Explore Brendan Mahan's journey in the Coaching Industry

It’s sort of how I felt when I was trying to figure out where to go. So, when I started off, I graduated from college and didn’t have a plan. I was a creative writing major, thinking I would work at Barnes & Noble. That eventually led to teaching because I’d done a lot of work with kids prior to graduating from college and eventually became a teacher. However, schools didn’t have a lot of money, so I was getting let go, which is how teaching works; the most recent person is the first one out. So, I kind of bounced from school district to school district for a little while there, and I felt rootless, right? I felt like asking whether this was really the place for me to be? Was I doing this right? Should I have been doing something else? I couldn’t seem to keep a job in education. The ironic part is that now I train schools in ADHD, anxiety management and classroom management, all that kind of stuff. So, I’m still in education but as a consultant and as a professional development trainer as opposed to being a teacher. So, for a time during my career in education, I felt pretty rootless. Then I ended up going into the ADHD field specifically. I’ve been doing that for ten years now, so I’m rooted.  I was in the best fit that I had experienced up until then and when I started doing the ADHD work, I realized that was just the thing I was best at up until that moment but what I;m doing now  is what I am meant to do. This is what I’m really good at. – Brendan Mahan

Yeah. So even that is a little rootless. As an infant, I was born in Massachusetts but my family moved to Texas so my dad could get some career training. Then we moved to New Jersey and I was there until fourth grade but my mom missed her family back in Massachusetts, so we moved back there. So, between fourth and fifth grade, I spent a year in a hotel because the person who was buying our house didn’t and we had to find a new buyer. So, that was fun. I grew up in Chelmsford, MA from the fifth grade until college, basically. It’s interesting, I would say that I’m from Chelmsford, but when I think about my childhood, that’s all New Jersey. – Brendan Mahan

I actually started off in psychology. I have a very ADHD college story. So, I started off in psychology at UMass, which is like a special program where you were in smaller classes and that was fine. The deeper in the psychology I got around sophomore year, the more I realized it was about doing research, we’re not going to help people like I wanted to major in counseling, which you don’t really do until you get a master’s degree. So, I was majoring in research and statistics and the history of psychology and I didn’t like that. My other thought was, I would also want to be a writer if this psychology thing didn’t fit in, maybe I could go be a writer. So, I moved over to English for a semester or two and English wanted me to read but wouldn’t teach me how to write. I was only allowed to take two classes in writing in a full English major and I felt that was dumb. That was not what I wanted to do. So then I designed my own major at UMass because they have a program there called BDC that lets you make your own major. I called it Creative Writing, but really I majored in Comic Books. I took 12 credits in comic books and then the rest of my 22 credit major was Mythology, Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing, etc, those types of courses that would contribute to me learning how to be a better comic book writer. I worked at a publishing company. I ran a conference on graphic novels but during my senior year, all of the contacts out in western Massachusetts dried up. There was a comic book museum out there that closed; the comic book publishing company I mentioned went out of business. So, in the span of like six months, everything that I had sort of done to connect myself into the comic book industry evaporated. Then I graduated and didn’t know what to do, move to New York or just go home? I ended up going home and working at Barnes & Noble. – Brendan Mahan

So, that took a little while. First I became a teacher and my sister who was also a teacher, told me that I was good at working with kids, that I was a natural. So, I ended up getting a post baccalaureate degree in Elementary Education, and then I got a master’s in Middle School Education. I taught for seven or eight years. Like I said, I bounced around from school to school. So I was in five districts in seven years teaching English. Everybody kept telling me I should be a guidance counselor while I taught. So, I was teaching and my students were telling me I should be a guidance counselor, other teachers were saying I should be a guidance counselor and guidance counselors are telling me I should be one too because I was good at connecting with them and helping them feel safe and making them feel like they mattered and validating those social emotional skills that they needed. However, that wasn’t the thing that people cared about when I taught back then. Now that’s a big deal, that’s really important but when I taught, that wasn’t the priority. The priority was to dump information into their heads, which wasn’t exactly my jam. I was more interested in connecting, making them care and making them want to come to school, and then they would learn nonetheless. As I like to say, emotions beat academics, right? It’s more important that we make sure the emotional regulation is there and the kids feel safe and secure and go into the academic world. But for the schools I worked in, it didn’t really matter how the kids felt about it, we just wanted them to learn. In my opinion, they’re not going to learn if they don’t feel safe. So, that led me to become a guidance counselor when I left teaching because I realized I couldn’t get better at English as a teacher if I didn’t keep a curriculum for more than two years. So I ended up pivoting to guidance counseling, got a degree in School Counseling, and was already dabbling in ADHD while I got that master’s degree and then the ADHD stuff just won out. It just became the thing to do. – Brendan Mahan

