The Bypassing Creative Consistency with Susanne Schotanus
Hey Team!
As many of you know, I have a passion for writing, and so I’m excited that today we are diving deep into that world and why it often feels like an uphill battle when you have an ADHD brain. I'm talking with Susanne Schotanus, an expert ADHD coach who holds the unique distinction of being the world's first dedicated ADHD writing coach, as well as the founder of the annual Basecamp to Brilliance writing summit. Susanne brings a wealth of clinical and practical insight from her years spent coaching everyone from burnt-out university professors to memoirists struggling to organize decades of research.
In our conversation today, we discuss why standard linear approaches to writing clash so intensely with our multi-dimensional thinking styles. Susanne explains the mechanics of the "messy middle" in long-term projects, how our constant craving for novelty can derail a draft after just two weeks, and why we might want to reconsider our view of consistency. We also explore practical ways to gamify your workflow and create structural frameworks that adapt to your brain rather than forcing your brain to adapt to them.
And while this episode's core focus is on writing, I think there is a lot to get out of this when considering any kind of long-term pursuit.
Susanne's Website - https://passionatewritercoaching.com/
Free Guide - https://passionatewritercoaching.com/hackingyouradhd/
If you'd life to follow along on the show notes page you can find that at HackingYourADHD.com/299
YouTube: https://tinyurl.com/y835cnrk
William Curb: Well, I'm so excited to be doing this interview because writing has been a passion of mine since I was very young. So I was looking through this, I was like, oh, this will be so much fun, even just for me. Even with that in mind, I thought a great place for us to start is that you had mentioned that you had been diagnosed twice, which for a lot of us once is enough. But tell us a little bit about that.
Susanne Schotanus: Right, I can't recommend it. It wasn't intentional at all. I first got diagnosed when I was 15. All they could tell me at that point was sometimes you have a hard time focusing and these pills might help. They gave me a Ritalin, didn't really work for me.
It made me very aggressive and I'm not an aggressive person. So everyone kind of forgot about my diagnosis until I was in university. And I was struggling a little bit. And I was visiting a friend's house and her mother happened to be an ADHD coach. And she said, well, your struggles sound a whole lot like ADHD. And I said, I think there was a diagnosis somewhere in my past. So I undertook a journey and I went back to my child psychologist and psychiatrist and everyone else who was involved at that time. And no one could find my diagnosis. So I heard through the grapevine about a psychiatrist who was close by and who was very good at diagnosing ADHD.
It took me about three months. But in the end, I got my second ADHD diagnosis and very proudly took it to the university. Only to hear, yeah, well, the only thing we can give you is extra time on your exam.
And as I'm an exceptionally fast reader and only needed half the exam time to begin with, the second diagnosis was pretty much as useful as the first one. But it does make for a good story. Yeah.
William Curb: And well, it's often the diagnosis is incredibly life changing for people. But it isn't always. Sometimes it's just like, oh, this is I kind of knew. And it's nice to have the confirmation, but it's
Susanne Schotanus: like, I think it's not the diagnosis, it's the learning after it is getting the language that can help you find your people online and help you find information and help you learn more about all those challenges that you thought were just you being a bad person and not well adjusted to our society and turned out to be ADHD. So I always say, I was diagnosed relatively early, but I am on the same journey that everyone else is because there's so much that we're only finding out now, that we're only learning about now from podcasts such as yours and from scientists who are now finally looking at women and other stuff, even though they're not looking at writing yet. So I think that we're all in this together, we're all learning together because before, let's say 10 years ago, we knew nothing. So it's not the diagnosis, it's the learning process and the finding community after I think that have the bigger effect.
William Curb: Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. There's only so much that just having the diagnosis gives you because I know for years after my diagnosis, I didn't actually do anything with it. I was just like, okay, well, this makes sense. This explains a lot of my life. And then I didn't go through with the process of being like, okay, well, let's actually find out how I can work with my brain.
Susanne Schotanus: And that is where that is the crux, right? When you start learning with your brain, that is when it starts having an impact.
William Curb: Yeah, it's one of those things where it makes so much sense to be like, oh, yeah, let's just do things that work for how I do things. But it takes that like just one additional step to get there often.
