Today we’ve got a real treat, I’m talking to one of my favorite people, Brendan Mahan of the ADHD Essentials Podcast. I last had Brendan on to talk about the Wall of Awful, his model of how everything that we do can be made harder from repeated failure. It’s a great episode and I’ll link that in the show notes if you want to get caught up on that.
I asked Brendan back on the show because while we were at the International ADHD Conference I got talking to him about a different model of his and that’s the 9 parts of a transition. Now I understand that the idea of 9 parts of a transition can seem a bit daunting, but what I think the most salient point of this episode is, is that transitions are far more than what we initially think they are. Because of this we often underestimate what goes into making those transitions. But I’m getting ahead of myself here, in our conversation today, Brendan breaks down this model and we also explore strategies for managing distractions and understanding our emotional states.
Be sure to checkout Brendan's podcast ADHD Essentials
William Curb: We're here to talk about the nine parts of her transition, which I'm sure most people say, transition nine parts, that's way too many. I already have enough trouble with the one part of the transition, but the way we've been discussing it is, you know, that is not something you used to get to decide on.
Brendan Mahan: Yeah, and were you there for the conversation in my hotel room at the conference where we broke it into even more pieces?
William Curb: Yeah.
Brendan Mahan: Jessica was just like, no, it's six. And I was like, it's nine. And we went back and forth on it a little bit, but it was just, we were looking at it different.
William Curb: Yeah, the way I was identifying the nine parts were the initial three parts being the stopping of the initial task, the movement to the next task, and then the starting of the new task.
Brendan Mahan: Sort of. I'm going to tweak that a little bit, right?
William Curb: OK, great.
Brendan Mahan: So every transition has nine components. Every transition is really hiding six different transitions.
William Curb: Yeah.
Brendan Mahan: We can make that simpler for now by talking about the different stages of a transition. So every transition has the following stages, right? We're in a task, that's stage one. Then we have to transition out of that task. So that's our first transition. Stage two is a gap. It's just a no man's land. I'm not going to say we're necessarily moving towards the thing that is coming next. Like, hopefully.
William Curb: That's fair.
Brendan Mahan: But that's not guaranteed. So let's just call it a gap. Then we have a second transition where we transition into whatever is next. And then we're doing whatever comes next, right?
William Curb: OK.
Brendan Mahan: If you picture, the model I usually use is if you picture a hallway, right? So there's a room, there's a hallway, and then there's another room. So the first room is whatever I'm doing. Then there's a doorway that I step out of. That's my transition. I go into the hallway, that's the gap. Another doorway, that's my second transition. And then I'm in the second room doing whatever is that I'm supposed to be doing. Sort of?
So that's broadly speaking what transitions look like. But every transition is really three different kinds of transitions stacked on top of each other. So we have to physically transition. So it's time to eat dinner, right? And I have to leave my editing of my podcast and go and have dinner. I have to put my computer away, stand up, right?
That's me transitioning out of my editing of the podcast. Then I have to literally in my house go into a hallway and like make my way to the kitchen or the dining room to have dinner. And then I have to sit down at the table and like pick up my knife and fork and whatever and start to eat, right? So that's the physical aspect of a transition, right? I'm physically transitioning out of the podcast, closing my laptop, putting my computer down on the table or the desk or the bed or whatever happened to be editing.
Then stand up, walk to the dining room and then pull my chair out, transition into going to eat dinner, sit down, do the thing. But I also have to transition cognitively and emotionally when I do any transition, right? So the physical piece is the only piece that we see. It's the only thing observable to someone who isn't us.
So I might sit down at dinner and start talking about whatever the podcast topic was, right? All of a sudden I'm talking about why two E giftedness and ADHD is such an important thing for people to know about. And my family is like, who cares? Like, what are you talking about, Brendan? What?
William Curb: Yeah.
Brendan Mahan: Or if I've had a particularly gnarly edit, which happens sometimes, there's times when I'm editing somebody and it drives me bananas because they're just really hard to edit. I might sit down frustrated and aggravated, right? And now I have to interact with my family in a way that is not frustrated and is not sort of impatient.
