This week I passed my final exam and earned my ACC credential from the International Coaching Federation! It’s taken me two and a half years to achieve this milestone, so there’s much to celebrate.
Coach Training complete, for now
I’ve reflected previously on my coach training journey and I remain very impressed with the overall process (even though the final proctored exam made my edtech heart bleed). Initially I was focused on using coaching approaches within an executive role, and at the moment I use coaching in most of the work I do in different ways. It’s a valuable skills to have in all sorts of contexts, and it makes me better at being in a leadership role.
Coaching is very much an evolving practice and so I am looking forward to being active member of the professional community, to continue learning with and from my peers and to explore new ways of coaching.
What’s next
As I start this new chapter in my coaching practice, what I do and how I support my client is evolving, too. Alongside coaching individual clients I have started to coach more groups and teams, particularly leadership teams of hybrid organisations and groups keen to increase wellbeing at work. There’s an exciting new project in the works that I am hoping to share more on soon.
For individual clients the start of the summer season will see walk’n’coach sessions as part of my formal offering, starting with my established clients (with whom I already have built a rapport and a sense of trust). Usually, this would be coaching via a phone call, or, geography permitting, we might also meet in person.
That is alongside my existing video coaching and email check-ins, and I am also adding coaching moments by post, offering occasional letters and printed resources to help connect more deeply.
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I’ve previously blogged about how much I enjoy compiling my monthly newsletter, and how useful the process in itself is for me as it ensures I keep logging what I am up to, sharing updates and resources for those who wish to keep in touch away from social media.
So if you are wondering what is actually inside and how do you get it.. then this post is for you. Here’s a peek inside this month’s edition:
Hi there!
This week a new digital skills micro-credential for emerging leaders I developed together with Dr Lynne Taylerson for the Digital Learning Institute is launching, and I am really excited to see this project to its conclusion.
It’s been very rewarding to build on the research I did for my book on leading virtual teams and focus specifically on the skills we need in hybrid organisations.
Alongside this project, I am thrilled to welcome new coaching clients on board for the summer as I expand my blended coaching practice to include coaching by post and walk’n’coach sessions. Later this month I am also running the highly successful Digital Wellbeing: Healthy Habits for Hybrid Working course again with the amazing team at the University of Oxford and speaking at the ASCILITE’s Women in Academic Leadership Initiative webinar about my journey as a leader.
My favourite read for this month has to be The Revenge of Analogue by David Sax. Although this book was published nearly ten years ago, and some of the research it is based on would have been changed by the pandemic, I found it a really inspiring read. I love all things analogue from stationary and paper notebooks, to sending actual letters in the post and listening to vinyl records, and I have read a LOT of books about these (if you have never come across the fabulous Adventures in Stationary by James Ward, I thorough recommend it. There is a whole history of post-it notes and paperclips to be discovered!). What I found fascinating about The Revenge of the Analogue was the business perspective: examples of how industries were revived not for nostalgic reasons, but because of profit.
Standing in line on Record Store Day, patiently waiting with hundreds of other enthusiasts, it made me so happy not to be the only woman who was waiting to buy a record. The independent record store industry here in Cardiff seems to be thriving, reaching new audiences beyond the stereotypical collectors. There were families, young adults and teenagers (at 7am!) and… plenty of women – all waiting to get their hands on the newest releases whilst sipping coffee in the early morning sunshine and watching the recycling being picked up by lorries from the nearby bars and restaurents. Quite a different story to a few years ago, when I was definitely part of a small minority of new enthusiasts. Yay for the popularity of analogue (even if it results in hipster style queuing at ungodly hours).
On my radar for this month
A brand new read arrived by post yesterday, thanks to a kind friend, who sent me Mary Oliver’s Devotions. I love a bit of poetry, and I am looking forward to exploring this volume. Reading the description, I was won over by the promise of ‘exuberant dog poems’.
Non-fiction reading 2024
Creativityand culture
Art Matters by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell
Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert
Hybrid working and leadership
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Rooms of Their Own (Where Great Writers Write), Improbable Libraries and Shedworking, all three by Alex Johnson
Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career by Herminia Ibarra
When I first started coach training, I set myself the goal to offer walking sessions for my clients. My thinking is that pretty much all of my favourite coaching and mentoring conversations happened when walking, either outdoors or pacing up and down in my office.