Susanne Schotanus: Because we are so used to just blaming ourselves and just getting stuck in this, oh, yes, I just failed again. Of course, I failed again. I always fail. That is our go to that is what we've been doing since childhood. And that is like decades of habits that you now have to shake to I always say curiosity is the antidote to judgment. We've all been stuck in this judgment. And it takes a big step to in those moments of failure, quote unquote, treat yourself with curiosity and ask yourself, okay, what went wrong here? What didn't I have in place that I needed instead of just beating yourself up and going down that deep dark hole?
William Curb: Yeah, because often when we have this self talk, it doesn't lead us to that, okay, well, there's something I can do about it. It's just this self talk of like, I'm bad and therefore I can't do anything. But with, as you said, with the curiosity, you go, oh, well, maybe there is something I can do. Maybe, maybe I can write that book if I know the right steps.
Susanne Schotanus: Right, precisely. It makes such a big difference. And as long as you get stuck in the judgment zone, your diagnosis is not going to save you.
William Curb: So with that in mind, I think we can jump into some of this idea of ADHD coaching with writing, and specifically for writing, because I know so many people that I like writing so much, I have trouble imagining other people not wanting to be writers. And so it's one of those things where sometimes I forget about that. But I do know a lot of people that are like, oh, yeah, writing, I would love to write, but it's too hard for me. And I think ADHD on top that aught layers in some really heavy burdens with the executive dysfunction and stuff. And so can you talk a little bit about what are some of the unique challenges ADHD writers face?
Susanne Schotanus: I think as with many of our ADHD challenges, the challenges make most people go, oh, so everyone has ADHD, because they are not completely unique to us. We just have them in a more excessive form. But one of the big differences I have noticed is that most neurotypicals are linear thinkers. They think from A to B to C to D. For us, that is definitely not the case. We start with A, and then we see how that relates to B, C, and D, and we see how that relates to everything else.
If I give you two random topics and you're in the zone, you're probably going to be able to find a connection between the two because your brain is constantly seeking connections, making connections. And that means that we think not in a linear line, we think two dimensionally, we think in a two dimensional map. But the problem with writing is writing is a linear form of communication.
It is one line broken up with commas, periods, and maybe a paragraph break here and there. So if we're trying to do is we have this two dimensional map in our heads of how everything relates, and now we need to squeeze that into a one dimensional line. And there's a few, few things that go wrong there. One, we get completely overwhelmed by the map because there is so much to say, where do I even get started? Because we don't have a natural start point and a natural end point. A second one is I can never, I can never catch the nuance and the richness of my ideas within my text.
So I need to throw it out and start over. And then of course, there is our desire for novelty, which means that when you have worked on something for two weeks, this is mostly true for longer term texts, your brain will tell you, this is not exciting anymore, because you were relying on novelty in the first two weeks, that novelty wears off, we think it's not exciting to you anymore. And therefore, you think that the project will not be exciting to the rest of the world.
William Curb: Yeah, I have definitely felt that one.
Susanne Schotanus: So you throw it out and you start a new project. We love starting new projects. We have a very, very, very hard time with that messy middle going through the way that I describe it is you start very excitedly in those first two weeks.
Everything is new. You have so many ideas. You create all these different threads and then you get stuck in that messy middle surrounded by threads, not knowing how to tie it all back together. And I think that that is very ADG specific writing problem.
William Curb: Yeah, I've definitely had my trouble with like, I'm gathering all my ideas and then I'm like, well, that was the most interesting part. And then I'm like, well, time for a new idea to where that that's all that. And we'll just write about something else.
Susanne Schotanus: And that is fine. If you just want to write for pleasure, then start a new project every two weeks. Why not? But if you start feeling bad about this stack of unfinished projects on your desk or in your Google Drive, then that is going to start weighing on you. There's going to be, it's going to be one more piece of evidence that you were a failure and you can never finish anything and never accomplish anything. And there's so much emotional work that comes into it. And as writing is usually a very vulnerable activity, those two don't mesh very well. When you feel terrible about yourself, it doesn't make your writing better.
William Curb: Yeah. Yeah, one of the ideas I was curious about when I was thinking about this interview was the how much of what you do is just coaching writing specific problems versus ADHD problems that in turn make writing harder?
Susanne Schotanus: Yeah, I think that 80% is the second. I often tell my clients, I'm a life coach for ADHD writers, because I think that if the rest of your life is falling apart, then we can talk about writing all we want, but it's not going to happen. If you can't figure out how to motivate yourself in general, if you can't figure out how to manage your schedule in such a way that you can have time for writing, if you are so overwhelmed by everything that is going on in your day job, there's not going to be any writing.
