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Help people manage their emotions
Manage emotions
Both learning and driving are emotional activities - they
engage the feeling part of the body and brain. Emotions are
impulses to act. The root meaning of emotion is 'to move'.
They move us without our thinking, or even being conscious
of their presence.
Feelings can help us. They can engage us in learning if
we are excited by it; when driving, and we sense danger, we
are moved to protect ourselves.
Feelings can also make things hard for us when we learn
and when we drive.
A view of driver training that ignores emotions is
seriously lacking.
Emotions and teaching
Emotions can put the brakes on learning or they can push
the accelerator down. In a training environment you have to
deal with emotions on several fronts: your own emotions,
individual participants' emotions and the emotions everyone
feels from the experience generated by the group.
For you and your participants, training must ultimately
feel okay but along the way it must tug on participants'
emotions: if people do not feel emotionally 'pulled around a
bit' by training it is unlikely to have a lasting
impression. The skill in good teaching is to manage arousal
in a caring way and to help your participants interpret and
use their emotions wisely.
Training advice for training
- Create learning experiences that 'tug' on
participants' emotions but do not cause them to get
offside. Excite participants by helping them to
discover relevance in what they are learning. Let them
experience happiness, sadness, reflect on things they
love, or even let them get angry (in a role play or role
reversal, for example).
- Be careful. Strong negative emotions can cause
participants to focus on the threat and not the subject.
You message goes thorough a defensive filter and
important parts are missed; they can argue against you
and reinforce their position rather than expand their
understanding.
- Help participants question themselves rather
than asserting that they must adopt a particular view.
Let them work out why they are resisting a particular
position. Help them move outside the boundaries they have
created for themselves.
- Look and listen for emotional reactions when
teaching people the standard. When you sense a
negative reaction, investigate the causes with them. Is
it the goal of the standard, the content or the process
that they disagree with? Do not get defensive or go on
the offensive. Show a genuine interest in trying to
understand their view. If you try to dominate an argument
you are already defeated.
- Manage your own emotions: synchronise
them with the content and message of your instruction -
if it's a serious issue, be serious.
- Emotions cannot appeal to anything beyond
themselves as they are 'hard wired'. Thus,
self-awareness is the vital foundation skill for managing
emotions. Learn to notice your emotions. When you notice
an emotion being 'triggered':
- Check its intensity.
- Label it.
- Think how it will or is affecting
behaviour.
- If it's a useful emotion, use it.
- If it's a potentially harmful emotion,
resist the impulse to be controlled by it and
consciously think through the costs and benefits
of your programmed response.
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Training advice for driving
- Help participants learn to use the
self-awareness technique described above. (There
is more on the cost and benefits of safe behaviour under
the theme Manage motivations.)
- Help participants develop accurate risk
perception - recognise potential threats to their
safety ahead of time. When drivers are exposed to
potential threats they should feel it and not have to
consciously recognise them. The feeling of being
threatened moves a driver to act defensively. It is
difficult to 'install' this feeling as many risk
situations appear safe. Most driving situations in fact
look right (people generally do the right thing). It is
not until we sense something is going wrong that we make
an assessment of what kind of wrong it is. We then have
to choose and make an appropriate response: by this stage
it could be too late. Your training must enable people to
perceive the potential for 'wrong' in apparently normal
situations.
- Help participants become self-aware of fear and
fun. 'Best safety lies in fear,' Shakespeare said
but so too can best fun lie in fear. A sense of fear
brings with it a high level of arousal. When we seek risk
we are seeking arousal. What starts as fear can lead to
fun, which then pushes us closer to the edge. We continue
down this road for some time until we get a fright. If we
survive the fright, how we reflect on it will influence
how we behave in the future.
- Help participants practise safe behaviours,
even though they do not feel threatened, and then
reinforce their behaviour. If you can change their
behaviour in this way, the emotional connection may
follow.
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