ABSTRACT
Very early in my exploration of how people learn from experience I noticed that emotions played a significant part in starting the process. This realization came both from a study of the words that were used, which conveyed, sometimes quite vividly something of the state of the speaker’s arousal, and also from the body language which accompanied their accounts. Consider the short examples of learning given in earlier chapters. In the example in Chapter 1 Jeannie felt ashamed, felt that she had let down her friend, her colleagues and herself. In his meeting, Jim, in Chapter 2, felt he was ‘a gibbering idiot’, and thought ‘never again, I’ll never again allow myself to get into this situation’. As they spoke, their postures leaning forward, the quality of their voices and their general demeanour of people who had had painful experiences, conveyed the importance they attached to these learning events in their lives.