And so I might need to make that transition, too. There's been times when I've done an edit and I came to the kitchen table and I'm just ranting about how do better. Like, I can't believe this person was so brutal in the interview and they kept saying, I'm an on everything was a false start. And every other word they're putting themselves over and I had to edit out like half of that. Ah, right. Like I cut 10 minutes out of this interview and that's I never cut that much time.
William Curb: Yeah.
Brendan Mahan: But sometimes I have people who are that it's that empty. And those are the ones that get me frustrated. Last year I ran that workshop. Last year's conference, I ran that workshop on how to be a good podcast. And it grew out of me having like three in a row that was just like, oh, my God. And so I wanted to teach people how to do a better job when they came on my show.
But these transitions, they matter. And it's important to know about because if we don't know they exist, it's easy to lose track of what's going on and to have the wrong expectation of ourselves or our kids. The more we know about how transitions work, the easier it is for us to start tasks and even end tasks and put them down because we can do it on purpose.
William Curb: Yeah. And I think the salient piece that people are going to be like, think about for themselves right now is that that's a lot of stuff to think about. But I've been playing with this idea all week and like part of me is going, oh, yeah, you also just mentally skip a bunch of these steps when they aren't related. You know, if you just had a fine time doing the editing and you go over to dinner, you're not might not need the cognitive or emotional side to transition. That won't be a difficult transition. It'll just kind of naturally happen. Yeah. So even though there are a lot of steps, the important part is to realise, oh, these are where I could get snagged on my transition.
Brendan Mahan: Yeah, because even in talking to people about it, right, some people are like, no, I don't have a gap. I just go and do the next thing. But you do like it. I don't care how driven you are. I don't care that you're excited about the next thing. There's still a gap and it might be imperceptible to you. But if we pretend there's not a gap, then we're going to think there's never a gap. And at some point, we're going to get hit with a gap and it's going to derail us. But if we know that it's there, if we anticipate its presence and acknowledge its presence, then if it does derail us, we can play with that and have a better understanding of why we got derailed.
William Curb: I'm like thinking if I'm like doing one task on my phone and then switching over to email, it takes almost no time to do that. But there is a gap where I am getting filled with a ton of information that is distracting and trying to pull my attention.
Brendan Mahan: Yeah. And sometimes the phone is the gap, right? Yeah. Sometimes where I need to check my email, I pick up my phone, I look at the email, then I look at it and I'm like, oh, this is complicated enough that I want to answer this on my computer. I don't want to do this one on the phone. And so I may be heading towards my computer, but somehow I started playing Candy Crush.
And now I'm not replying to that email. And it's because that was the gap. The gap was as I made my way towards my computer to sit down and reply to that email. My brain just habitually went over to Candy Crush or Facebook or Twitter or whatever. And now I'm not doing the thing that I want to be doing because I got stuck in the gap. And I didn't even realise it was happening.
William Curb: And it's one of those issues where it just takes time to realise, oh, this is what's happening. And I also think that transition is also important for us to be doing. We don't want to be skipping it entirely either. It's us preparing for the next thing so that we are mentally, emotionally and physically ready to do the next thing.
Brendan Mahan: That part is important, right? Because one of the transition things I've had to be more attuned to of late is when I go to do something that requires cognitive effort and kind of especially email. I'm not transitioning over to that stuff as quickly as I used to. And I think it's because of all the stress and anxiety that I carried for the last three years with COVID and my kid and all that stuff.
I think I've just burnt out to a degree that I need more time to transition into an effortful cognitive task that is not a preferred task. And I'm learning or I'm noticing that if I sit down to do my email or I sit down to like pay a bill or something or clean up clutter somewhere, if I don't engage in that task immediately, I'm much more likely to pull out of it and do something else.
William Curb: Yeah.