So, I have ADHD, so I understand it because I look out of ADHD eyes every second of every day but I wasn’t diagnosed until I was an adult. I was bouncing around in my profession and that made me question: What if? What’s going on with me? What part of this is my responsibility? How much of this is on me? Because it’s not just the economy, I must be making mistakes, right? Consequently, in the course of trying to figure out what those mistakes were and why I was making them, I learned about ADHD, pursued that diagnosis and started to figure that part of myself out and did a pretty good job of it. One of the most surprising things that came out of my guidance counseling degree was when I had to do an internship for the guidance degree. One of the questions that was asked of my cooperating counselor practitioner person was about identifying my strengths and she said it was my organization. I was caught off guard because I didn’t feel it was like that. The story in my head was that I wasn’t organized, right? Rather, I was a super disorganized person, but I worked really hard on that during my master’s degree program as a result of learning about ADHD and figuring out why I was better organizing myself and how to do a better job of it. Somewhere in the course of that, organization became a strength of mine instead of a weakness, which I didn’t even see happen. I just thought I was compensating for my struggles but my helper or the counselor I was working with saw it as a strength. – Brendan Mahan

So that second piece of that question with ADHD changes my answer because if you just asked me when did I know it was time to help others, the answer to that would be when I was ten. I’ve kind of always been that guy. Once I was old enough to be able to do that, that was my deal. Then as I learned about ADHD,before I even stopped teaching, I thought maybe I could be a guidance counselor or I could be an ADHD coach. I’d do one of those two because they’re not that far apart, they’re the same kinds of things. It’s just that one happens in a school and one happens, for me, in my basement over Zoom, because that’s where my office is. I’m in my office meeting with people over Zoom. So, it happened as I was sort of transitioning out of the classroom when I started looking at doing the ADHD work. – Brendan Mahan

It all started when I listened to a virtual summit. There were people in the virtual summit who were offering free gifts, which is how that works. One of the free gifts was a free 30 minute coaching call. So, I had that free 30 minute coaching call and talked to that woman and that led to me signing up for her coaching group, which then led to her saying that I was really good at this.She told me she could train me in how to be an ADHD coach if I Wanted to. I kind of started there. I also already knew I had some good concepts and ideas and that kind of thing. As I progressed through doing some coaching work with her and then doing some coaching work with some other people and doing some coaching work on my own , it became clear to me that I was good at it, that I had the chops, I guess. Because I used to be a teacher, learning about ADHD and how it works can get you pretty far. The more you learn about ADHD, the more you can support yourself and my ability to share information is pretty high. I’m a pretty good communicator, so the metaphors and concepts that I would talk to my clients about eventually became easier to share with whoever, and then they would be better off as a result of having learned more about their ADHD. They can communicate this with their kids or their spouse, and I can help some marriages, some families, etc. – Brendan Mahan

ADHD is a point of performance disorder. So, folks with ADHD have more difficulty doing something compared to people who don’t have ADHD, unless they’re really interested in it. If it’s something they’re really interested and motivated for, they’re going to do better with initiating but if it’s stuff that they’re not that interested in, they’re going to really struggle. I like to call it “life on hard mode” because the essential challenges of ADHD are also the essential challenges of life just turned up to 11. Yeah, everybody gets sad but not everyone has depression. Everyone struggles with organization and doing stuff they don’t want to do and getting places on time and remembering things and managing their emotions when things get frustrating but not everybody has ADHD because all of those things are pieces of ADHD. It’s just a lot harder for ADHD folks to navigate those challenges than it is for people who are neurotypical, which is why folks like to pretend ADHD doesn’t exist, even though it does. – Brendan Mahan

