As any parent knows, our children have personalities and characters that they show from the very beginning. And if nothing untoward interferes, what we see, and know, of them early is what carries forward. One child is naturally cautious, another likes to be the center of attention, you know the drill. From the very first, we are, in many respects, who we are.

If I had to choose a way to describe myself as a child, it would be restless. My mother would forever tell me to “lite somewhere” which fit nicely with a friend’s characterization, much later, that I have the “attention span of a monarch butterfly.” In today’s world, we would label it and likely think about strategies, or interventions, to manage it. I am, I think, fortunate that did not happen because I learned (for the most part) how to manage it on my own.

Yes, I spent a fair amount of time in elementary school in trouble for talking, which meant, at that time, standing in the corner of the classroom. I would have difficulty concentrating on an assignment and yet would manage to pull it off at the last second. Then, as now, I would describe myself as the “queen of deadlines.”

None of this is new to me but what struck me recently was something I read about the ways in people who have attention challenges are motivated. They are not motivated by the typical rewards and consequences, but rather by novelty, creativity, challenge and urgency. These elements are all positives with the caveat that, like the butterfly, staying in one place, finishing one thing, does not always happen.

I was clearly thinking about this after I read it, to the extent that it colored my dreams at night. I am sure that I dream, as we all do, but I almost never remember having dreamt or remember a dream. In this case, I had a number of dreams, all of which were in different settings and all of which were focused on me not finishing what I started.

I feel as if this a bit of a battle between my desire to complete some personal work I long to do and my love for flitting to the next new thing. And I realize that this is the moment (I almost wrote may be the moment and knew that was an effort to evade and avoid!) that I have to find ways to make myself commit and focus.

It’s easy for me to do this in my professional life. I have deadlines and commitments that I have to honor and I always do. But in the work I want to do that goes outside those parameters, where the deadlines are mine to set, well, that is where my challenge lies.

How do we maximize our strengths and minimize our deficits? How do we hold ourselves as accountable as we are held by others? I recognize that coping with, and managing, my challenges was not a phenomenon limited to my school days but is, rather, an ongoing process. And I also recognize that I may truly need an accountability partner to be that Jiminy Cricket on my shoulder. Accepting who I am without it becoming an excuse—that’s the hill I must climb to continue to fill my full heart.