Feelings and emotions interfere with ski learning
Feelings and emotions are known to affect rational behaviors, which can result in either a positive or negative effect on learning. Thus, when we experience these affective states we begin to perceive both our limitations as well as our opportunities to learn or to improve our performance.
Feelings and emotions cause us to stop paying attention to our skiing, orienting our attention towards these affective states. On the one hand, we feel good when we ski as intended; on the other hand, it is difficult to pay attention to resolve a learning situation if our emotional circuit sends danger signals to our cognitive area.
The knowledge that we ‘know how to ski’ is a feeling: we feel that we know, that we ski well, that we use our body parts correctly to do it but, ultimately, it is our feeling of confidence on which we rely to know: we trust that we did well. In our learning, we feel progress and therefore more confidence, then this feeling multiplies as we trust ourselves.
Our interpretation of a situation can generate opposite feelings. For some skiers, going down a slope with freshly fallen snow awakens feelings of pleasure, while for others, learning to go down it generates feelings of displeasure or devaluation for not having the ability to cope with it.
Depending on the learning situation to be faced, our feelings can help or harm its resolution. They benefit if they are pleasant and coherent with our own progress. They harm if the situation is considered relevant, then feelings cause distraction and distort reasoning.
Experiences in the mountain environment originate pleasant and unpleasant emotions located mainly in the limbic system. These accompany every moment in that every piece of information received and every activity performed is processed by this system, so they are inevitably associated with emotions. If when learning we are having experiences of unpleasant emotions, little will be retained.
We have observed that, when learning, we respond directly to our emotions, both the fear and the pleasure systems. Learning facilitators must be prepared to deal with their learners’ emotions because, sooner or later, they will arise and must be settled attentively, even if they seem disproportionate to the situation at hand, especially those of fear.
Every skier has the capacity to experience fear or pleasure, but when we start skiing we learn what to be afraid of and what gives us pleasure. When faced with a challenge that we consider threatening, i.e., something not pleasurable, the amygdalae that make up the limbic system begin to send signals to our prefrontal cortex. Due to the negative emotions that we experience, our movements begin to reduce mobility, adopting inefficient postures.
In this situation, it is clear that we are struggling to maintain control of our actions, but our cognitive control system is resisting because we are responding to signals from our emotional system. The instructor’s advices in these cases may not cooperate because we have decided not to listen to them or to take them as criticisms or incitements to act. The situation will change when we interpret the situation differently, stop resisting the suggestions we are receiving and apply them. Then we will begin to feel in control of the situation because our emotional system has calmed down and our cognitive system begins to take over. When the challenge is pleasurable, the positive emotions generated by intrinsic motivation predispose us to act.
An essential guideline for learning to ski is to decrease negative emotional interference in order to feel in control of the situation. Eustress, or pleasantness stress, occurs when conditions are relatively optimal such as pleasant weather, good visibility, or acceptable slope conditions, which activates our limbic system in a positive way generating pleasurable emotions.
Embarrassment is an emotion that draws our attention to the evaluation we make of ourselves in certain situations in which we must comply with certain norms of social behavior. In a learning context, the approach to shame is somewhat ambiguous. While many parents and learners perceive that shame should be avoided, instructors and coaches know that this emotion is something that is part of normal behavior in recreational skiers and athletes.
Avoiding negative emotions such as shame, believing that only positive ones provide for the good development as learners, is a mistaken belief that psychology proved long ago by attesting that, if appropriate to the situation, negative emotions collaborate in the development of our psyche.
In an educational setting such as a ski lesson, instructors should be careful to recurrently criticize counterproductive behaviors to avoid affecting learners’ self-image. In the case of embarrassment, the learner evaluates himself negatively towards himself, not towards the action performed, and this may affect his self-esteem and lose his confidence.