And yes, I think that I have some clients where we mostly talk about the content of their work. How do I structure this? What are the elements that I want to bring in? How does it all tie together? How can I make sense of this for my reader? But most of the work that I do is really how do I organize myself around writing?
William Curb: Yeah, I can definitely see that because organization is one of my Achilles heels in all areas of my life. And so it definitely will slip into my writing where I'm just like, I'll finish a piece and be like, I can't. There's no organization to this. This is awful.
Susanne Schotanus: Yeah, and that is the organization within your work. But imagine that you haven't touched your project in two months and you know you need to work on it because there's a deadline, but you don't even know which of the thousand folders it is in. Or you know that you read something somewhere that has a bearing on what you're writing right now, but you have no idea where to find it. Because you don't have a note taking system, but you don't have a note organization system.
William Curb: Yeah, that's always. I have a lot of notes and I know that I'm like, I probably have some good ideas in there that I'm never going to see again because I just don't, I never labeled them or, and you know, either physical notes or that are in a giant bin of papers that I may or may never go through or you know, digital note takers. I'm like, oh, this will, this one will be great. And it's, it's not.
Susanne Schotanus: Nope. No, because when you architect, look, people, ADHDers often tell me either I don't take notes at all, or and more, more regularly, they tell me, oh yeah, I do take notes. I'm a great note taker. And my follow up question is, okay, but do you know how to find your notes? I had a client who had a binder, like a scrapbook where every thought he had, he wrote down and put in the scrapbook, beautiful, wonderful, magical, like every single thought he had, every epiphany, every idea went into that. And I asked him, okay, so when's the last time he actually looked at it, except to put your new ideas in, doesn't happen.
So yeah, I think that note taking is something that a lot of people talk about, how to organize your notes in such a way that you can actually find them, or organize them in such a way that you will want to find them instead of thinking, oh yeah, well, this is such a mess. I don't even know where to start. So let me just think about it again, and come up with a new solution. Those are two completely different things. And if you're even if you're a good note taker, that doesn't necessarily mean that the notes are serving you in any way shape or form.
William Curb: Yeah, that's absolutely true. I have more notes than I know what to do with and no way to I'm getting better with finding ways to like organize them, because I'll be like, oh, I'm specifically taking notes for this project. So I need to be able to look at it again. But yes, so do you have systems or suggestions for how people should better go into that idea?
Susanne Schotanus: Absolutely. The first rule is you can't fail your tools. Your note taking system is here to serve you. You are not here to serve it. So if you have a brand new note taking tool that seems very exciting to you, and after a while, it just seems like it doesn't isn't working for you anymore, that doesn't mean that you failed and you should give up on note taking altogether. It means your system needs to change. If you fall in love with a new tool, and every time you stop using it after two weeks, that's fine. Clearly, the tool has certain purpose, find the next one that gets you excited and use that. Just make sure that you build your note taking systems in such a way that you can export them. So that you can still take them with you to the new tool, and that you don't make it so complex that if you come back after a while, you can still figure out how it worked.
So it is it is all about accepting how your brain works, and then figuring out, okay, how can I make this work for me? I don't think it's necessarily people often tell me, oh, yeah, tools don't work for me because I never use them. And my follow up question is always, okay, do you not use them? Or do you use them for two gloriously productive weeks only to then get bored with it? Because if it's a second, then my question is, is the price of this tool worth the two gloriously productive weeks? I'm sure that you would be willing to pay a lot of money for two very productive weeks. If the tool can help you do that, then it's served its purpose.
It's fine. But it is our beating up of ourselves that prevents us from making the most out of those tools for the brain that we actually have rather than the brain that we wish we had.
William Curb: Yeah, often that is the rub is that we are too often being like, oh, but if things were like this, and it's like, but they're not.
Susanne Schotanus: No. So why not start with acceptance and then take it from there? So I would not say there's one system that works for every ADHD writer, because I think that we are we might have a lot in common, but we're still individuals and we still have our own quirks and our own interests and our own passions. I love databases. I'm a complete geek.