The statistics for kids are around 8 to 9%. So let’s make adults 8 to 9% too. Honestly,  I haven’t looked at the statistics recently, but it’s like 10%, somewhere around there. There’s also folks who haven’t been diagnosed. – Brendan Mahan

I would say a fair number. I would bet that you could take that number and add another half to it, probably because ADHD is a point of performance disorder. That’s going to affect your diagnosis. If you’ve got a kid who’s struggling academically, they’re more likely to get diagnosed with ADHD but if they’ve got parents who are teaching them the skills that they need to perform well academically, that doesn’t mean they don’t have ADHD. That just means they’ve got some support that the other kid doesn’t have which is why ADHD is a bigger challenge for kids that are living in poverty because they don’t have the same resources that are as kids who are living in the upper middle class. They can’t afford tutors, they can’t afford executive functioning coaches and all this kind of stuff. So they’re more likely to get the diagnosis because then they’re going to get the support at school. So socio economics play into how ADHD works because if you have the money, you’ve heard about this stuff because you’ve been to college, you know about it, you know what to ask for. – Brendan Mahan

I don’t need to think that, I know that. It’s not a matter of opinion, It is in fact true, especially for women. Women are much more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety or bipolar disorder or something like that rather than ADHD, because there’s the bias in our culture that ADHD is a disorder for boys and men to have but girls and women don’t have it. Doctors are much more familiar and comfortable with women and girls having anxiety than with having ADHD, so they’re more likely to go to that diagnosis over ADHD. Anxiety is a piece of ADHD, absolutely. If you’re only looking at that piece, you’re going to get that diagnosis but if you expand it beyond anxiety and start looking at what’s causing this anxiety you might realize it is probably repeated failure and an inability to meet the expectations of the world around you. Why is that happening? Because you have ADHD and your prefrontal cortex is not as developed as your peers. So, using these executive functioning skills that help you perform is harder for you to do and as a result, you’re anxious. So it totally is misdiagnosed. – Brendan Mahan

Yes, I’m doing a bunch, I mostly run workshops. COVID kind of slowed that down a little bit, but we’ll be going back to it for next year. Although I just wrapped one up last week. I do workshops on ADHD. I presented for the International conference on ADHD as a scholar, I presented for the Massachusetts School Administrators Association, the Massachusetts School Counseling Association, and those kinds of places and various schools throughout the state. It’s about explaining just what is ADHD? How does it work? So there’s that component. What are executive functions? How do we train and teach executive functions? How do we get our kids to do the stuff we ask of them? So that point of performance is about workshops on that and social emotional learning and anxiety and all of the things that touch ADHD. There are workshops that I train teachers on, as well as teaching assistants and special education teachers and the whole nine yards. In addition to that, I occasionally consult with schools, so I’ll go there and observe kids or observe the classroom and also work with parents to help navigate. So it’s sort of helping the teacher by helping the parent kind of a thing. I run parent coaching groups four times a year where I’m teaching parents how to manage anxiety at home and form a better connection with their kids. It’s not exactly school academic skills, but if we can make things more peaceful at home and reduce the battles about school, it’s going to be easier for that kid to perform because like I said, emotions beat academics. Let’s tackle the emotions and then we’ll worry about the academics. I also have a podcast that is published weekly. I think I’m up to 211 episodes, and that’s a resource for teachers, educators, parents and anybody that might find it useful to listen to and find out what’s going on. I interview teachers and parents, I interview ADHD experts, I interview the occasional NASA’s scientist, One hit wonder and then New York best selling author, etc. – Brendan Mahan

