#15 The Sustain Conference, a Mural and a Venue Visit

Weeknotes — Monday 27 October—Sunday 2 November 2025

Summary of the week

A big week with some exciting moments. UnConference, a venue visit for the IAF conference, train delays, and Sunday mural painting. Quite a mix of fun things and frustrations!

Sustain Conference

Set up and travel for the Sustain conference this week. All the preparations over the previous weeks came together. There is always a surreal moment when something you have been planning for a while arrives. The event had a great turnout with over 200 people, and it was a fantastic experience working with a fellow facilitator. You know when you just click with someone, and it makes everything so much easier and fun.

International Association of Facilitators Conference

Visited the venue for the upcoming IAF conference this week. We have outgrown the venue we used for years, so we had to scout for a new one that would deliver different things based on feedback from previous years.

Train delays on the way meant I missed out on a lunchtime pre-meet with PK. The joy of rail travel in the UK: delays, no seats and dirty trains. With that, luckily, it was a useful visit. We climbed many floors to work out the best combination of rooms and layouts. TheStudio in Birmingham is a great space for workshops, so many rooms being purpose-built. Seeing a venue in person changes how you think about what is possible in it, and makes it a lot easier when you are working out the spaces for the flow of people and sessions.

Dot and Dash

Payments sorted for hiring venue space for workshops next month in Bristol. More admin, which involves lots of chasing up venues and checking that they have your booking, invoicing and confirmation that the payment has all gone through.

Thrive double hour this week is a solid block of focused work time that I rely on for getting things done, especially boring things like admin. Executive function works best on these tasks when I have other people online. Glad that body doubling is one of the key things that people are finding useful.

Creative Practice

Sunday was a day of mural painting. I spent all Sunday outside next to a park working on a shutter for a library local to me. I met Nicola White, a local mural artist, at an illustration meetup event. She got a few people to help over the next few cold autumn Sundays to get the painting finished before it got colder in winter. It was pretty cold, but we had some breaks in the warm library with a cuppa, so we could feel our hands warm up and brave the cold again. I felt so great spending the entire day with other artists, immersed in conversations about creativity, art, and painting. Then rounding off the evening with an accountability call with Ross from the Puttyverse, aka my sales and health buddy. A brilliant combination of making and reflecting to end the week.

For a timelapse video of the whole day I posted this on instagram you can see the light changing which made it hard for us to recognise the various shades of colours especially the greens.

I wonder...who else gives thought to what a space looks like before people arrive at a space, event, or workshop, how much time and effort goes into making an experience feel good and creating the atmosphere and flow to allow people to feel at their best?

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