I love databases and tagging and filtering and creating entire architectures. That is not for everyone. So I think that the best thing you can do is take it in a more playful way, watch some YouTube videos and follow your interests. If something seems interesting to you, start using it in a playful way rather than thinking, I now need to set this up in such a way that I can use it through the rest of my life.
Because let's be honest, you're not going to use it for the rest of your life unless you start keep making changes to it to make it seem new to yourself again. So I think that is the big, big problem. We find a new tool, then we dedicate like a week of our life to figuring it out. And as soon as we figured it out, it's not interesting anymore. And then we've wasted that week setting up a system that we thought was going to serve us forever.
William Curb: Yeah, I have spent a lot of time in that zone of like, oh, I'm going to make this tool so complex that I can't fail without realizing that that complexity itself is making it fail.
Susanne Schotanus: Yes. So play. Give yourself 15, 20 minutes a day and play with your new tool. Play with your new toy. Watch YouTube videos, try things out. Don't try to build it all right now. Just accept that it's going to develop over time as your as your ideas develop. Take it easy.
William Curb: Yeah. And yeah, I guess I'll be willing to be like, oh, yeah, if it because often you'll be using something like if only this one thing was different, but I've already set it up this way. It's like, well, just do it the new way.
Susanne Schotanus: Of course, but limit the time that you spend on it. Yes.
William Curb: Don't dive in for weeks at a time being like I'm making this script that's going to put every note in the right place and it's going to be I'll be it'll be magic because it won't be.
Susanne Schotanus: It won't be. No tool is magic. And your brain is not capable of figuring out everything that you might need in the future. So let your future self take care of it.
William Curb: Yeah, I think that's a great point because there's so many things where I like try to think ahead as much as I can and then it never I can't quite ever get that far ahead. Right. It's true.
Susanne Schotanus: So let's let your future self figure it out. They are probably going to be incredibly capable.
William Curb: And so this is also touching on another point I wanted to get into, which is consistency, something that I know I've had a lot of issues with consistency on a number of things. But it's I think I'm probably have a fairly similar view of consistency that I've developed that you have where it's not about everyday consistency. It's just kind of a rolling like, yeah, I'll get if I just keep doing this month after month, I'll get there. I don't have to be everyday consistent.
Susanne Schotanus: I think consistency is a myth. It is an impossible standard. It's an impossible standard, especially for ADHD years and especially for ADHD years who live a rich full life. And let's be honest, we all do. I like the word consistency just makes me shiver. I do not like that word. There was a I had a conversation with one of my coaching groups the other day and one of my clients said, Oh, I can definitely make this work as long as I'm consistent. And one of one of the other people in the group said, Yeah, we don't use that word here.
We don't use the C word here. Consistency, I think is a myth. I don't think we are capable of consistency.
And I think that it is not necessary. If you go online, people will tell you if you want to achieve anything, you have to be consistent. If you want to build an online following, you have to be consistent. If you want to get any big creative projects, then you have to be consistent. And that is another stick that we keep beating ourselves with, because we can't be consistent. So I think what if we replace consistency with constant progress, whatever that looks like.
So right writing every day, no, that's probably not going to happen. And the problem with that kind of thinking is if you miss one day, you've broken your streak. So you might as well give up. So it is actually going to make it less likely that you finish your project rather than more likely if you tell yourself you have to be consistent.
So what if we let go of the idea of consistency and instead try to keep making progress? And that means that your shower thoughts count. That means that listening to a podcast in your car and having a new idea about the thing that you are writing that counts, you made progress.
Great. Just try to stay in touch with your project instead of only counting like 500 words a day, because that is what consistency looks like according to the all-knowing internet. So yeah, I think consistency is a myth and we need to replace that as ADHD writers. We shouldn't even redefine it. Just let's let go of that concept altogether, because it's not serving us. It's not helping us.
William Curb: Yeah. And I think a reason a lot of ADHD writers do really cling to it is the same thing that we were talking about earlier where they lose interest in their idea because they haven't been touching it. And so yeah, I think there's a little bit of dichotomy where like, yeah, we can't be consistent in the way we want. We also need to keep touching it in a semi-consistent fashion.
Susanne Schotanus: Yeah. So let's play. How can we touch it? I have done this exercise with a lot of my clients and they've come up with the craziest things. I was working with an academic. She was a professor and she started making collages about the transformation that people would undergo if they read and understood her paper. Not something that you would associate with academic writing, but collaging for her worked.