Brendan Mahan: And I have to intentionally think to myself, like, no, it just takes a little while for me to hook into this. Like I need to give my cognition and my emotions time to get engaged with this task. Just because I'm physically engaged doesn't mean that I'm done transitioning. I need to give time to the other aspects.
William Curb: Oh, I love that too, because I do the same thing with my writing where when I start writing, I'll just do stream of consciousness writing for like the first five minutes with the full intention that it's either going to get deleted or moved somewhere else because it's my brain getting ready to do the writing. And I'll even just be like, I don't want to be writing right now.
Writing is dumb. I hate what I'm doing. I want to get up and do something else. And just getting those thoughts out. Then it's like, oh, and I want to write about blah, blah, blah. And then it's like, oh, that just flows right into that.
Brendan Mahan: That's your transition. That's the hallway. You're not actually engaged in the task of writing with your cognitive and emotional aspects. You're only doing it physically. And so as a transition activity, as a ritual, really, you are typing away whatever comes up so that when you shift in to actually writing meaningful stuff, you're already doing it and it doesn't provide you with an opening to escape and go do something else.
William Curb: And I think it's also just great to acknowledge those feelings of like, I don't want to be here. I don't want to be doing this. And it's like, OK, why? Because I'm not doing it yet. Oh, OK, well, then let's figure out how to make that happen.
Brendan Mahan: Yeah, it's tricky, right? Because there's so many tasks that we often don't want to do that are also require effort. Sometimes it seems like more effort than is actually true because we don't want to do them. And that makes them feel more effortful. And if we don't allow ourselves to acknowledge that it's a thing we're not interested in engaged with, then we're not giving ourselves the best opportunity to transition into the thing. And we're also not giving ourselves the dignity of misery sort of like.
William Curb: Yeah.
Brendan Mahan: And the dignity of struggle, like learning how to do the hard thing is useful. It's a great strategy for climbing the wall of awful. Like that's going to be in the book, which is another thing that I'm doing that requires transitions and all. And this transition stuff will be in the book. But being able to do something that is non preferred, it gets easier the more we do it because we build that muscle.
William Curb: Absolutely. I focus a lot on like how to make things easier. But sometimes the way you make things easier is just getting used to doing things that are hard until they are easy.
Brendan Mahan: Yep.
William Curb: But then still acknowledging that they're hard because often my brain goes to if I can do it, that means it's easy and it's not worthwhile. Don't do that brain. Not helpful in the least.
Brendan Mahan: No.
William Curb: So one of the other avenues I was looking around seeing this to and that you mentioned is that it's not just looking at the transitions within ourselves, but seeing them in other people, especially like our kids. The whole picking up kids from school and then them just being bonkers once they get home, which is I think two pieces. There is just, you know, the constant masking at school and then coming down from having to hold themselves in all day. But also this, oh, they need time to get home.
Brendan Mahan: Yeah. And there's a lot of stuff in that transition, right? There's a lot of things hiding. The I've been masking all day and I can finally let go is a component of it. Not just I'm masking my neurodiversity, but I might be masking my emotional responses, which might be connected to neurodiversity might not be.
So I might be angry for the last three hours of school, but I can't show it and I get more and more angry because I can't show my anger because I have enough executive functioning to mask that. But then I get home. Then mom and dad picked me up at school or whatever. And now that anger can come out and I might rant about what made me mad at school. I might snap at mom and dad. I might just be actively angry, but not at anybody. I might just be grumpy and making cranky faces and stuff. And as parents, we can get caught up in that storm sometimes because we are too, right?
Like we've been masking at work all day and now we pick our kid up and everyone's mask is down. And off we go, right? We're off to the races. But as parents, it's our job to help our kid navigate that storm. And we have to, unfortunately, kind of keep our mask on. We have to stay centered and stay in the pocket. I think of it like in a football game when the quarterback is in the pocket and there's people crashing into each other all the way around him. And he's like, no, I'm fine. Everything's cool.
