How Dean McCoubrey Founded MySociaLife
How Dean McCoubrey Founded MySociaLife. MySociaLife is a company that aims to train students, aged 9 to 17, via eight ‘digital life skills’ modules, while offering parent, teacher and psychologist programs too. It seeks to assist all custodians who are guiding kids to be safer, smarter kids online.
Dean McCoubrey, MySociaLife’s founder, believes deeply in the importance of human connection. He also believes that family values, mentorship and education are central to a strong and conscious society. As a father of three kids aged 10, 15 and 19, he felt compelled to share his 20-years of expertise within the powerfully influential world of media as parents and educators needed the help.
His insights are based on practice, not theory, having experienced first-hand the importance of wellbeing and self-regulation. As a founder of several successful media companies and a journalism hub, Dean hit a wall in 2013. An adrenal burnout from relentless deadlines resulted in a 12 month forced introspection – “the turning point in my life,” he says.
On the journey to recovery and good health, he investigated and practised multiple aspects of mental and physical health, cognitive therapy and neuroscience with some of the greatest experts in the field. Motivated by the profound importance of mind health, he turned his attention to how kids are consuming, and being impacted by, digital and social media, as uneducated and unregulated “self-publishers”.
In 2018, he developed six lessons which he later discovered to be closely aligned with the World Economic Forum’s eight-module digital citizenship program. After flying to New York in 2019 to meet them and also visit Common Sense Media, the standard bearers of online safety in the United States, the stage was set to bring digital life skills and digital citizenship to students globally in the form of MySociaLife.
Dean still works closely with schools and parents, and he personally trains clinical psychologists, GPs and school counsellors, examining specific cases for hospitals and health practitioners to unlock solutions.
