When attention no longer holds

Learning isn't always linear and it's not just about discipline.

I always had pretty good grades in school. Nothing extraordinary, but enough to move forward without questioning too much how I actually learned. Looking back, I realize those good grades sometimes hid all the invisible effort behind them and that not everyone has that margin. So when I went back to university in my late twenties, I honestly thought it would be just another easy step along the way,''easy breezy''.

The difference this time was that I wasn't going back out of curiosity or pure intellectual interest. I had a very clear goal: earning a degree that would finally allow me to reach a management position. The pressure to succeed was real and fully assumed.

I remember my very first class vividly. I arrived at the last minute, which meant only a few seats were left at the back of the room. I sat down, opened my notebook, started taking notes and very quickly, something felt off. My mind was elsewhere, as if it simply couldn’t settle.

I noticed everything. Absolutely everything. The sound of chairs shifting. The sharp smell of an orange being peeled by the student next to me. The not-so-subtle noise of someone biting their nails a few rows away. Breathing. Pages turning. Sighs. The room turned into a real symphony of sounds and stimuli even though, rationally, nothing unusual was happening.

And meanwhile, inside my head, the dialogue began. Come back. Focus. Listen to the professor. Look forward. The more I tried to pull my attention back, the more a quiet frustration rose inside me, because I didn’t understand what was happening. It wasn’t as if I had never been able to concentrate before. I don’t remember ever experiencing it this intensely. That feeling of wanting to be present and not being able to.

The next class went exactly the same way. Then the stress set in. That evening, I sat down to study, convinced that in the quiet, everything would fall back into place. But nothing stuck. I read. I reread. The words moved across the page without anchoring. I started to doubt, not the material, but myself.

From that point on, I began to adjust, almost instinctively. I told myself that if something wasn’t working, maybe I wasn’t the problem, maybe the way I was approaching it was.

I decided to arrive earlier to class, early enough to choose my seat. Sitting in the front. Reducing the number of faces, noises and movements in my field of vision. That alone made a huge difference. I also started taking notes much more actively, not just to record the material, but to keep my brain engaged. I wrote fast. A lot. I added color, arrows, boxes, little drawings. I needed movement on the page for things to stay alive in my mind.

But most of all, I started participating. Raising my hand. Asking questions, sometimes because I didn’t understand and sometimes because it helped me stay in action, in the moment, in the exchange. As long as I was part of the conversation, my attention stayed anchored, alive.

Over time, another thought settled in. Maybe this class simply didn’t interest me.

And that was okay.

It didn’t mean I wasn’t meant to work in this field. It didn’t call my abilities or ambitions into question. It was one course among many, within a much larger path.

Looking back, what that period really taught me wasn’t how to discipline myself better, even though I was sometimes very hard on myself, but how to better understand what was truly happening with my attention. For a long time, I had lumped everything together: attention, concentration, discipline, success, intelligence. As if it all came down to willpower. If I couldn’t do it, it meant I wasn’t trying hard enough.

Today, I see things differently.

I understand now that attention is not an ON/OFF switch activated by motivation. It’s a living mechanism. It reacts. It adapts. It moves depending on what’s happening inside us and around us. At the time, I would never have spoken about neuroplasticity. I didn’t have the words for that. I only knew that something was happening, without understanding what exactly. Looking back, I now see that my brain was doing what it does best: adapting.

The brain doesn’t just learn what we present to it, it learns under what conditions we ask it to integrate information. Under pressure, it develops strategies just to get through. In a safer, more meaningful context, it becomes capable of creating new pathways, more stable ones, that gradually turn into habits and learning.

So the issue was never about forcing my attention to stay in place. It was about understanding how my brain was adapting and what it needed in order to learn differently.

At 28, I was no longer in the same context as during my earlier school years. There were professional stakes, pressure to succeed, more responsibilities, more fatigue, less margin for error. My environment had changed. My inner state had changed too. And my attention reacted to all of it. It became more sensitive to stimuli. More reactive to sounds, smells, movement and to what was happening inside me as well. Not because I lacked ambition or ability, but because part of my mental energy was already being used elsewhere. What I thought was a sudden lack of competence was really a gap between what my attention could offer at that moment and what I was asking of it.

Over time, I understood that what I had seen as a limitation wasn’t truly one. It was a different way of functioning, one that required different reference points, different strategies, and above all, a different way of speaking to myself, with more respect and understanding.

Whether you live with ADHD, ADD, dyspraxia, a language disorder or simply have an attention system that’s highly sensitive to environment, interest, and meaning, none of that disqualifies your ability to learn, succeed or grow professionally. It simply means stepping out of autopilot, as if one single way of learning or performing could fit everyone.

In my case, things didn’t improve by becoming more rigid. They improved when I learned to lean into what was already there: curiosity, the ability to make connections, deep engagement when a subject truly matters to me, presence in exchange and in action. Those were the forces that ended up supporting my learning, far more than imposed discipline ever could.

What I also came to realize over time is how little I had ever reflected on how I learn. Not what I learn or how fast, but under what conditions my brain is actually available. And yet, in the working world, that question is far from trivial.

However it’s phrased, organizations want to know what to expect, especially in roles with heavy cognitive load, constant pressure and high adaptability. But beyond performance, that question reveals something else: does the person truly know themselves?

There is real strength in being able to say: I know I struggle more in this context and I’m starting to understand how I function best. With this tool. This method. In this environment. That’s not a weakness to justify. It’s the ability to position yourself with clarity.

When you understand how you learn, you stop defining yourself by what holds you back and you begin to consciously rely on what truly allows you to move forward.

If this text helps someone feel that they’re not lazy, not “less than,” not failing, just trying to figure out how to function differently, then it has done its job.

Because in the end, the issue is not about changing who you are. It’s about stopping the fight against what, with the right support, can become a strength.