It worked as a way to stay in touch. I have someone who uses Legos to outline her academic papers. I know someone who was writing a screenplay and she took her project to the Clay Studio. So in the Clay Studio, she was working on the faces of her characters and through that she could get deeper into who are there, where are they coming from. She did character development as she was working with Clay. Someone else said, I spent a lot of time in the car so I listened to podcasts about topics related to my project that I strongly disagree with. And then I used that frustration about my disagreement to fuel my motivation to get back to my project and write.
So what can it look like? How can you touch your writing while you do other things? We are great multitaskers. So what if you can bring your writing project into the everyday instead of seeing it as a separate realm that you need to visit and need to make time to visit putting all else in? aside. Make it fun. Yeah.
William Curb: And I can definitely see the importance of just letting your brain kind of play because looking at a blank page, often we get, we mirror that and are just blank in our thoughts. But when I'm out doing something else, it's usually my brain is like, oh, let's fire. Let's think about these ideas.
Susanne Schotanus: Absolutely. One of the best investments I've ever made is I bought a pack of bath crayons and I put one of them in the shower. And I have outlined entire texts on my shower wall because that is where I have my greatest ideas.
And after that, I can just put them on paper and then rinse it all off with shower head. So yeah, just accept where you have your greatest ideas and build on that.
William Curb: I know I get a lot of goods thinking done while I'm driving because I'm not listening to an audiobook or a podcast. I'm just like driving. I'm like, okay, yeah, my brain needs something to do. And so it just starts working through ideas. And often that's where ideas for what I'm writing about come from is like so many posts from this podcast have come from just like, I was like driving around and being like, man, that's an issue. And then been like, okay, let's solve it.
Susanne Schotanus: Right. That's amazing. And that is a way to stay in touch with your writing without putting the pressure of consistency on yourself.
William Curb: So I just glanced at my notes here with the consistency I also saw this note I had about like waiting for motivation, which I think is almost kind of a parallel problem here because that's often what people talk about.
The reason for consistency is that then you don't have to wait for motivation because we don't want to just like only work when we're motivated because that's we have deadlines and it does not work that way.
Susanne Schotanus: Right. That's true. Yes. You're absolutely right. Waiting for motivation rarely works because motivation comes from action not the other way around.
William Curb: Yeah. And so just using this idea of touching the idea any way you can, I think is a great system there for not waiting for the motivation.
Susanne Schotanus: I think so too. It often it awakens your intrinsic motivation. But there are other ways too. So I don't know if you're familiar with the work of William Dotson. He's the one who came up with the idea of the interest-based nervous system that ADHDers have as opposed to the importance-based nervous system that neurotypical people have. And he also developed the INCUE model of motivation for ADHD. So he says we're interested by interest passion, novelty, challenge, and urgency and pressure.
Now, ADHDers I have found often rely either mostly on novelty, ADHD writers, either on novelty. So as we discussed, you start a new project because you have a new idea. This is exciting.
I want to do this. And then after a few weeks, the novelty wears off and you have your new idea. So that usually results if you only rely on novelty usually results in a lot of unfinished projects or they rely mostly on urgency and pressure. So they wait until the deadline and then they get things done. That usually if that is your only source of motivation, that usually results in burnout because you are constantly firefighting.
You are working from one panicky deadline to the next. So that doesn't quite work either. But the challenge elements often forgotten. We ADHDers are very susceptible to gamification and playfulness. So if you can start pulling on the gamification lever and the challenge lever, and maybe bring some accountability into it as well, communicate or racing against your past self, or communicating to your to your friend that you're going to do something this week, then you can start generating motivation without having to wait for it, without switching from one new project to the next and without constantly like working from one deadline to the next. So that is one thing that I would really suggest is play.
That is kind of the theme of this session today, I think. Just play with it. Have fun with it. Another one is there's a brilliant book called Tiny Habits, not atomic habits, Tiny Habits, where the the behavioral scientist talks about how you don't need as much motivation as you think if you make the task super easy. So if you tell yourself, I'm now going to sit down and write a sentence, you need a whole lot less motivation than if you say I need to work on my book.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. It's when you can't conceptualize what you're doing, it's too much.
Susanne Schotanus: Right. So make it tiny. And suddenly you don't need that much motivation anymore.