It’s a broad swath, right? There’s some schools that are doing really well. There’s some schools that are struggling and there are two reasons for that. A school that is prioritizing social emotional learning and social emotional skills over academics is going to be doing better with ADHD. Theoretically, at least according to my philosophy, we’ll also be doing better academically but that’s not always the priority. Sometimes the priority is having to roll out this new math curriculum and then there’s schools that don’t have the budget for it. There are schools that don’t have the budget to learn what they need to learn about ADHD to then execute more effectively and then there’s schools that don’t want to hear it. There are schools that just want that authoritarian approach to discipline in the classroom and they’re not right. Kids with ADA are either going to thrive in a system that’s that structured or they’re going to really struggle in a system that’s structured in that sort of punitive way because they’re going to end up messing up somewhere and if they’re getting punished for messing up, they’re going to struggle that much more because that’s how ADHD works. We ADHD folks do much better with reward than we do with punishment, except when it’s the threat of punishment. Sometimes that can get us motivated to do it if we can avoid the punishment. However, as soon as we screw up and that punishment starts hitting us, if there’s no forgiveness in it, we’re going to fall apart eventually and sooner rather than later. – Brendan Mahan

I would say that if you’re going to do this job, you’ve got to go through a coaching program or you have to start in mental health or in education. If you’re a mom who has a kid with ADHD and think you’re going to help other moms do ADHD parenting, you’re not qualified. I hate to be a jerk, I hate to sound like a snob, but you’re not qualified because you don’t know what you’re going to encounter and you need to know what you’re going to encounter. The only way to find that out is to work in a professional field that will teach you that stuff and give you that experience or go and get the training, one or the other. I’ve got a client who is a mom who’s got a kid with ADHD and some other stuff who used to be an accountant and is trying to pivot into this field and she does really well. Sometimes, she doesn’t do really well and sometimes she’s struggling and that’s part of what we do. I explain what to do with that kid or that parent. You also have to know what you’re getting into because you’ve got to be self-motivated and that’s hard for folks with ADHD. A lot of people want to go into this field because they have ADHD, claim to understand it and want to help people, which is valid. That’s what I did. That’s my road. However, I’ve managed to learn how to self-start. It wasn’t easy, It was really hard. There were times when I didn’t know if this job was going to work or not, and luckily my wife made enough money that I could fail for a little while and we weren’t going to be homeless. So you’ve got to have that. You’ve got to have some kind of cushion at the start of this career, like anything when you’re an entrepreneur so that you can sort of get rolling and not have the whole rug get yanked out from underneath you. You have to know how to talk to people, how to communicate, how to make people feel heard and cared for and validated. I built my business primarily with workshops at the beginning. So, I would go to libraries and do workshops on ADHD for parents, and I would literally email schools in that town, in the surrounding towns and just let them know I was going to be at the library or guidance counselor or principal or special education teacher and if they wanted to come, I would love to have them there and see what I was doing. According to my logic, when I went into these workshops, people saw that I knew what I was doing and they would want to work with me. So, now when I get a client and if I get school staff in there, they might want to bring him in to do training. That led to my name getting out there and I established a reputation. I didn’t pursue any workshops during COVID and I haven’t been I haven’t pursued a workshop yet since March of 2020. I’m still getting workshops and having people contact me, and I charge a good amount of money for my workshops now but it’s because I established that reputation with small stuff, doing free workshops in libraries and that built and built and built. So now schools contact me because I have a reputation and then the podcast doesn’t hurt either, right? Everybody and their mom has a podcast nowadays, and as a result, the podcast market is oversaturated. There’s a glut of shows. I had a show two years before COVID hit. COVID really pushed podcasting because people had nothing to do and everybody decided to start a podcast. My show was already well-established by then and I’m in the top 5% of shows, that’s nothing to sneeze at. I don’t have a billion and a half downloads. It’s just there’s a lot of shows but I also have a reputation in the ADHD circles of getting good guests, being a good interviewer, caring about how comfortable the folks on my show are and whether or not they want to come back or feel safe in the course of the interview and asking good questions and those sorts of things. Then you get a couple of good guests and those good guests lead to you getting the better guests and that kind of stuff. – Brendan Mahan

