They say the most seductive words in the English language are, “I’d like your opinion about ….”

When you are an expert or a specialist tasked with teaching other people about what you know, the siren song of your own voice can be astonishingly seductive.

It’s nothing you intend, of course. You’re passionate about your topic. After all, you invested quite a bit of time and energy to learn what you have. And naturally you want to help people avoid many of the mistakes you made along the way.

So you explain as much as you can in the time you have, trying to squeeze as much helpful information into the session as the clock allows. But the more you try to help, the less they seem to learn. How maddening!

It turns out that when you are trying to train others, the most effective way to get your expertise out of your head is not via your mouth or even via your written words.

The most effective way to get your expertise out of your head is to create experiences for the people you are training.

For one thing, you probably don’t even recognize all the stuff you know. Many of the nuances have long since become so automatic that you’re no longer aware of them; you take them for granted as an obvious given.

Skeptical? Imagine yourself in the passenger seat trying to teach a complete novice how to drive. Could you really describe all the subtle things you do as a matter of course when you drive? When you press on the accelerator or the brake, how much pressure is too much or too little? How do you convey the “feel” of the best moment to hit the clutch and change gears?

That gap between what you know how to do and what you can actually explain is the difference between “procedural knowledge” and “declarative knowledge.”

So what is an expert or specialist to do? You can’t dump your experiences into someone else’s head.

But you can create targeted experiences for your learners. When you isolate a key concept to convey, you can pour the richness of your procedural knowledge into creating ways for your learners to practice it -- preferably ways that mimic the real world where they will be applying what you teach them.

In the case of your novice driver, you might find an empty parking lot or little-used country road where he or she can safely practice accelerating and braking without simultaneously worrying about turn signals and cross traffic and the hundreds of other details demanding a driver’s attention.

In a case of training new convenience-store managers, you can provide simplified scenarios that help them practice making key choices. Then gradually add more and more of the variables at play in the Real World. As an experienced convenience-store manager, you know these variables and their significance better than anyone. You know which details will create that certain “feel” you get when you are in a given situation and need to take action.

It’s not easy, of course, to stand back and let people practice -- making mistakes and correcting them with minimal intervention from you. You want to help! And they want you to help them. “I’d like your opinion about ….”

But in training, only a portion of what you know can get out of your head with words. Let your expertise out by creating targeted experiences, where much more of the richness of what you don’t realize you know can be absorbed by the people you train.