I'm just going to throw this football. It's not a big deal. That's parenting. A lot of the time is like it's chaos everywhere around us. And we have to just be in the pocket acting like this is normal and we can handle it because we're the leaders of our family. We're steering the ship. So being able to recognise why our kids might be struggling, what role transition might be playing in this so that one, we can avoid taking it personally.
And two, we can help guide them through the transition. We can say it sounds like you had a really frustrating day at school. Do you want to talk about it or do you just need some time? Yeah. Right. And let them pick and keep moving forward. Decide like, is it best that we start homework as soon as we get home or do you need an hour before you start?
What's good?
And that's going to vary kid to kid. I have identical twin sons and one of them just sits right down into his homework immediately. And the other one, probably 75 percent of the time does that. But the other 25, he's like, I just need to sit for a minute. I just need to not do whatever the thing is that I've been doing. Because my kids take homework personally sometimes. There's times when my kids are like, I just got done with school. Why do I have to bring it home? And I can't fault them for that.
William Curb: Yeah. In my ideal world, my kids would never have homework to bring home because I don't think it's actually useful.
Brendan Mahan: Not until high school.
William Curb: Yeah.
Brendan Mahan: High school is when it starts to reinforce learning a little bit in upper middle. Yeah. It does teach skills. It teaches like how to study and how to sit down and do homework and stuff. But it's only teaching the skills of homework. It's not really teaching too many other skills.
William Curb: It's only teaching the skills of how to do homework. Right. If they have an example of how to do it. Yeah. When I was in middle school and doing homework, I didn't actually learn the study skills that I later used because I was in boarding school. We had study call. We just went in the cafeteria sat and did our homework. And so I had that external thing like I got all my homework done because I had to sit there for an hour. But later doing homework, not that helpful.
Brendan Mahan: Yep. One skill that we already mentioned that homework teaches, but you have to be intentional about it is homework teaches you how to do stuff. That sucks. Yeah. It teaches you how to do the non preferred task and how to do things that are hard. But if we don't call attention to that, then the kids don't know that they're learning that and it just ends up for a lot of kids with ADHD. It's just frustration and they don't actually learn that skill. They're just annoyed by having to do homework.
William Curb: Yeah. A lot of the soft skills that kids learn in school, they don't realize are transitioned to other things. Like when people are like, why did I have to write that stupid essay in English? It's like, what's teaching you how to form an argument and then argue points.
Brendan Mahan: Even more than that, said the former English teacher. I can go super deep on this. Writing teaches us how to organize our thoughts, how to formulate an argument. It teaches us how to communicate more effectively, especially now that's a critical skill. And in addition to creating an argument, it's really teaching us how to formulate our thoughts. It's teaching us how to organize our ideas, which may or may not be in the form of an argument, right? Like I can formulate my ideas just in terms of what am I going to do with my week? Or how do I want to build my business, do my next project? Writing an essay teaches us those skills in addition to communication skills and argumentative skills and that stuff.
William Curb: Absolutely. Now kind of hit a tangent there. So I'm going to pull this back.
Brendan Mahan: Yeah.
William Curb: And the way I wanted to pull is also discussing this macro versus micro transitions, because a lot of what we've been talking about is like big picture. You know, we're going from the hallway to the thing when that's also like a series of transitions, getting off your computer and then up to walk away is another smaller transition that we don't think about. And the way I've been thinking about the last few days is just like driving home and getting stuck in the car in the driveway being like, I need to go inside and do stuff, but that transition out of the car is so hard.
Brendan Mahan: And even some of that is the autopilot stuff that you talked about earlier. Right. I don't even notice that there's a gap between stopping, editing and going to dinner because I just roll right through it. Some of those micro transitions might work the same way where I close my computer, I stand up, I don't know, throw on a hoodie and I walk into the dining room. All of those are each its own transition.
But if I always do the same thing when I stop editing, I'm going to slide right through those transitions. And some of this, a lot of this is decisiveness. Right. Mm hmm. In my room, Jessica was like, I just do the thing. Like there's no gap because Jessica is pretty decisive. She's like, no, I just do the thing. I'm pretty decisive guy too. So a lot of the times I roll through that stuff just like she does. But if you're indecisive, these transitions become harder.