William Curb: One of the funny things I'll do with my episodes is I will use templates to help me like format stuff. But inadvertently, while I was making the templates, I left in some typos.
I have never corrected those because they are such a good motivator for me to get started on doing things because I'll just fill open the template and be like, okay, gotta fix these. And then that just little habit of like, oh, I'm starting to work. My brain is like, oh, yeah, you're in work mode now. You're not just doing nothing.
Susanne Schotanus: Right, exactly. And what you also really showed there is when you get a tiny little task done, it becomes so much easier to do the next one because fixing that typo seems simple and easy. It's not fixing the whole episode. It's not editing the whole episode. That is big.
That's overwhelming. But I can fix this typo. And by fixing that typo, you are building up your motivation because you're giving yourself tiny little dopamine boosts. So what you're doing is you're not waiting for motivation. You are creating motivation through action. And there's probably also a little bit of accountability for you as well. People will know if you don't put your episode up.
William Curb: Yeah, there's that. There's that. Always the thing of like people like, so how do you keep doing your episodes? I'm like, well, if I didn't, I'd get emails about it.
Susanne Schotanus: Precisely. Accountability works. It's just enough pressure that you don't get overwhelmed, usually, mostly, but that you do keep like, we do so much better in a community. We do so much better connected to others in relation to others. It is so much easier to do things for someone else than it is to do it for yourself. And that is one reason why coaching works.
William Curb: Yeah. Well, and I think especially with coaching and accountability, because one of the things I've learned about accountability is that it works much better with like connections to you from people that are not like you're like sibling or mother, you know, like direct family or something a little bit farther out in the relationship is like the best form of accountability because you're like, they don't know who I am yet. I don't want to let them down. Precisely. Yeah.
Susanne Schotanus: I see that especially in the at the start of a coaching relationship, people say, oh, I got so much writing done yesterday because I knew I was going to meet you today and I didn't want to admit I hadn't done anything. So it's really it's a regularly scheduled accountability point. Yes.
William Curb: So as we've been talking, one of the things I've been kind of curious about is what kind of a typical client would look like for you because when I think about writing, I'm often thinking about either the or journalistic writing I'm doing for podcast or the fiction writing I just do on the side for fun. But there's a whole range of things that people can do. Like as you already mentioned, like screenwriters and academics and on. So just kind of curious what the primary focus of like who is coming to you.
Susanne Schotanus: Interesting. I hate to talk about the typical client because all of them are special little snowflakes to me. But I do think the majority of my clients are academics because academics feel a lot of pressure to publish. They've experienced very little in the way of support. There's faculty and they feel that their job depends on it.
So they are very happy to invest. So the majority of my clients is academics. The rest is composed of people who are writing their memoirs because we ADHD or stake risks, we have interesting lives. And at some point you can you realize, hmm, people might be interested in everything that I have experienced. So there's a lot of memoirists. There's definitely novelists, nonfiction writers who are completely and utterly obsessed with the topic.
I've been researching it for decades and I want to share their insights with the world. As I said, screenwriters, journalists, content writers, what else? Freelance, content writers and journalists. Anyone who needs or wants to write pretty much. Yeah.
William Curb: And is it usually around kind of the same subjects of issues for writing that people have or is it just like all over the place?
Susanne Schotanus: I talk a lot about motivation. I talk a lot about time management and nine out of 10 times the words make it smaller come out of my mouth. There's also a lot of as we as we talked about the architecture of your note-taking system. So there are some general areas that people mostly struggle with.
But every day is different. I can never predict what is going to happen because every week, like you will probably experience that too. I always say every time you think you've solved the problem, your brain has just invented a new one. So I am always busy and I can never predict where we're going next.
So I just show up to my coaching sessions completely open asking what's going on and then we take it from there. I do not believe in a one-size-fits-all program for ADHD writers because our problems are so varied and you can never predict what's the problem is going to pop up next.
William Curb: Yeah. Well, and especially when we talked about earlier how many of the problems are really ADHD issues on top of whatever they're doing.
Susanne Schotanus: Yeah, because everything I just said is executive function, right? Time management, motivation, organization, it's all like the ADHD checklist, but no one is talking about how it expresses itself when you're trying to write.
William Curb: Yeah, and writing has become such a ubiquitous skill across all fields. Even if you think you're out of it, you still got to do emails and texting even is something that I know so many people, they're like, I just want to be able to respond to this, but I can't.
