Episode 238 - Remember What It Was Like to Be a Beginner
Summary
The better we become at something, the harder it can be to remember what it was like not to know. New research shows that experts give more useful and actionable advice when they reconnect with their own experience as beginners. This episode explores a simple way leaders can become better coaches and teachers.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to episode 238 of the Leadership Today podcast, where each week we share practical tips to improve your leadership. This week we look at a challenge that comes with becoming more experienced: the better we become at something, the harder it can be to explain it to someone who's just starting out.
Think about something you've done hundreds or perhaps thousands of times. It might be running a meeting, preparing a report, handling a difficult customer, using a particular system or having a performance conversation. After enough practice, many of the steps become almost automatic. You don't consciously think about everything you're doing because you've built up knowledge and patterns that allow you to work quickly.
That's usually a good thing, but it creates a challenge when someone less experienced asks us for advice. We can forget what it was like not to know what we now know.
A new study published in the Academy of Management Journal explores this problem. The research looked at what happens when experts reconnect with what they call a beginner's mind. Rather than simply remembering an event from the past, people were encouraged to mentally revisit what it actually felt like to be a novice in that particular area.
Across studies involving managers and musicians, taking on a beginner’s mind made a difference to the advice experts provided. When experienced people reconnected with their former beginner state, their advice became more concrete. And importantly, the novices receiving that advice rated it as more useful and were more willing to act on it.
It helps explain something we see constantly at work. An experienced leader might tell a new supervisor, "You just need to have a clear conversation and hold them accountable." That sounds perfectly sensible to someone who has handled dozens of performance conversations. But the new leader may still be wondering: How do I actually start the conversation? What words do I use? What happens if they become defensive? What should I prepare beforehand?
Expertise compresses all of those little steps. Once something feels obvious to us, we stop mentioning the things that no longer require conscious thought.
That's why telling someone to "communicate more effectively", "delegate properly" or "think strategically" often isn't particularly helpful. The advice describes the destination without helping the person with the journey.
There are three practical ways leaders can use this research.
First, before giving advice, briefly remember your own first attempt. Think back to when you genuinely didn't know what to do. What were you worried about? What confused you? What did you misunderstand? What would you have wanted someone to tell you at that point? That mental exercise may help you notice assumptions that your expertise now hides from you.
Second, make your advice behavioural. Instead of saying, "You need to delegate more", describe what the person could actually do. You might say, "Choose one task this week, explain the outcome you're looking for, ask the person how they would approach it, agree when you'll check in, and resist taking the task back unless there's a genuine risk." Concrete advice is easier to act on.
Third, check what the other person already knows. Before launching into an explanation, ask, "What have you tried so far?" or "Talk me through how you'd approach it." That helps you pitch your advice at the right level and also encourages the other person to think rather than simply waiting for your answer.
Expertise doesn't automatically make us good teachers or coaches. In fact, expertise can sometimes get in the way because it makes the difficult look obvious. Great leaders benefit from traveling back to their own beginning so they can help someone else move forward.
Reference
Zhang, T. (2026). Back to the beginning: Rediscovering a beginner's mind enhances advice provision to novices. Academy of Management Journal. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2023.0816.
Leadership Today On-Demand Special Offer
We have a great deal for podcast listeners on our Leadership Today On-Demand subscription. Just go to www.leadershiptoday.com and checkout using the promo code PODCAST for 25% off an annual subscription.
Leadership Today On-Demand is a video subscription service that allows you to work on your leadership in your own time and at your own pace. It is available online and through our Apple iOS and Android apps for phones and tablets. Our mission is to help you to become an even better leader.
Your subscription brings together all of our video content in one place including:
- Five online courses with workbooks
- Five five day challenges with workbooks
- Nineteen recorded webinars
- A searchable library of 170+ "how to" quick videos on a range of leadership challenges
That's over $4,500 of content for less than the price of a single online course. And there are more videos added each week.
Get Connected
Find out ways to get connected here: https://leadership.today/connect