Yeah. Because now I hit the gap and I'm like, well, am I going to go have dinner or am I going to send this one last email or am I going to talk to my kid about their homework before I go to dinner? Or am I going to talk to my kid about homework at dinner?
Or should I ask my wife about how her day went and I'm stuck in this indecision land in the gap and that can be problematic too. Another place that is huge for micro-transitions is email, which we might not think of it that way, but every email is its own topic. So I transition into doing my email into sending and replying and all that stuff. But I get one email that's asking about the Anderson account. I have an email from my spouse asking me what I want for dinner. My boss is then sending me an email asking me when I'm available to meet with them. And I also have three more emails that are also dealing with the Anderson account, but different aspects of it. One is like funding and another one is how are we going to advertise this thing?
And a third is a question that I hadn't even thought of regarding what the next steps are. And Anderson account is not the only one I have. I have the Smith account and I have the Jones account and each of them has four or five emails connected to it. And then I've got people who are just emailing me out of the blue trying to sell me something because they think I'm going to buy it.
William Curb: Right.
Brendan Mahan: I'm using those examples hoping they're more accessible for folks because I could easily talk about what's hiding in my email. But I know that I have like a weird job that most people don't have to deal with the kind of emails that I have to deal with. But it's all every one of those is its own little thing and its own little world. And there's these little transitions that have to happen for me to shift from how do I email with my wife versus how do I email with my boss versus how do I email with an underling versus how do I email with a peer?
How do I email with someone who is outside of my corporation is just trying to sell me something. Each of those has a different voice, a different tone, a different mentality. And so I'm shifting around for all of them.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. I'm thinking like going through my emails and being like, yeah, there's an interview request and like that's a series of tasks of being like, do I know this person? Are they going to just be spewing misinformation if I invite them on? As our one example was, are they a white nationalist that I don't want on podcast?
Brendan Mahan: I had a person. This was this was a person who never heard back from me because the transition they put in the email was too jarring for me. Right. So host of the ADHD Essentials podcast. Topic matters in this case. Episode 250 of my show is me and my family sitting on our couch talking about my son's experience and struggles with obsessive compulsive disorder, which led to him being hospitalized for three months.
William Curb: Right.
Brendan Mahan: And how that affected our family. It was my kid's idea to have this conversation. I was not taking advantage of them in any way they wanted to do it. They traditionally appear on the 50th episodes of my show. And I was like, OK, cool. If you're comfortable, we'll do it. So this woman emails me and is telling me how meaningful she found that episode and how she appreciated the courage of my family and the vulnerability of my family to talk about this stuff.
And then immediately jumps into how would you feel about having this autism expert on your show, which was like, what? You just went from talking about a really personal episode. If you had picked any other episode, you probably would have gotten them on my show. But they went with a really personal one and then shifted to business right after that first sentence. And the business wasn't even a perfect lineup for my show, because I don't do autism. I do ADHD. Their cousins.
I'm not opposed to having autism folks come on the show like it makes sense. It's mostly on brand. But that pivot, oh, man, was that pivot rough. I felt disrespected. Like I felt almost taken advantage of.
And so it just didn't happen. And that's learning how to communicate. Sort of kind of goes back to the communication stuff in middle school and high school. Yeah. And also recognizing how transitions work.
William Curb: Yeah, I had one recently that I was like, oh, this introduction to talk about my show is clearly generated and doing a bad job of it. I don't mind using AI to get started on something. But yeah, read through and make sure it's communicating what you want it to communicate.
Brendan Mahan: Can I pivot to an experience I had on Monday?
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely.
Brendan Mahan: So Monday, I consulted on an IEP for a kid. The parents had come to my parenting group. They happened to live 20 minutes away from where I live. So I was like, sure, I'll consult.