Give away your best stuff for free. Full stop. I give away my best stuff for free. Give away your best stuff for free. If that’s all you have to give, then keep building stuff. If all you’ve got is one thing, then of course you do not want to give it away, it’s the only thing you have. So you’re not ready to do this yet, right? Or at least you’re not ready to do this with a high profile. You’ve got to have stuff in your pocket and you’ve got to give that stuff away. Then people want to work with you because they think it is amazing. One of my best things is the “Wall of Awful”, which I’m sure we’re going to do later. I have given it away for free. I mentioned today the “Wall of Awful” in my parent groups and they couldn’t wait to get to it, even though I’ve given it away for free, even though they’ve already heard it. I literally send my parents coach, my people, my parent coaching groups links to YouTube videos from How to ADHD, which is a YouTube channel, and on ADHD that are about my Wall of Awful as a model. So it’s free. It’s already out there but now they get to talk to me about it and we get to go deeper because those videos are like 14 minutes or two seven minute videos. They’re going to be with me for 2 hours today and Wednesday and we’re going to go a lot deeper than what those videos have. So, you’ve got to be able to give your stuff away for free, but still have depth to it. If your best stuff doesn’t have depth, that’s why you want to do a workshop on it. That’s why you want to give it away for free because people are going to ask questions that you’ve never thought of and you’re going to have to answer them, and that’s going to add more sophistication to your best stuff. That’s where you become what you want to be in this profession. That’s how you become an expert; by getting to be asked questions that you’re not ready for because you never thought of them and now you’ve got to figure it out. As a guy on the other side of the podcast, if I’m interviewing someone and I can tell they’re holding back, guarding their stuff, that’s a bad interview. In comparison, when I interview someone and they throw all their best stuff at me, that’s awesome, that’s a really good interview because they’re giving me value. They’re making themselves look good and people who are listening to my show are going to want to work with them because they come across as so amazing. But if all your stuff is guarded and you’re not really giving good answers or you’re telling people to go to your website and learn about door to door, you just come across as slimy and now people don’t want to work with you because if you’re not willing to share this stuff now, they might think that if they pay you, are you going to try to upsell them again and make them give you even more money to get that answer? When does that end? If I just get the answer for free in a podcast, I want to work with that guy because he’s got all the answers and I don’t know what answers are hiding. If I pay this guy, I’m going to find out even better stuff. – Brendan Mahan

You got to know what your ‘why’ is. Why are you doing this? That is a big piece of why I’m able to self motivate; I love helping people. Also, this business lets me control my time in a way that being a teacher doesn’t, I homeschooled my kids for all of it. They’re back in school now that everyone’s vaccinated, but prior to vaccination, my kids were being homeschooled by me and not virtual learning. I developed the curriculum, I delivered the curriculum and I assessed the curriculum because I used to teach sixth grade and they were going into sixth grade. I already knew half of it. I knew social studies in English. I just had to do math and science. I couldn’t have done that If I was working in a school. I would have had to quit my job, right? So part of my ‘why’ is my family, the flexibility. If my kids have a dentist appointment, I can take them to the dentist appointment with minimal disruptions because I work from home. That’s helpful. That’s another piece of the ‘why’. I can just pick them up at school, go to the dentist, drop them off, go back to work. So that ability to control my time better is a piece of it too. My ‘why’ is not money, I don’t really care about money. If I had all the money in the world and didn’t have to worry about it as a practical need, I wouldn’t charge people for what I do because I just don’t care about money. It’s not a thing that’s important to me. So know your ‘why’ and know what you’re bad at, how do you struggle, what makes it hard for you to do stuff and then figure out how to work around that. I had to learn how to use a calendar. I struggle with emails and a couple of things I’ve learned is I have to give myself numbers. When I say that I’m going to check my email today, it’s not good enough. I have to use better verbs. I have to say I’m going to reply to five emails a day or ten emails. I need a number and I need the verb to be ‘reply’, not check. I also have a click counter that they use going in and out of clubs and stuff. I literally pull a click counter out when I do my email and I keep a track of how many emails I’ve done because one of my problems with emails is that it feels imaginary. I mean, you send an email and nothing happens. It’s just, I typed five sentences and sent it out and I didn’t hear back from that person and I don’t really know if this means anything. Also hiding in that email is more stuff I have to do because they may be a client or they want me to maybe do a video with them. So, emails for me are like more work that I have to do. I don’t know how big it’s going to get and it doesn’t feel real after I hit send, at least the click counter makes it feel real. I feel like I get credit for having done the email sort of, and I can look back at my calendar at the end of the day and see that I replied to 27 emails and worked with three clients and did a workshop or whatever. That matters. So you have to figure out what is it with the things that you struggle with, what do you struggle with about it, and then how can you work around it. – Brendan Mahan

