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A feeling can be entirely real while the conclusion drawn from it is mistaken.

Feelings are worth taking seriously but on their own they can't tell us who did what, or why.

Respecting feelings means investigating what they signal.

The meeting was heated. I made a statement in order to bring us back to the main issue. All of a sudden, a colleague made a comment about my statement. The comment did not sound collegial or helpful. I felt he was questioning my expertise. I felt uncomfortable. By any HR definition, I had enough to submit a complaint against him, and I had the strongest possible evidence: my feelings. Was I right? Did I need anything more?

Years ago, a professional heavyweight boxer came to see me. Without any doubt, he was better equipped to defend himself than almost anyone who had ever sat in my office.

He came because of spiders.

His fear was so severe that the word alone could set it off. If he heard that someone had seen a spider in the building next door, his heart would race, he would start to sweat, and everything in him wanted to get out. Needless to mention, we met in a country where spiders pose almost no danger to anyone.

I have thought about him often over the years, because his case raises a question much bigger than spiders.

Did his fear make spiders dangerous? Of course not. His terror was completely genuine as an experience, but wildly out of proportion as an estimate of risk. It told me a great deal about him: what he had learned, what had happened to him, the associations his nervous system had quietly built over a lifetime. It........

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