I'll go to the school. And one of the things I I kind of figured it out on Monday. Like I should have figured this out years ago when I started playing with this transition model, but I figured it out Monday. Their kid takes forever to do anything. I was supposed to meet him at eight o'clock in the morning at his house. It took him 15 minutes to come out of his room. That's a long time, right? Yeah. And my general assumption is that everyone's doing the best they can.
Everybody wants to do well and everybody wants to be included. So I am not defaulting to this kid is oppositional and just as dragging his feet because he doesn't want to meet me, right? I mean, I'm not going to pretend those thoughts didn't drift through my head, but I talked back to them as soon as they did. And once I met him and started talking to him, I realized just how defensive this kid was part of what's up with him is he has really fast processing, like auditorily and when reading, but his ability to then manipulate that information is like average, which is there's still a gap. If you're incredibly fast, taking it in and average in manipulation, that that's a gap and his ability to create output, like sort of share his thoughts verbally or especially in writing is even more significant of a gap. So that's going to be frustrating.
That's going to be really make things hard, right? And it makes teachers frustrated with him too, because they're like, you're bright and then you're not. And I don't know what to do with that. Like, how come you seem like you really get it in class discussions and then you can't do the homework, you can't write the essay. So he's got a lot of those frustrations and he doesn't trust anybody anymore because everybody is asking the things of him that he can't do and no one seems to be giving him the benefit of the doubt.
And so I'm thinking about all this and I'm like, so he's not dragging his feet. My working theory, and I didn't ask him because of what we were not in a place to do that, but my working theory that I talked to his parents about and they thought it was probably plausible is that because he is slow to do the cognitive processing part of stuff, like to manipulate information. If he's really worked up emotionally about meeting some random guy who is in his house right now, it's going to take him longer to do the cognitive transition, to talk himself through the emotional transition, to then come out of his room and meet me.
Does that make sense? And I was like, this is why your kid is slow with everything. He's not being disrespectful. It's just taking him a while to process through whatever thoughts he's having so that he can then take action and do what you're asking of him. So sometimes it's their play in interesting ways and slowing us down physically because we're still processing cognitively and emotionally.
William Curb: Yeah, this is making me think also, I saw a lot of people talking on Twitter, you know, coming back from the International ADHD Conference that we were both at recently, we had this big transition and then that's also going to be having domino effects on everything else that we're doing, especially our other transitions, where we're like, why can't I do this then?
Brendan Mahan: Or even our big, important, responsible things that we want to be doing. But we're a little toasted, right? Like, I mean, I came back from that conference and immediately did a consultation. Like the next day I consulted on IEP and I met with a client, did important, responsible stuff pretty much right away and didn't crash until later. I didn't start to really get hit hard until like Wednesday. Wednesday was when I started to fall apart and go, I can't do anything anymore. Tuesday things were a little slow. Wednesday I was done and then Thursday I was digging my way back out.
William Curb: Yeah, and I think the point that's important to take away is that so we have this idea of ADHD being consistently inconsistent. But when we're also not putting in consistent variables, we're also not going to have the same results for like, I should be able to do this thing, even though I have this major travel thing that I just got back from. That's a big variable that is different than just a normal week. And we're not considering that when we're looking at why is the transition so hard? Right. And that's going to confound all those nine steps. We're not maybe not all of the nine components, but at least a number of them, you know, especially the cognitive ones.
Brendan Mahan: And I think it also matters where it landed in the calendar for us, right? Speaking of transitions, because it was the weekend after Thanksgiving, was when the conference happened. The weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year's are pretty sloppy for a lot of Americans. Like it's just kind of garbage time in a lot of ways, because those two holidays land too close to each other to make the intervening time feel real and important. So it gets undermined by that. And we're also dealing with like the change of the seasons for some of us, not for everybody, but that lack of sunlight or reduced amount of sunlight that can have some seasonal affective stuff happening for some folks.
And if you're in an area that gets cold and needing to be inside more, it can play a role in how you're able to navigate these transitions. It was a rough time to have to process all of that stuff at once. And it's just a matter of being aware of it and going on. This is why and I can cognitive my way through it.