I think that if you don’t think you’re influential, you’re lying to yourself. Everybody is influential. We all have influence on the people on everyone around us. Some of us have more influence than others, but we all have some level of influence. So, it’s just not true that you’re not influential. I think that there’s a lot of fear there of asking what if you’re not influential enough or what if you’re not worthy of being influential, that’s when imposter syndrome stuff comes in. So, I think being influential matters, but that’s not that’s not how I approach it. Influencer is the word now. I hear that I am officially an influencer. People are pursuing me in the ADHD circles to do stuff with them because I’m an influencer in the world of ADHD, but that’s not what I’m trying to do. To me, that’s superficial. I don’t want to be an influencer, I want to be maybe a role model. That’s not the word I’m trying to get, but that’s better, right? I want to set an example for my profession. I want to set the example for kids and adults with ADHD who are struggling. I want kids that are having trouble in school to look at me and know that despite having ADHD, I have two master’s degrees. So if I can do it, they can do it too. That’s what I want to be. I want to be a positive example for the world, I guess. So, that’s ‘influence’. But influence is vague. What does it really mean? That means you can sell stuff on Instagram. I don’t want to sell you stuff. That’s not my deal. I want to be a positive example for you. I want you to do better whether you work with me or not, I don’t care. I want you to have a better life because some piece of me, whether it’s actually me or my voice recorded on the Internet, some piece of me, drifted through your world for a minute and your life got better. My job is to make everyone else’s day better. So that’s that and I think that piece matters because that’s a different kind of influence. It’s hard to be influential if you don’t know how you want to influence. You’ve got to do something with that. That’s got to matter. It’s not the followers that give you credibility, right? It’s your stuff. It’s. What are you presenting to those followers? I was credible when I was doing workshops with two and three people in them. I was still credible. I still knew my stuff. I still had good things to share. I still talked about ADHD and people cried because they heard what I had to say and it reframed some experience in their life. People still laughed because I’m funny when I present. I still took people on this emotional roller coaster, sort of while also teaching them stuff and giving them useful, valuable information. So my workshops, my presentations are about emotion and academics. It’s both of those things because that’s how you get people to where you’re trying to bring them in. – Brendan Mahan

I didn’t need to give myself pep talks. In the beginning of course there were only eight people there, I was lucky there’s eight people here. Nobody knows who I am. It doesn’t matter that I have good stuff. Why would I expect there to be more than eight people when I haven’t done this before? Even as I did it more and more, eventually those numbers grew. However, those numbers in the beginning didn’t grow because I got more well-known. They grew because I met people who heard what I had to say and realized I knew my stuff and thought I was a pretty good talker. People need to hear what you’re saying. So I networked into areas that I was useful in. I spent time working up in Milford with their JAG group, the juvenile advocacy group that’s been navigating the heroin epidemic. I’ve been working with them for like ten years and connecting to JAG and Amy Leoni If I can give her a shout out. She’s a mental health clinician out there who’s done a lot of work in that area. She kind of platformed me. She got some workshops, and invited me to come and talk to the folks out there in that direction and all of a sudden I’m talking in front of 50 people whereas before it was ten or 12, they just kept growing. I did that and I realized this was resonating with all 50 people. I could talk in front of 50 people and not be nervous and not shut down and handle that. then, that grows and eventually I’m doing workshops in front of 200 people and I like it even better. That’s hard for some people but that’s just how I roll because I have ADHD and those workshops give me dopamine. They light me up, they make me feel good. It was through networking with people in the ADHD circles that helped me get a podcast because Eric Quivers, who does ‘ADHD Rewired’, told me I  needed to start a podcast. So, part of the business side of this is you got to network and you got to know who to network with and how to build yourself with the support of others because none of us are in this alone. – Brendan Mahan

