Coaching practices for How to Avoid Jargon

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Avoid Jargon, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I sprinkle in terms that are just second nature to me without even hearing them as specialist words anymore
• I keep piling caveats and qualifiers onto what I’m trying to say, and the more I add the more people misread me
• When I’m explaining something and hit a spot where I get vague or hand-wave past it, my instinct is to tell myself it’s just a wording problem and keep going
• I keep trying to imagine how this lands for a total beginner, but I can’t actually un-know what I know
• Every time I try to boil this down to something a beginner could follow, I either keep it accurate but tangled or make it clean by quietly leaving out the part that makes it true

Practices that may help

1. Run a jargon audit on every key explanation
   Go word by word through your explanation and mark every term a newcomer would not know.
   The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach
2. Apply parsimony to your own communication
   Use the fewest words and concepts that carry the full meaning — not as brevity, but as clarity.
   Occam’s Razor: Prefer the Simpler Explanation
3. Pinpoint where the explanation breaks
   Treat every stumble, hand-wave, or jargon-grab as a flag for a real gap.
   The Feynman Technique, Step by Step
4. Find a genuine novice to test your explanation on
   Before the real audience, explain to someone who actually doesn’t know.
   The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach
5. Simplify the idea without breaking it
   Find the plainest accurate version — simplifying that keeps the truth is the real test.
   The Protege Effect: Learn It Better by Teaching It
6. Deliberately slow down at conceptual transitions
   Pause, name the transition, and check understanding before moving to the next idea.
   The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach
7. Track recurring domains where you consistently avoid the unfamiliar
   Spot where unfamiliarity — not actual risk — is driving your avoidance, by logging avoidance decisions over time.
   Ambiguity Aversion — Why Unknown Odds Feel Worse Than Bad Odds
8. Explain it to a complete beginner
   Teach the concept in plain words to someone who knows nothing about it.
   The Feynman Technique, Step by Step
9. Build a bridging analogy from what they know to what they don’t
   Map the new concept onto a structure the audience already understands.
   The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach
10. Open with a concrete story, not with your framework
    Lead with a specific, sensory narrative before introducing any abstraction.
    The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach

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