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.
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… Read more: Coaching for the new term
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… Read more: Newsletter, September 2026
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. Painting I… Read more: Adventures in Analogue II
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… Read more: Road to Nowhere
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 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).
Newsletters have become more important to my regular reading, and alongside those of Audrey Watters’ Second Breakfast (on technology and fitness) and Helen Beetham’s Imperfect Offerings (on education, technology and AI), I find John Naughton’s Memex a very valuable source of inspiration and further reading.
One of the links I followed from Memex was Cory Doctorow’s McLuhan lecture on enshittification. It makes for very interesting and insightful reading, analysing our relationship with tech platforms and how their evolving priorities impact on our lives.
One of the books I read recently is Lol Tolhurst’s Goth – A History. Lots of anecdotes and archive pictures from the late 70s and early 80s made this a treasure trove for fans of The Cure and their contemporaries. It reads more like a memoir than a history to me, but I found plenty of things I enjoyed.
On my radar for this month
Work’s been so busy at the moment that I have been mainlining fiction in recent weeks, and I am grateful indeed to have a great local library system here in Cardiff, so that I can borrow old Discworld novels to my hearts content.
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
Coaching and reflective inquiry
The Big Book of Beautiful Questions by Warren Berger
Coach the Person not the Problem by Marcia Reynolds
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Time has flown by. It feels like only a moment ago that I was blogging about being 3 months into my career transition… and here we are, having passed the four month mark. Looking back at my previous posts on this topic has inspired me to share some updates about how things are going, how much my efforts to re-invent Mondays are bearing fruit and how free-lance life is treating me. In case you missed them, here are quick links to previous posts on this topic:
Not knowing what the following day, week or month would hold filled me with uncertainty during the first month of free-lance life. Although I had felt well prepared for not knowing what the day would bring, after all, life as a CEO was never predictable, I really felt it in those first few weeks. I remember recording a podcast in those early weeks, talking about my empty calendar, my empty inbox, the sense that it was really just me, sitting at my desk, alone, making it up as I went along.
Fast forward to now, and I am glad to say that I have begun to settle into uncertainty. The past few months have had many ups and downs and brought much time for reflection, and I realise now that I need the uncertainty just now. I don’t want to know what the next day or week will look like. The not knowing gives me space to experience and try out different ways of working and allows me to figure out what I enjoy and what I’d prefer not to do again.
A folder of things I have said no to
My mix of pro bono and paid work definitely keeps me busy, and I am probably overcommitting my time in the interest of trying out new things. I am mentoring at a local high school, offering pro bono coaching, writing articles and going to events alongside consultancy contracts, course design, leadership development and workshops.
I am on the hunt for what brings me joy, and what sparks my curiosity, and along the way I have plenty of experiences that teach me where I don’t feel I can contribute. Some things just aren’t a good fit, regardless of how lucrative they may be. Hence I have set up a new folder called literally ‘Things I have said no to’.
So far, it’s not very full, but the list is growing steadily, and I hope to use it in the long term to help learn what really matters to me, what fills my cup, and what I *could* have said yes to for money. It is a privileged position to be in for sure, but it is also a way of exercising responsibility. I can’t do everything, and I need to focus my energy where it matters.
Habits that work for me, and some that don’t
In some of the previous posts I have talked a lot about my work/life balance and that continues to be a big theme for me. Recently I worked on a course about digital wellbeing, and trying out the exercises I designed prompted me to focus on what habits I have that foster wellbeing and help manage my relationship with technology. Given how nuanced my relationship with technology is this is a complex topic, but one worth thinking about. Here are some insights into what I feel works well and also some things that maybe don’t:
Over the past four months, I have become A LOT BETTER at taking breaks. Breaks to step away from the screen, breaks from wearing headphones, from notifications, from social media, from email and from technology all together. This has all sorts of beneficial consequences. Take today. I had a pretty intense meeting, which demanded a lot of my attention and focus. Coming at the end of an already pretty busy morning of focused work, I ended the call with a headache. I felt tired, irritated. I got up, went downstairs, and had a drink of water. Stress headaches like that used to be quite a usual feature of my working life. Old me would have had a quick break, and then got back to work, trying to focus enough to ignore how my head felt. And it probably would have worked, but at the end of the day I would have felt spent, exhausted. Instead of returning to my desk, I took half an hour to do something different. I did a small DIY chore that had been on my to do list for ages, taking all my attention to sand and paint a small hole in the wall. Even after ten minutes my headache was gone, and I felt much better. I did go back to work after a while, feeling refreshed and ready to concentrate again. For me, that’s a win.
One area of my life where technology has become more prevalent is fitness. I usually find half an hour in the morning to exercise, stretch or meditate. I watch the video class on the screen in my office, where I have enough space to spread a yoga mat or follow the routines. My neighbours, I hope, aren’t watching my efforts at jumping jacks… . The fitness app I use works with my smart watch, and enables me to match exercise choices to my mood and energy levels. Some days I want to sweat, some days I just want to sit. For a variety of reasons, morning meetings have become rare for me just now, and this morning I stood in the sun in my office in tree pose, happy to soak in early spring sunshine and energy. Another win!