I don’t know that that’s what it is. I think it’s the difference between the imaginary nature of the Internet and the reality of a room with people in it. My numbers on the podcast are getting like 20,000 downloads a month and 30,000 downloads a month now. I’m getting a lot of downloads but that doesn’t mean that 30,000 people are going to come to a workshop that I start because those 30,000 people are literally spread across every continent on the planet. They’re not all coming to a workshop. When I launch the parent coaching groups, I’m hoping I get ten people. I kept them at 12 and I ran them with six. Please sign up despite the podcast because there’s a difference between listening to this show when it’s convenient and committing to meeting with Brendan every Monday and every Wednesday for an hour, or going into this workshop on a random weeknight to listen to this guy talk for an hour or two. That’s a different thing. It’s just the reality of people versus data points, likes, subscribers, that kind of stuff. – Brendan Mahan

So there’s a few different ones I think. Sometimes I’m having a good day. Like, ADHD is nothing if not a roller coaster. So it’s inconsistent and I need to change my mindset depending on where I am that day. Maybe my mindset is that I’m willing to be flexible. However, some of the mindset stuff is compassion and self forgiveness. If I just suck today, that’s okay. I don’t need to hate myself and beat myself up about that. I can forgive myself and move on because tomorrow’s a new day and I’ll do better tomorrow or I’ll do better in the afternoon than I did in the morning or whatever. So there’s a piece of that because with ADHD, sometimes I’m the greatest person walking the face of the planet and sometimes I don’t know why they let me out of my house. It’s just the nature of my disorder. So when I’m the greatest person walking the face of the planet, my mindset is that I’m the greatest person walking the face of the planet and it’s easy for me to do this stuff because I’m the greatest person walking in the face of the planet. But when I don’t know why they let me out of my house, when that’s my day, I forgive that. I give myself that space, right? There’s times when I feel like today is a day when I’m just going to watch ‘Hustle and Flow’ on Netflix and hope that I can pull some of the motivation from all of these up and coming hip hop artists. Maybe that gives me the drive to check three emails or I should say reply to three emails, do that. Maybe that’s what’s happening. I know enough hacks to try to adjust my emotional state when I’m stuck. I might exercise, I’ll watch ‘Hustle & Flow’, I might listen to a podcast that’s not mine and take a walk or I might just say that I’ve been going really hard for the last three months and it’s okay if I take a day or two to reset and chill out and unwind and decompress and then kill it tomorrow. So, my mindset kind of varies based on where I am, but there’s some self-care in there, There’s some self-compassion in there and you just got to do the thing right, that’s there too. Sometimes you just get anxious because you didn’t do the thing. Anxiety is the only thing we can burn for fuel and wind up putting more of it when we’re done. So, sometimes I’m burning that anxiety for fuel with the knowledge that I’m going to struggle later. – Brendan Mahan

