My Thoughts

If you think learning is only about the head, you are missing half the class, literally.

Emotion colours attention, fuels memory and shapes decisions. It's messy, sometimes inconvenient, and utterly central to how people learn. After two decades working across classrooms, corporate boardrooms and government funded training programs from Sydney to Perth, I've become bluntly convinced: schools and workplaces that ignore emotional learning do so at their peril.

Why this matters

Learning is rarely neutral. Think about the last time you tried to teach someone a new skill, onboarding a new starter, rolling out a policy, training sales teams. The content is fine, yet uptake varies wildly. Some people latch on; others resist for reasons that have nothing to do with IQ or prior knowledge. That gap is emotional.

A lot of current practice still treats emotion as an interference. Calm, focus, no drama, that's the dream. But the neuroscience and the behavioural evidence tell a different story: emotion is not noise. It's a signal. The trick is to decode and design around it.

A short primer, the brain bits that matter

Three brain regions do a kind of tango when emotion meets learning.

Amygdala: The sentinel. It flags what's important, fear, reward, surprise. When it lights up, the brain takes pay attention. It's not a villain. It's the part that decides what's worth storing.
Hippocampus: The archivist. It works with the amygdala to consolidate what should be remembered. Emotional events become vivid, often more durable.
Prefrontal cortex: The moderator. It helps regulate emotion, weigh options, and select context appropriate responses. Mature PFC function is what separates reactive outbursts from considered responses.

This is not academic trivia. It's practical. If the amygdala labels a training session as threatening, deadline pressure, public humiliation, unclear expectations, the hippocampus stores that as "avoid" and the PFC scrambles to regulate. No learning. Simple.

Emotion narrows and broadens attention, deliberately

One of the more useful general rules from psychology is that emotion changes the aperture of attention. Positive, safe curiosity widens attention. People see patterns, make creative connections. Negative, threat based states narrow attention, very helpful when you need to fix a technical fault or respond to danger, but unhelpful when the task demands exploration or synthesis.

So: not all negative emotion is bad. Anxiety can sharpen detail orientation; pressure can improve performance for some tasks. But when a learning environment deposits chronic stress on participants, poorly explained tasks, shaming, constant interruptions, the ability to think broadly and creatively is squashed.

Memory loves meaning

Emotional intensity enhances memory encoding. That's not a metaphor, it's biology. Events charged with feeling are tagged as important and consolidated more robustly. This is why we remember first day of school trauma or an inspiring teacher decades later while forgetting countless neutral lectures.

This principle is gold for trainers and teachers. If you structure learning around emotionally meaningful contexts, stories, or real world stakes, retention improves. That's how you turn a fact into usable knowledge.

Classical conditioning, the silent teacher

We also learn emotional reactions via association. A neutral stimulus paired repeatedly with reward or punishment eventually carries emotion itself. That's why a meeting room can feel hostile after one bad performance review in it, or why a particular client's name sends a team member into defensiveness.

Understand conditioning and you can change training environments strategically: neutralise negative triggers, build positive associations, reframe contexts. It's practical, not mystical.

Obvious but ignored: social learning matters

People learn emotionally by watching others. Emotional contagion and mimicry are everyday phenomena, laughter spreads, so does panic. When leaders display calm curiosity, teams are more likely to mirror that. Conversely, a cynical manager will cultivate a defensive culture faster than policy changes can fix it.

We see this in workplaces across Melbourne and Canberra: a respectful leader who asks good questions creates far more durable behavioural change than a top down module about "communication skills." Reinforcement through modelling is the currency of emotional learning.

Cognitive techniques that actually work

If you want to help learners reframe emotional reactions, do the following:

Teach cognitive appraisal: help people label what they feel and why. Naming an emotion reduces its intensity and creates space for action.
Use cognitive restructuring: challenge catastrophic thoughts with evidence based prompts. "What's the data? What's the worst realistic outcome? What's another plausible view?"
Use mindfulness sparingly and practically: five minutes of guided attention before a tricky session can reduce reactivity enough to open up learning.

These aren't therapy substitutes. They are pragmatic tools that foster better learning states. And yes, some purists will insist these belong to the clinic, not the classroom. I disagree. They keep classrooms functional. In industry, they keep induction training from becoming an HR nightmare.

