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Getting Ready to Learn 43

appreciation of their staff appropriately. “I really appreciated the
way you did that.” “Thank you so much for staying on to help.”
“Thanks a lot, that made a real difference.” These are just the
beginnings of an important emotional lexicon that we all need to
carry around with us and know how to use. For, as Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry wrote in The Little Prince, “It is with the heart that
one sees rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Even though we don’t know how to deal with emotions, they
certainly do have to be dealt with effectively, both at work and at
home. One way of staying close to your own feelings is to keep a
feelings file from time to time.

Try this idea. Take a page from your diary or personal organizer or create an electronic equiv-
alent. Mark it out in hours and draw a line down the middle of the page. Every hour, stop and
jot down on the left-hand side who you are with, where you are, and what you are doing.
Describe on the right-hand side how you are feeling and any observations you might have
about the situation. You can also use this approach in meetings if your attention is wandering!

RAISING SELF-ESTEEM

In an emotionally confusing world, maintaining your self-esteem is
sometimes a hard task. Indeed, the concept of self-esteem needs some
further explanation, for it is at the root of why so many people feel
that they are not ready to learn. It is a hugely complex area with
which, as a global society, we are only just beginning to get to grips.
Self-esteem—how much you value yourself—is slippery stuff. One
day you feel great. Then you lose your job or something devastating
happens in your personal life and your esteem suddenly plummets.
Of course, loss of self-esteem can be much more subtle than
this. Not doing as well as you would like to, feeling undervalued,
feeling uncertain of your role: these are just some of the more com-
mon experiences leading to a lowering of self-esteem. Or it could be
a single aspect of life that is going wrong and infecting all the rest,
like a rotten apple in a fruit bowl.
Although it is always a good thing to give people positive feed-
back and seek to bolster their self-worth, if someone feels they are a