You’re not bulletproof, no one is bulletproof. And the more we pretend that we are, the worse it gets later. You can white knuckle it for a while, but eventually that vulnerability is coming out. Especially for men, we’re not allowed to be vulnerable. Men are men and women, too. I’m not going to pretend that’s not true for women as well, but especially for men and we are. So, when you pretend that you’re not vulnerable, those negative emotions are still there. You’re still feeling left out, you’re still feeling humiliated, you’re still feeling uncertain, you’re still feeling anxious, you’re still feeling guilty and shameful and scared. All of that stuff is still there. If we don’t allow those feelings to come up, then they’re causing other feelings and the other emotion that comes out is anger because anger is the only negative emotion that doesn’t make me feel vulnerable because it makes you feel vulnerable. Then I can pretend that I’m not vulnerable because the person I’m screaming at is obviously vulnerable and I can pretend I’m not and that’s not healthy. That’s a recipe for disaster when it comes to relationships in your personal life, potentially when it comes to relationships in your professional life, that’s not a plan. So, just admit at least to yourself that you’re scared, that you’re uncertain. Just do it and then you can eventually get to the point where you can be uncertain and feel comfortable with it. You can be comfortable feeling uncomfortable and that’s where success lives. That’s how you get to success; by being able to be in an uncomfortable position and be comfortable with it, or at least make it look like you’re comfortable with it because those are the folks that people look at. They might seem amazing but meanwhile, they might be feeling terrible and might not really know what’s going on. One of the most important moments in my life was when I said to someone “I don’t know the answer to that, but I can figure it out and get back to you.” When I got comfortable saying that, it opened up all kinds of new doors for me because when I didn’t know what the answer to a question was, I didn’t feel the need to fake it or lie or something and cause a problem and hopefully solve it before it actually became a problem and I correct what I said or whatever. Just be vulnerable, just own it. – Brendan Mahan

It’s kind of similar for both, right? The more we know, the more we can manage it and the more we can understand it. One of the best things my wife did for me was she went to a training on ADHD with me. Her learning about my ADHD vastly improved our marriage because all of a sudden all these things I did wrong, all these ways I messed up that she was kind of taking it personally and thinking I didn’t care and all that stuff, all of a sudden made sense to her because I just have a disorder, A good example is that I have asthma. When I have trouble breathing, it’s not because I’m too lazy and unmotivated to breathe, it’s because I have asthma. So, I don’t feel guilty or bad when I have an asthma attack. No one gets mad at me for having an asthma attack, I’m supposed to because I have asthma, it makes sense. However, ADHD gets moralized a lot. So when I’m late, when I double back myself, when I forget to buy milk on the way home, when I am just stuck and can’t seem to start, it’s really easy for people with ADHD in those situations to get mad at themselves. It’s really easy for other people to get mad at them for those struggles. But paradoxically, they’re supposed to happen. I’m supposed to forget things. At some point I should forget either my wife’s birthday or our anniversary. It hasn’t happened yet, but I have ADHD, it’s reasonable for that to happen. It doesn’t mean I don’t love my wife. I tell my wife I love her every day but I could forget one of those at some point and it’s not a lack of love, it’s my brain having its issues. So, understanding that, normalizing it, giving people permission to have ADHD, including yourself, that’s the number one thing. That’s the best way to help yourself with ADHD or the best way to help the person you love. However, the only way to give them that permission is to learn about it and understand how it works so that you can recognize when it’s rearing its ugly head. – Brendan Mahan

Yeah, I think that one of the challenges of ADHD is the guilt and shame that comes with it and splitting that hair right. Guilt is feeling like I made a mistake, shame is feeling like I am a mistake. When you have ADHD, you make a lot of mistakes. Especially once you get the diagnosis, you understand you’re making all those mistakes because you have ADHD. That’s a major part of us. So how do I avoid the shame if the reason I’ve made all these mistakes is because I have ADHD must be because of me, I must be the mistake. The way that I navigate that is that sometimes ADHD wins but when I have that thought, when I say that out loud, that battle is over and I can start a new one and I’m going to win this one. That’s because I’m going to change my approach, I’m going to bring in new strategies. I am going to bring in a new tool, I am going to get help from a peer or whatever I need to do to try to reclaim whatever ground I lost. That perspective is important, it’s critical in order to navigate this disorder, you’ve got to be able to start afresh periodically, and you also have to give yourself permission to have it, like I said. It makes sense that I didn’t pay that parking ticket. It’s not good that I didn’t pay that parking ticket, I still need to pay it, but I don’t have to carry the guilt and shame of failing to pay that parking ticket. I just have to pay. Often we fail to pay the parking ticket and we feel bad about it and because we feel bad about it, it’s even harder to pay it and then don’t. However, if I can get to the point where I can put that guilt and shame down, it just becomes a problem to solve. – Brendan Mahan