I like moving whilst thinking, and I like talking and walking… . I take walking meetings, and walking catch ups, so walking whilst coaching feels like a natural extension of that. As a bonus, it means even virtual coaching can move away from the screen, at least some of the time, enabling everyone to spend less time sitting, staring at their reflection on Zoom.
My first formal mentor, Margaret, and I had incredible conversations whilst clocking up the miles in the parks in and around Oxford or sometimes also Sheffield, and I often felt elated when I came back from one of our rare days having unlocked a knotty problem. Plans were made, visions shaped and things shifted as we walked and talked.
However, when I first started formally coaching clients two in 2021, I realised pretty quickly that I needed to gain a lot more practice with the mechanics of the work of a coach, from building rapport to keeping the session on track, before I could hold space effectively on the move. Video calls offer me the chance to listen deeply to my clients, to focus on them fully, rather than be distracted by things around me… and it didn’t want to jeopardise the quality of the coaching in favour of heading outside too soon.
This summer then is my first season of offering walk’n’coach sessions as part of my formal offering, starting with my established clients (with whom I already have built a rapport and a sense of trust). Usually, this would be coaching via a phone call, or, geography permitting, we might also meet in person.
I am really looking forward to exploring this mode of coaching, and starting to plan and prepare for offering these sessions from May onwards.
If you’d like to learn more, listen to the podcast episode about walking and coaching:
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I’m Dr Maren Deepwell and this is my domain on the open web. My interests span education and the not for profit sector and I bring creativity and curiosity to my work as a leader and a coach. With a background in Educational Technology, Anthropology and Fine Art I am as passionate about pen and paper as I am about the newest digital technologies and I write about everything from stationary to strategy.
I work as an independent consultant with organisations and (emerging) leaders in education and the not-for-profit sector as an executive trouble shooter, strategic advisor and coach. I specialise in authentic leadership and unconventional career development, digital wellbeing and sustainability. Find out more about my work and get in touch via my business site.
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… Read more: Rookie (or a year of mentoring)
It’s been an eventful summer already, and the next big event is just around the corner: on 18th August the DS106 Radio Summer Camp returns! YES! Regular readers will know that I am a huge fan of all things audio and especially radio. So for the past few years it’s been a real pleasure for… Read more: The Radio (Summer Camp) Returns
It’s summer holiday season and I am sitting at my desk, working (with a blissfully quiet inbox). If you are reading this, you might be working, too, so here’s a friendly wave from me to you.
Blogging about blogging. Again. Hello again. As you might have noticed, the blog has had a revamp. It’s a new theme (WordPress 2025) and a streamlined presence. It’s part of my summer project on digital sustainability (I’ve blogged about this in two separate posts, linked below) and part mid-year revamp. It’s also been a good… Read more: My home on the open web.
In my last post I described how I have started to think about how to make my work more environmentally sustainable, and described the practical steps I am taking to achieve this, starting with decreasing my digital footprint. Thanks to everyone who got in touch with comments and tips digital sustainability (I’ve updated the original… Read more: Digital Sustainability Part 2
It’s been 18 months since I first launched my podcast, and this academic year I have stepped up the pace with a new episode every week. 65 episodes later… I still enjoy the process of making the podcast and it’s been very, very useful for my professional practice. It’s also a (for me still relatively) new way to sharing my work and I have tried to find the right tone in this medium, tried to find my podcast voice.
In this post, I bring together things I have learnt along the way, and also ideas for what I’d like to try out next:
Getting started: Looking back at the first year on the podcast, the pattern of putting out episodes is erratic. Sometimes I published 5 episodes a month, other times it was only one. They all come out on different days, and the format and duration vary, from below 10 minutes to above 40. Season 1, which doesn’t have episode numbers, has 10 episodes. Season 2 has 21 and currently Season 3 is at 30+. It’s a bit of a mess… However, what matters to me is that I did it. I continued to record and release episodes, trying out different topics and formats, with guests and without. I now feel that I have a podcast, and I have made it part of my professional practice.
