey. For now, it’s time to celebrate your achievement – and there’s a course certificate and digital badge to collect.

    Some favourite moments 🙂

    There was a lot to enjoy over the past month, and I found the weekly live group coaching sessions especially energising and inspiring. I loved hearing the group reflections and questions… and I was very happy to see folk playing along with the activities, too, from office origami to writing postcards with Positive Feedback by Post.

    I decided early on to include a course letter in the design, and this element was one of my favourite parts of the course delivery.

    Another element that has been great for the course is welcoming participants from different sectors and timezones. Although a group of 20 isn’t that large in itself, the group coaching format I had designed into the course doesn’t work as well with groups larger than 10, so that was the maximum number of participants for each live session.

    As the course was designed to be taken largely asynchronously, and audio based, which received a lot of positive feedback, the live session weren’t essential to attend, but proved very popular.

    Audio first wins!

    Given that the aim of the course is to establish healthy habits for hybrid working, it was my intention from the start to create audio instead of video content. Although video is very prevalent in this kind of course usually, providing audio recordings ready to download accompanied by transcripts and (mostly) openly licenced resources proved to be a very effective approach.

    Participants loved being able to download the recordings (usually around 30 min per topic) and listen whilst walking, or simply away from their desk. I am really delighted that this approach landed well… and I am definitely planning to use a similar format for future developments. Which brings us to…

    What’s next?

    First up, registration for the next run of the Healthy Hybrid Habits for Leaders and Managers is already open, and a few early birds have already signed up. Both free and paid places are available, and as before I’ll be accepting group registration (at a discounted rate), too! The next cohort gets underway on 20 January 2025… so if you are looking for a bit of a ray of light in the dark days of January, this might be the course for you.

    Also, I am VERY excited to have a new offering to unveil… Ta Da! Come and join me for a Coaching Walk: Autumn Ramble. If you are looking for some space to reflect and take a step back, then join me for a walk.

    Try a free, self-paced coaching walk I have designed as a seasonal guide to accompany you on an autumn ramble. This is the first of my seasonal offerings designed to give you some creative and fun ways to find time to reflect and focus. Enjoy!

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  • Mental Health in the Workplace

    Mental Health in the Workplace

    Tomorrow is World Mental Health Day and this year’s theme is “It is Time to Prioritise Mental Health in the Workplace” -World Mental Health Day is an annual awareness day observed every 10th October.

    This is a cause I have long championed, and I am glad to see this year’s emphasis on mental health in the workplace supported by a whole range of resources. I’ve linked to some examples below and each of these point to further resources for help and advice:

    WMHD Source Files

    Many of my coaching conversations are related to finding balance between wellbeing, both mental and physical, and the demands of a busy work life or a career transition so I doubly appreciate the emphasis on mental heath at work.

    Hybrid and remote working has a big impact on our wellbeing. Much of the resources for leaders and managers features above identify the need to develop skills in supporting mental healthy in hybrid work places, but there’s a lot yet to do.

    I’ve previously blogged about a whole range of approaches to supporting mental healthy in hybrid and virtual teams, from mediation and mindfulness to team building on the radio and celebrating small milestones.

    This week I am going to take a moment to check in with myself, and those around me. So in that spirit, I’ll leave you with an invitation to reach out. How are you?

    WMHD Source Files
  • A Dog Walk – Looking back at a year of Re-inventing Mondays

    A Dog Walk – Looking back at a year of Re-inventing Mondays

    Join me and the dogs for a walk as we look back at a year of re-inventing Mondays. This is a two part episode to celebrate my first year of running my own business and I share how things have been going, what’s been joyful and what’s been tough.

    I want to use this episode to share my thoughts on the first anniversary of my career transition which is now a year in the making. I remember so well when I first started recording the podcast a year ago to chronicle my adventures under the heading “Reinventing Mondays” and I sat in front of my desk looking at my empty inbox in which there were zero emails and my diary in which there were no meetings and I thought “Oh shit what did I do?”.

    I had no idea really what to expect of the year ahead. But now today I am looking back at the year and I know what it’s been like and I thought I’d share a little bit of my reflections, how I’ve been getting on, what has been fun, what has been tough and also how my kind of expectation from coming from a long-term kind of senior role into self-employment have worked out.

    And as I’m walking next to the river at the moment it’s a beautiful autumn morning and it’s a fantastic metaphor for how the year has changed things given that I’m not sitting at my desk, not staring at a screen and instead I’m watching the dogs sniff around trees and bushes as we walk and I hope that you forgive me the less than ideal audio quality of these episodes. I really wanted to give myself a chance to think out loud with you in a way that I usually do because reflective walking and checking in with myself as I take the dogs out in the mornings has become a really big part of my practice and it’s a lovely space to think much more conducive to seeing how things are going than sitting at my desk staring at a screen.

    So let’s take stock. How has the forest year been going? Have I been enjoying it? Have I been meeting my goals? And what if I’ve been missing if anything about the past? … enjoy the listen and look out for part 2 🙂

    This episode was recorded on a dog walk and the audio quality is mixed.