Susanne Schotanus: Right, exactly. The number of times I have personally struggled with email anxiety is just ridiculous. Seeing an overpull inbox and just becoming completely avoidant, not knowing how to even begin by clearing it all.
William Curb: Yeah, and even being like, I just email something I've struggled with for years and it's always, it feels like it should be easy. I'm like, I know how to do this and then I get, and then it builds up again. I'm like, how did this happen?
Susanne Schotanus: It's true. I am the exact same way. I teach this stuff. You teach this stuff. Everyone struggles with this, I think. It's just some people hide it better than others or higher assistance.
William Curb: Yeah, that's where I'm at right now and it's great. But yeah, often because people have this need to email, respond immediately to things and giving that up has been very helpful for me, where I'm like, okay, I'll get to this when I get to it, unless it's actually urgent, but it almost never ends.
Susanne Schotanus: It's true. But for ADHD years, everything always feels so urgent because we're rely on urgency so much. I have that too. Sometimes when I send someone a message, I just keep checking my inbox seeing if I have already received a response. But when I am down in my rabbit hole, there's no way I'm going to respond within 24 hours because I am completely down the rabbit hole, completely immersed in whatever project I have going on. So sometimes people's ADHD also doesn't mesh well together. We're not always on the same schedule.
William Curb: It's very true. We all have our own unique flavor of ADHD and it can be great sometimes and it can be a problem sometimes.
Susanne Schotanus: Absolutely true. Yes. Still, we are my favorite people. Sometimes I go months without talking to a neurotypical and then people come to me and ask, do neurotypicals have this problem? And I say, I have no idea. I don't talk to those people.
William Curb: Yeah. I've ever get once in a while, I'll talk to some of my neurotypical friends and I'll like mention something. They're like, oh, yeah, I just do this one thing and it solves all that. And I'm like, but how do you do that? They're like, yeah, I just answer all my emails that I don't see what the problem is. What?
Susanne Schotanus: How? Yes. I completely understand. So yes, you're absolutely right. Writing is everywhere. You can't avoid it. But what you can do is redefining what writing looks like for you. I had one of the most prolific writers I've ever worked with. It was a novelist and she would go into the woods and dictate into her phone for two hours. And then she would go home and spend the afternoon editing what she wrote through her voice. She would never look at a white page, a blank page, and she could write a book in a month.
William Curb: Yeah, I've been experimenting with some like speech to text and that's been fantastic. It's been one of the biggest game changers in my writing in the last few years where it's just like, oh, this is really a great way to get my thoughts out because I don't get bogged down and trying. Like I can't type as fast as I think and it often very helps to just be like, I can just talk and then edit later.
Susanne Schotanus: Yeah, precisely. So when you do struggle with writing, one question you can ask yourself is, okay, so what don't I struggle with that I can use here? For example, I had someone who was very good at making PowerPoint presentations.
So I told her, why don't you outline your text in a PowerPoint and then present that PowerPoint to yourself while you record yourself and have your well structured first draft?
William Curb: Yeah, I think a lot of people often get stuck in like, this is how I'm supposed to do things. And with ADHD, it's so often about just whatever works.
Susanne Schotanus: I'm a big fan of whatever works.
William Curb: Yeah, which and it's so funny, would you like do it? Because you're like, why didn't I do this earlier? I just had this thought of like how it was supposed to be and it's like, oh, well, this sometimes it's finding the right tool. Sometimes it's just breaking through that mental barrier of what is supposed to be and what you can do.
Susanne Schotanus: I absolutely agree. And I think the second one is often overlooked, but makes the biggest difference.
William Curb: Do you tell me a little bit about Basecamp to Brilliance?
Susanne Schotanus: I would love to tell you a little bit about Basecamp to Brilliance. Last year, I was five years in business, and I decided to throw a big awesome party. And a big awesome party to the form of a summit where people talked about ADHD and writing.
And the prompts I gave all the speakers was absolutely, we want your tools, we want your strategies, we want to learn from you. But we also want to see your struggles, because there's so little talk about ADHD and writing. And the same experience that all of us had before we got diagnosed, or before we learned after diagnosis, that this too was ADHD, where the only answer we had to the question, why can't I do this is you're just bad at it. We didn't have like different language, we didn't have a different understanding that could tell us, oh, no, no, you're not a bad writer, you're an ADHD writer with very typical ADHD writer problems, who just needs the right tools. That same thing also happens in writing, if there's no language, there's no stories about what ADHD writers struggle with, then you think that your problems with writing are just your faults, or just you not trying hard enough, or you being bad at it.