A habit that doesn’t work so well for me all the time is my CEO brain. It’s super helpful for running my free-lance business (and soon, a properly registered new company… more of that next month), and it’s equally valuable for leadership training and coaching and lots of other things. It’s helpful when I can help out, take responsibility as needed, and it can make working with me easy. I am so used to not breaking things, that I have become a very steady pair of hands. Unfortunately those steady hands are attached to a mind and heart that all too easily assume responsibility and care, too. I catch myself solving a problem or thinking about a strategy that my clients haven’t asked for. They may be paying me to design a workshop or a course, meanwhile I have revamped their professional development offering in my head. Coaching is a good antidote for CEO brain, as it’s trained me to place trust in the other person, to trust that they know or can find their path, or the solution to the problems facing them. And of course they do. They are creative and capable and amazing at doing what they do. As my own free-lance venture grows, I hope that I can utilise my CEO brain in good ways, without taking on responsibility beyond what is appropriate.
On my wish-list
At the start of embarking on this adventure my wish-list ran something like: make enough money to pay the bills, find more joy and balance. Along the way I unexpectedly acquired a record player for my study (yay!) and a lot more fun people to work with than I had imagined in those first few quiet weeks. Over the past few months my list has expanded and now includes: a sit/stand desk, more art for my work-space and a wall I can write and scribble on.
The thing that isn’t on my wish list anymore is more joy. That’s definitely happening and I am grateful every day for this adventure and all the amazing people I get to work with every week.
The book that really stayed with me last month was Coach the Person not the Problem by Marcia Reynolds. It’s a fascinating read full of practical guidance and insightful ideas, and a great read if you are interested in developing a coaching approach to leadership or your coaching and mentoring skills.
There was a lot to take away from the book, such as a really useful habit to set an intention for a conversation or a coaching session at the start. For example, you might choose to focus on feeling open or curious or caring, and focus on that before the conversation starts. It sounds obvious, but in my experience that’s harder to put into practice than it sounds.
I have a whole spectrum of interactions in any given week, and I am about to start mentoring young adults as part of a national programme, too. I don’t really know what to expect or what unexpected emotions, situations or challenges the clients I work with may bring into our session on any given day. I found the step by step guidance on how to establish and maintain a certain focus extremely helpful!
On my radar for this month
I read a lot of fiction in January, so these two titles are still on my list to read from last month:
Goth – A History by Lol Tolhurst
The Coaching Habit. Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier
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
Coaching and reflective inquiry
The Big Book of Beautiful Questions by Warren Berger
Coach the Person not the Problem by Marcia Reynolds
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It’s been great fun this week to head up to Edinburgh to facilitate an away day for a senior leadership team at the university, and I wanted to share a few snippets of what made the day really memorable for me. The focus for the day was all about hybrid working and leading people and projects in a continually changing context, managing the enduring impact of lockdown working alongside emerging policies and priorities. Here are some reflections:
First of all, there’s the venue! The photo of this post shows the building where we spent our day with a beautiful view of Arthur’s Seat. It was great to have a venue which had such scenery on the doorstep, particularly as we could see the hill from the meeting room where we were based for the day. Lots of natural light and air always helps, I find. The venue was a good fit for some of the activities I had built into the day, designed to encourage everyone to step away from their screens and do some thinking together whilst getting some movement in.
The walk and talk reflection after lunch was a really popular part of the day, giving everyone time and space to talk about things in a less formal setting than sitting around a meeting table. This activity also offered those who needed some quiet time to reflect on their own a way to do that between a busy morning of group working and the afternoon brainstorming session.
One of the sessions on the agenda explored fresh ideas for fostering a sense of community and encouraging engagement in hybrid workplaces. For example, we discussed how working radio or shared playlists could work, even scope to have a silent disco… 🙂 . I loved that idea in particular. We also tried out office origami as a communal activity.
Now, for most of the day we worked on hybrid working leadership skills, exploring areas like communication and collaboration as well as building trust and keeping oversight of progress. Most importantly we talked about fostering loyalty and engagement, considering how the experiences of new and established staff could differ and how the role of leaders changes over time as hybrid working becomes more established.
What was really inspiring for me throughout the day was to see all the experience and expertise a team like this can bring to bear on the challenges of hybrid working. Working in learning technology builds a lot of capacity for the challenges ahead, especially as there are a lot of things we know about blended learning that can now be applied to hybrid working.
I had quite a few requests from folk elsewhere who are interested in hosting a day like this at their institution or take part in an online version. If you’d like to be added to the waiting list for that, get in touch.
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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… Read more: Coaching for the new term
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… Read more: Newsletter, September 2026
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. Painting I… Read more: Adventures in Analogue II
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… Read more: Road to Nowhere
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)