  • In conversation with Jim Groom

    In conversation with Jim Groom

    This month I had the best fun on the podcast in conversation with special guest Jim Groom. We talked about being a robot in a co-working space, teaching Slack to make jokes and building a blog studio in Trento Italy! Here is one of my favourite moments from the conversation:

    Maren: Reclaim Slack is very special! It’s partly how you use it, but it’s also all these little touches. I’ve never seen somewhere that has quite so many little jokes hidden in Slack. Sometimes I type messages into Slack and the pre-programmed bot comes on and makes jokes. The first time it happened, I was completely stunned, Jim. I just looked at the response and I was so surprised that it had made a joke. I got the joke because it’s an internal team joke and I’m familiar with everyone now to understand the context. But like all these sort of small things they’re really hard to get right. They don’t come out of the box, do they? They are like little bits of love and joy that you just kind of programme in over time.

    Jim: I agree. I mean, yes. One of the jokes is when someone writes anything and it has the words ‘lock in’, the bot comes up and says, lock it in. When you say ‘yeah’, the bot comes back and says, YEAH! with a big exclamation point. Then there’s even more esoteric ones that come out if you do very special things. It’s almost like Easter eggs in the video game, right? I think that’s it. The joy is in the details and the magic dust is maybe in those details, too. …

    Jim: The difficulties of ‘doing online’ [working] for so long was your other question. … Like I feel like I could never burn out online. But everybody works differently like that. And I think obviously having a real sense of the limits because they’re there and we went through some rough times as a global experience over the last three or four years that really brought that into focus. I don’t have a solution to that. Again, I love my work, but I’m not a very smart worker. I’m not a very efficient worker. I’m a very passionate, dedicated, consistently present worker, but sometimes not very healthily for my own balance of work and life. But I’ve been working through that this year in particular to try and pull back a little bit and get a sense of how I can find balance. But I guess my problem is I enjoy my work too much. I enjoy the people I work with and I really built my identity around it. So it’s hard for me personally to let go. I’m still just an old school Reclaim Host-er.

    If you, like me, are already a life-long fan of Jim’s work, you are in for a special treat, and if you are just discovering the wonderful world of the bava, this is a perfect introduction. Enjoy!

    Show notes

    Mentioned in this episode:

    Jim Groom, formerly Executive Director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington, has been working towards the idea of Domain of One‘s Own as far back as 2008 and has been dreaming of this opportunity for years. In the Spring of 2011 he opened up a digital storytelling course called “ds106” for anyone to take openly online and hundreds of people participated and continue to give back to that community. In Spring of 2013 he joined a group of hackers and thinkers at MIT to think about how an online framework could allow people to seamlessly syndicate the work they do across the web in a space of their own both on an academic and personal level. In Fall of 2015 he went full time with Reclaim Hosting and has not looked back since. #4life⁠

    This interview is going to feature in ⁠my upcoming book⁠. Get in touch with me if you’d like to join us for an episode and contribute to the book.

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  • Updating my short bio… or ‘Hello, I’m a dog person’

    Updating my short bio… or ‘Hello, I’m a dog person’

    At the moment I am working on a new short bio to put on my social profiles. It’s not a task I relish because I do a lot of different things and work with a number of communities, so whatever I put will alienate some and attract others. It’s one thing I miss about being a CEO, as at least those three letters took up very little of the character count 😉 . Now that I am my own boss, I am not quite sure what to write. I also work increasingly with folk in digital and workplace wellbeing outside of academia, and to them the title ‘Dr’ is more likely to translate into the assumption that I am a GP or Psychotherapist… which sometimes leads to interesting conversations… .

    So I am trying to transform:

    I work with edu orgs + non profits as an independent consultant & coach. Author, speaker, podcast host, houseplant enthusiast, runner, dog person.

    into something a little more, well, something I like better.

    Which brings us to the final few words in the current bio, namely that I am a dog person. I don’t describe myself as a dog parent, but I certainly love the two canine companions that live with us, and I view them as very much part of the family.

    I mention being a dog person in my bio to share something real about myself, something that’s a big interest and part of my life. Having a dog was a childhood dream of mine and when I was little I begged and borrowed dogs from kind families on holiday, which I proudly walked around the camp sites.

    Now that my dream has become a reality, I am so glad to have the fun that dogs bring in my life. I love waking up in the morning and witness the bouncy morning joy that comes with two labradors who can’t wait to have breakfast, share morning tea and cuddles. Our dogs are definitely morning people.

    As a home and hybrid based professional, I also appreciate the extra motivation that dogs bring to my work/life balance. From getting in a couple of miles of walking each day to getting up from my desk regularly to check in with them, open the garden door and so on. Together we attend online conferences… meetings… and get through long, productive days at my desk.

    In that sense, mentioning being a dog person in my bio and posting the occasional pictures of them on my blog is a useful shorthand for folk who don’t know me and can provide an easy topic of conversation, too.

    So, where does that leave my bio? Here’s my current best draft:

    Meticulously informal coaching & courses for established and emerging leaders. Education and adjacent spaces, hybrid working, digital wellbeing, unconventional career paths. Author, podcast host, fan of writing letters, dog person.

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