Coaching practices for I Tried to Walk Someone Newer Through How I'd Handle This and Kept Hitting Questions I Couldn't Answer Cleanly and it Dawned on Me That the Spots Where I Go Vague Explaining it Are Exactly the Spots Where My Own Grasp is Thinner Than I'd Assumed
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For I Tried to Walk Someone Newer Through How I'd Handle This and Kept Hitting Questions I Couldn't Answer Cleanly and it Dawned on Me That the Spots Where I Go Vague Explaining it Are Exactly the Spots Where My Own Grasp is Thinner Than I'd Assumed, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- 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 tried to walk someone newer through how I’d handle this and kept hitting questions I couldn’t answer cleanly
- When I try to explain this to someone who knows nothing about it and they keep asking "but why does that happen?" at exactly the spots I’d normally skate over, I get stuck and exposed
- I keep trying to imagine how this lands for a total beginner, but I can’t actually un-know what I know
- I have this vague nagging sense that I should "study the whole thing more," but it’s so unfocused I never actually do it
Practices that may help
- 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 - Teach cases to solidify and test your own patterns
Explaining your recognition logic to others forces the implicit to become explicit and exposes gaps.
Recognition-Primed Decision Making - Third-party explanation test
Explain the concept to a person who knows nothing about it and let their questions expose your gaps.
Illusion of Explanatory Depth: You Know Less Than You Think - 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 - Knowledge-boundary identification
Map the exact point where your understanding runs out rather than treating it as a vague area of weakness.
Illusion of Explanatory Depth: You Know Less Than You Think - Push the "why" until you hit what you don’t know
Keep asking why of your own answer until you reach a gap, then go fill it.
Elaborative Interrogation: Ask "Why Is This True?" - Teach it to a real person
Explain the concept to an actual listener who can ask questions back.
The Feynman Technique, Step by Step - Ask what the audience already knows before explaining
Probe prior knowledge explicitly rather than assuming it.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Write the explanation, do not just think it
Put the "why" in writing so vague mental hand-waving cannot pass as understanding.
Elaborative Interrogation: Ask "Why Is This True?" - Apply the explanation test to gauge real understanding
If you can’t explain something simply without notes, you probably don’t understand it as well as you think.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, Understood Clearly
Related concerns
- When Illusion Of Explanatory Depth Third Party Explanation Test
Explain the concept to a person who knows nothing about it and let their questions expose your gaps.
Third-party explanation test
- When The Feynman Technique Teach Someone Real
Explain the concept to an actual listener who can ask questions back.
Teach it to a real person
- Feynman Style Explaining
The Feynman Technique is a four-step loop: pick a concept, explain it in plain language as if teaching a beginner, notice exactly where the explanation breaks down, and go back to fill those gaps. It works because explaining forces you to generate and retrieve the material, which exposes the difference between recognizing an idea and actually understanding it.
- Finding Knowledge Gaps
Map the exact point where your understanding runs out rather than treating it as a vague area of weakness.
Knowledge-boundary identification
- Illusion Of Explanatory Depth You Know Less Than You Think When Starting Out
The illusion of explanatory depth (IOED), documented by Rozenblit and Keil, is the systematic overestimation of how deeply you understand everyday mechanisms — devices, policies, biological processes. Most people believe they can explain how a toilet or a zipper works until asked to actually explain it, at which point their understanding collapses. The illusion is broken by requiring explanation at the mechanistic level rather than the narrative level.
- Teaching Reveals Gaps
The moments you fumbled while teaching are exactly what to go back and learn.
Use what you couldn’t teach as your study list
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