Choosing what to talk about: Just looking at the titles of various episodes gives you a clear indication that there are a whole range of topics I talk about. Here are some examples from across the three seasons:
25 hacks to make hybrid work 1% more comfortable
A party without a cake is just a meeting…
Career transition reflection – 3 months in
Some episodes are focused on coaching, and include more factual/how-to content whilst others are about leadership in hybrid workplaces and others again are updates on my work, celebrating milestones, reflective practice, radio… . The list goes on. What’s useful for me is that the podcast has become a reflection of my practice and leadership. That’s what I am interested in exploring, and it’s been helpful to acknowledge that as I find my voice.
Listening to other people’s podcasts provided all sorts of inspiration and I tried out different things with various episodes to feel out what might work for me. Importantly, it needs to be a topic I am interested in, and it needs to be useful to me. My podcast is a passion project, not something I get paid to do. It’s an element of my open practice and as such it’s useful to others (I hope) but it’s primary user is me.
An audience of one? In the early days of the podcast, it certainly was (an audience of one). I remember how excited I got when someone who could not be family & friends listened! It still makes me happy to hear that someone found an episode interesting or useful and yet I haven’t put a lot of effort into promoting the podcast. The platforms on which the podcast is registered offer all sorts of tools and resources to help you build your marketing campaign and expand your audience, which I must admit I have largely ignored up to now.
It’s an intentional choice on my part to keep the podcast a space to play and experiment with. Just like my blog, I want the podcast to be part of my domain, a page in my sketchbook if you like. I don’t want to monetise it even if I could. I am not interested in it becoming the next big podcast on hybrid working even if that opportunity arose. I want it to sit in the margins. A working, thinking space instead of a polished production.
With an organically growing audience, episodes now attract 30-50 listens on average.
Experiments in podcasting: Since I started the podcast, I have experimented with various projects: I used the podcast to record audio versions of key sections of my book Leading Virtual Teams; I have run two CPD courses using my podcast as the main platform to deliver course content and I have used the podcast to share career transition updates as I started my free-lance venture. It’s certainly been a bit of a mixed bag of approaches and that has resulted in me learning a lot along the way.
I appreciate that it may be frustrating to folks who are looking for regular episodes week in week out on a similar range of topics, and with a similar take on the format and I am sorry if experimenting with various aspects of the show makes it less enjoyable or less useful at times. For me, these experiments have been incredibly useful and rewarding, giving me space to try out ideas and new approaches on the journey to finding my podcast voice.
Things I learnt along the way:
Getting comfortable with recording conversations and structuring content
Recording intros and outros
Writing show notes and providing links to resources
Transcripts and automatic transcription
Registering a podcast on different platforms
The power of replay: Whilst many people dislike listening to their own voice, and I am not a huge fan of mine either, I do listen back to my own podcast episodes. I find it incredibly useful to replay my thoughts to help me refine my reflections and also to review how my thinking has changed. Just as listening back to a recording of me coaching with my coach trainer helps me identify ways in which I can improve as a coach and also identify what I am doing well and why it works; listening back to podcast episodes is extremely helpful for my professional development.
It’s also a bit nostalgic, particularly in the more personal/reflective episodes. Here I am, celebrating milestones and sharing tips for this and that whilst around me domestic chaos or work problems reign. There are episodes when I clearly had a cold and episodes when I can hear my dog Posey in the background wagging her tail or chewing on something noisy.
A note on the technology: I don’t have much know-how to share when it comes to podcasting tools and platforms. I have a wonderful mic that I can’t connect to my current computer, I use a browser-based, free tool to record my episodes which is just about to go out of service… and I live in a noisy environment where proper recording quality is harder to achieve than I’d like. In short, my set up is makeshift. When I sit down at my desk in the morning between meetings to record an episode, I am afraid there are no ambitions to have a recording set up beyond headphones.
I am fortunate to know many people in the Open Education community with brilliant podcasts and radio shows, many of whom have professional experience in this industry, much better placed to advise on anything technical and I salute them. I learn much from their example, even if that is not always evident in the audio quality of what I produce… .
Where next? I am very excited about continuing my podcasting adventures and I have ideas I want to try out come summer, and a break in my ‘regular’ schedule. I also need to learn how to record my episodes on a new platform, and I am definitely working on getting the good mic connected. Most of all, and regardless of any practical considerations, I am determined not to loose this space for open practice that I have opened up for myself. It’s another experiment in open leadership that has become important to me, and that in itself is a huge reward.
It’s not all about podcasting… there’s a newsletter you can subscribe to as well… (that’s another blog post).