William Curb: All right. The one thing I wanted to grab before we wrapped up is, do you want to talk anything a bit about your book?
Brendan Mahan: Oh, yeah. So it's going to take a little while. I'm going to have to come back when it's actually publishing. Yeah. So I'm finally writing the Wall of Awful book.
That's what it is. It's a book about the Wall of Awful, my model for the emotional impact of ADHD and repeated failure and executive function challenges and all that stuff. The book is not written specifically for ADHD folks because I kind of figure ADHD folks, a lot of us already know about it. And I don't have to work that hard to sell them on it. But if I make it only about ADHD, then a lot of people who could benefit from it will disregard it. So it's written more as kind of a productivity book, sort of. Chapter one is what the Wall of Awful is. And then chapter two is why do some people have more walls of awful than others?
And why do they have bigger ones? And that's where I play with neurodiversity. That's where I get into ADHD, but also anxiety, depression, autism. There's other neurodiversity issues that are going to affect the Wall of Awful. It's not an ADHD exclusive. So that's where I play with that. And then we move into getting past it and the book wraps up with how to make change work, so how to kind of stick the landing. Because one of the things I've noticed about books like this one is there's a lot of like change, you can do it. Woohoo.
And then no one talks about how change works. Yeah. So there's no instruction on how to make this actually actionable and make this actually stick. So that's in there on purpose. And then there's sort of like the usual wrap up stuff, like it's kind of how you would expect a book to go. But the thing that is important to me that I share about this book is that I'm not writing it by myself.
One of the reasons that I haven't been able to get this book written is it's a heavy thing to carry. I do a lot of stuff and I'm in the process of hiring a virtual assistant. So I literally have a list of all the things that I do at the moment. And this is what I've got. I have the parent groups. I have the podcast. I have one-on-one clients. I do workshops.
I do summits, which is kind of the same thing. I have all the social media stuff that I have to do to advertise and keep myself available. I'm also writing a book. I'm on the organizing committee for the ADHD conference. I'm a board member of the men's ADHD support group. And I'm a really engaged dad and studying for my black belt in Kempo and like run a monthly D &D game. There's a lot of other stuff in addition to just the professional stuff.
William Curb: Yeah.
Brendan Mahan: So I ended up hiring. Technically, she's a ghost writer. Her name is Alex Cappell, but she's not a ghost writer for my book. I believe that people should get credit for the work that they do. So her name is going on the book as my co-writer. And I'm insisting that she share stories as well. Awesome. And it's been this phenomenal experience for me and working with her because we hop on the phone and talk for two hours.
And I'm just exploring what I already know about the wall of awful and figuring things out as I go. And then she kind of does the labor of typing that up. She records it and runs it through like a text generator, script creator thing, and then is editing and writing as necessary. And then she'll throw it back to me and I do another revision edit.
So she's starting my orange, basically, which is what I need. Like speaking of transitions, right? I have a hard time with that first step on a big project. But once that transition first step is done, things get a lot easier and I can cruise. So she's the one taking that first step. She's doing stuff that is easy for her. She's like typing is not hard. And I'm like, typing is a bear.
I could write all day if I didn't have to type. And so it's important to me to talk about this, one, because she should get credit. And two, because I'm climbing my wall of awful. The strategy that I'm using to climb my wall of awful for this book is to get help. And that is a totally valid strategy. Yes. To get through a transition and start a task. Yeah.
William Curb: Getting help is a amazing thing that more people should do. It's scary to ask for help, but it is amazing. Yeah. All right. Is there anything you want to leave the audience with? If people want to find out more, where should they go?
Brendan Mahan: So basically, everything is ADHD essentials. The website is ADHD essentials dot com on Twitter. I'm ADHD essentials. Instagram is ADHD essentials, although my Instagram is not that great. Facebook, there's an ADHD essentials community. The podcast is ADHD essentials and it's https://www.adhdessentials.com/ If anybody wants to email me, it's Brendan@ADHDessentials.com
William Curb: Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Brendan Mahan: Thank you for having me.