A tough but necessary opinion: emotional discomfort has value

Not all emotion is to be cushioned away. A little discomfort, the right kind, framed growth type challenge, is effective. Stretch tasks that provoke unease can increase competence and resilience. This is controversial because it looks like "push people harder," which is not my point. The point is intentional discomfort: scaffolded, supported and purposeful.

Two opinions people will balk at:

We should reduce the emphasis on standardised testing in favour of assessments that measure collaboration, emotional regulation and critical thinking. Yes, it's messy. Yes, it's harder to scale. But the returns, workplace readiness, adaptability, fewer people with brittle coping mechanisms, are worth it.
A certain degree of emotional challenge builds grit; comfortable learners often plateau early. Not cruelty. Design.

Practical classroom and workplace tactics

Start with safety: clarify purpose, process and psychological safety. People will engage cognitively only when they are not busy defending themselves.
Use storytelling. Stories provide emotional hooks and context. A well told case study will outlast a dozen slides of bullet points.
Mix affect deliberately. Alternate tasks that require detail focus with ones that solicit broad creative thinking, so you capitalise on both narrowed and widened attention states.
Build observational learning opportunities. Role plays, video modelling, and shadowing are inexpensive and potent.
Beware of one off training. Emotional learning is reinforced by culture. Workshops matter, but leadership and peer practice determine whether a skill becomes embedded.

Measurement, yes, measure

We need metrics that capture affective outcomes, not just knowledge checks. Pre/post surveys, behavioural observations, manager scored performance changes and retention metrics are useful. And there's evidence that social emotional learning programs work: a landmark meta analysis found SEL programmes led to an average 11 percentile point gain in academic achievement. That's not small potatoes, it's material.

A local angle: why Australia should care

Our workplaces and schools are increasingly multicultural and emotionally complex. We can't afford to treat learning as a purely cognitive transaction. Governments and employers in Sydney and Melbourne who invest in integrating emotional learning into curriculum and induction see better engagement and retention. We've run programs where a modest redesign in onboarding, one that included emotional framing, leader modelling and a short reflective practice, cut early attrition in professional teams noticeably in under six months.

Common pushbacks and my counterpoints

"Emotional learning is soft and unmeasurable." Not true. You can measure behavioural change, engagement rates and performance outcomes. You can also track wellbeing indicators tied to productivity.
"This is outside the teacher's remit." Yes, it stretches roles. But teachers and trainers are the front line designers of learning environments; equipping them with basic emotional learning tools is efficient and necessary.
"Too much focus on feelings dilutes content." On the contrary: content without engagement is wasted. Emotion integrates content into lived meaning.

Operational traps to avoid

Don't confuse positivity with safety. Toxic positivity (pretend everything's fine) invalidates experiences and undermines trust.
Don't over psychologise every reaction. Not every upset is trauma. Keep things proportionate and practical.
Avoid band aid programs. One off wellbeing days are good for PR, poor for lasting change.

Where policy and practice should head

We need integrated systems: curriculum design that includes emotional learning outcomes, professional development for teachers and managers, and assessment frameworks that recognise affective competencies. This is a systems play, not an individual hero's project.

A final uncomfortable point: equity

Emotional learning disproportionately benefits those who have lacked earlier supports. If we embed SEL in schools and workplaces, we reduce long term inequalities. It's pragmatic social policy. Some will argue resources are limited, but the alternative is perpetuating avoidable disadvantage.

Conclusion, quick and blunt

Emotion is not an optional extra. It is the engine of attention and memory. Design for it, and you'll be surprised how much smarter your learners become.

We try to apply these principles in the work we do, pragmatic interventions, not feel good fluff. There's modest resistance to the idea that a training module should be emotionally engineered. Fair enough. But it works. It changes behaviour. It saves time and money in the long run.

One more thing. Start small. A brief pre session check in, a story that matters, a modelled response from a leader, these tiny nudges change the emotional tone, and that changes the learning.

Sources & Notes

Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The Impact of Enhancing Students' Social and Emotional Learning: A Meta‐Analysis of School‐Based Universal Interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405–432. (Meta analysis reporting an average 11 percentile point gain in academic achievement linked to SEL interventions.)
World Health Organization. (2014). Mental Health: A Call for Action by World Health Day 2014. WHO. (Statistic: roughly half of all mental health conditions start by 14 years of age.)
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2020). Children's mental health and wellbeing. AIHW. (Provides national level insights into prevalence of mental health conditions among Australian children and adolescents.)