So I felt that we needed more stories about ADHD and writing and what it could be, and how great it can be, and how much we can achieve through our writing, but also how much of a struggle it can be. So it was a beautiful mix of learning and connecting. It was a magical experience. And I decided the day after when I was completely and utterly exhausted, and had my huge dip after a three day high, that this is going to be an annual event. So this October, again, I'm going to throw a big party based camp to brilliance, which is a summit about ADHD and writing. But through the through the through the organization of it all, I started to realize how how unique this actually is. For the first time I realized, actually, I was the first person in the world to call myself an ADHD writing coach.
When I started, I googled the term, and there was nothing. So I thought I would just throw up a page on my website and see what happens. And lo and behold, before I knew it was the most popular page on my site. And I realized that that put me in a position where I felt responsible for actually making sure that this conversation happened. And that is why I started doing interviews and I started going out in the world more rather than just talking to one client at a time about it. Because if we don't have these conversations, then all the millions of ADHDers who struggle with writing will just sit there feeling it's their own fault.
And that was just a wait I couldn't bear anymore. So Base Camp to Brilliance is a celebration of ADHD and writing, but it's also a place where these stories can finally exist and be shared.
William Curb: Awesome. That sounds fantastic. And it's all online, right?
Susanne Schotanus: It's all online. You can go to basecamptobreliance.com to sign up to be the first to know when when the tickets are online and speakers are confirmed. Honestly, you'll be you're the first person to to hear this.
I already reached out to someone and I have my first speaker confirmed for October 2026. So I'm super excited. This only happened like three days ago. It is starting to ramp up.
William Curb: That's super exciting. I'll probably be signing up to go. So, yeah, I'm like, October, that sounds pretty free. I should be able to do that.
Susanne Schotanus: So it's ADHD Awareness Month. So you should just keep the entirety of October free and just celebrate neurodivergence in all shapes and forms. Yes, I'll try.
William Curb: All right. Well, we're coming up on time here. Are is there any final thoughts you want to leave the audience with?
Susanne Schotanus: Play. That's the big one. Let go of that stick. That stick that you keep beating yourself with that you can't do it, that you are not good enough, that you are just terrible at this because the way that that that other people do it doesn't work for you and bring curiosity and play into it. Figure out how to make it work for you rather than always feeling like you are failing your systems and you are failing your tools and you're failing when you look at your potential, you're failing to realize your potential.
You are not failing. You just haven't found the right tools. And if you do want tools for motivation, we also we already talked a little bit about how you can motivate yourself. I created a free guide that is available specifically for your audience that they can download to get their motivation within 10 minutes or less.
It is an emergency toolkit that guides you through six questions, multiple choice questions to help you choose between three tools that will help you get motivated within 10 minutes. Awesome.
William Curb: We'll all make sure there's links to that so everyone can find that in the show notes. And I'm sure a lot of people are getting quite a bit out of this. I know I got a lot out of it. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm so happy to hear it.
Susanne Schotanus: Thank you for having me. I had so much fun with you today.
This Episode's Top Tips
Waiting until you magically feel motivated to start a task is a losing game because our brains require action to generate momentum. To trick your brain into gear, lower the barrier to entry by making the first step absurdly small. Writing a single sentence or fixing a minor typo requires almost zero initial effort, but that tiny completion can give your brain the dopamine boost it needs to transition into work mode.
Your note-taking and organizational systems are here to serve you, not the other way around. Using a brand new productivity tool for two glorious weeks and then completely losing interest isn’t a personal failure; it’s just the natural lifespan of a novelty-driven dopamine source. With this in mind, keep your architectures simple, make sure your data is easily exportable, and make it easy if you need to switch tools in the future.
ADHD brains run on an system driven by interest, novelty, challenge, urgency, and passion. Most of us default to novelty (which leaves us with a mountain of half-finished projects) or panic-induced urgency (which runs us straight into burnout). To break the cycle and handle long-form projects, start intentionally leaning into the underutilized levers of challenge, gamification, and genuine playfulness.