Adults are vulnerable to personal and professional embarrassment from poor performance in the training program. Poor performance in the classroom may become the basis for personnel decisions by supervisors or the source of ridicule by peers. Economic benefits or promotion may be associated with the training program, creating a feeling of pressure to succeed. The way you handle these fears will largely determine the effectiveness and usefulness of your training program. To fail to recognize that adults have legitimate fears, or to treat them as children, is to guarantee failure.

Because adults tend to be more critical than children and are used to having more control of their environments than children, it is particularly important to provide learning environments that are comfortable both physically and psychologically. Each adult has a unique expectation of the course. Trainers must allow students to clarify and articulate these expectations before getting into the content. New knowledge and information must be integrated with adults