Ten years ago this week, I flew 17,000 kilometres to attend a medical conference in Dublin.

I am not someone who loves large crowds.

Which is a little ironic because I have spent the last decade co-organising a paediatric conference that deliberately fills a room with them.

I also arrived in Dublin with a pocket full of stickers and a sheet of temporary tattoos, because my colleagues and I were trying to advertise the very first conference for a small paediatric education website we had built called Don't Forget The Bubbles.

We were hopeful in that particular way you can only be before you know how hard something is going to be.

[I wrote about that week at the time. You can read it here.]

Ten years later, I'm in Glasgow for DFTB26.
And I find myself thinking about what I've learned in the decade between those two moments.

Not just about running a conference.
But about what it costs to show up, and how to do it without hollowing yourself out.

This is about learning to manage your energy, not just your courage.

💡 ONE IDEA WELL

In Dublin, I thought the challenge was courage.
I needed to be brave enough to walk up to strangers.

Brave enough to say hello, I know you from the internet, please don't find that weird.

And it worked. The strangers turned out to already be friends. I flew home feeling like I'd cracked something.

What I hadn't cracked was what came after.

Conference after conference. Year after year. The newsletter. The workshops. The talks. The being available, being visible, being on.

Here's what I've learned since Dublin, slowly and mostly the hard way:

You can love something deeply and still need to leave the room.

You can genuinely want to connect with people and still need forty minutes alone in a hotel corridor before you can do it well.

The introvert's challenge isn't really about courage.
It's about honest resource management.

I've learned to give myself timeouts without guilt.

To arrive at a conference knowing I will need to disappear for an hour, and building that in rather than hoping I won't need it.
To say no to the dinner, yes to the coffee.
To leave the party at a reasonable time and not perform the apology.

I've also learned - and this one took longer - that being off is not the same as being absent.
That the quality of your presence when you show up matters more than the quantity of your appearances.

The Dublin post was about finding the courage to connect.

This is about learning that connection is only sustainable if you protect what makes it possible.

🧰 LESS MESS, MORE MESSAGE

The platform that made those Dublin friendships possible barely exists anymore.

Twitter - the place where I met those strangers before I met them in person - has changed beyond recognition.

But the friendships haven't.

Because the friendships were never really about the platform.
The platform was just the room where we found each other.

What kept us connected was something more durable: genuine interest, showing up over time, being real with each other.

This is true of communication generally.

The performance of connection - the posts, the metrics, the being seen - is fragile.
It depends on conditions staying the same.

The connection itself, when it's real, doesn't.

Invest less in the room.
Invest more in what you bring to it.

👍🏼 TRY THIS

Before your next conference, event, or even a week of back-to-back meetings - map your energy honestly.

Ask yourself:

What drains me in social situations?
What restores me?
Where in my schedule can I build in recovery time — before I'm running on empty?

Then protect it.

Not as self-indulgence.
As the condition that makes good communication possible.

The best thing you can do for the people you're trying to reach is show up as yourself, with enough left in the tank to actually be present.

The stickers from Dublin are long gone.
The temporary tattoos probably lasted three days.

But I'm sitting here ten years later, and the people I pressed them into the hands of are still in my life.
Some of them are in Glasgow this week.

That turned out to be the point.

If you're at DFTB26 - come and find me.

I'll be the one who disappears for forty minutes and comes back ready to talk.

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Speak soon,

Andy