What Teaching Others Does to Your Own Skill

Explain It and You'll Finally Understand It

You've done the skill a thousand times.

Then a student asks how you do it, and you open your mouth, and nothing useful comes out. "You just... kind of... feel it."

That gap between doing and explaining is bigger than most performers realise. And closing it is one of the fastest ways to deepen your own ability.

Teaching forces you to break a skill into its actual mechanics. Where the weight is. When the pull happens. What the eyes do. Things your body figured out years ago without informing your conscious mind. To explain them, you have to go back and study your own movement, and almost every performer finds gaps when they do. Timing you got away with. Positions that work despite your technique, not because of it.

That's why coaches so often improve while teaching. Every correction you give someone else is a question you're forced to answer about your own foundation.

You don't need a formal coaching job to get this benefit. Spotting a friend, coaching a warm-up, helping a junior artist with a skill you take for granted. It all does the same work.

💡 Your challenge this week:
Take one skill you do automatically and explain it, out loud or in writing, step by step. Wherever you hear yourself getting vague, that's a part of the skill you don't fully understand yet. If there is a section you don't fully understand than this is where future mistakes could develop.

P.S. Teaching acrobatics for years taught me to understand the body's mechanics in depth and to see the fundamental elements inside every skill. Eventually that meant I could break down new skills without needing a coach. I could create my own drills, techniques and progressions.