(Thoughts from my coaching toolkit.)
Most of us take advantage of our mentors when we're adding new competencies to our toolkit. But coaching is a very dangerous game for both the coach and the coachee. That's because both may think when you understand how to perform a new skill, you can really do it. The fact of the matter is that there's no necessary correlation between understanding a skill and being able to do it.
For example, I understand how to play the clarinet...how the fingering works...how you carve or individualize a reed for the mouthpiece, and how you clean out the "spit" from using it. But guess what? Hand me a clarinet and I'm completely at loss. Not quite. I can figure out how to take the mouthpiece off and run a dirty rag through the clarinet to clean out the spit. That's not going to take me very far. I couldn't play a simple scale and would be utterly clueless staring at the first page of the Mozart clarinet concerto. I know, but I can't do.
So, when I chunk a behavior and talk someone through it, I'm always ready for the response that she "understands." In school when someone says he understands, that's what the teacher wants. . . for that person to regurgitate back what the teacher said. And you can get an A in class, and an F at work. Understanding won't get anyone very far in business or life.
Let me be perfectly clear: there's no necessary correlation between knowing or understanding and being able to deliver on that promise. One of the biggest barriers to turning knowledge into action is the tendency to treat talking about something as equivalent to actually doing something about it.
Let's take this still further. Let's suppose that you can actually perform the skill. Have you learned it? Probably not. Learning a skill means that a behavior is actually embedded into your toolkit.
To embed: to enclose closely in, to introduce as an integral part. As in: "Dirt embeds under their fingernails. The great bulk of the tree embeds in the soft soil. The tales of his prowess have become embedded in folklore."
When a behavior is embedded in your toolkit, that means that you've used the behavior so much that you know what effects that behavior will have on other skills in your toolkit. Your work toolkit is best thought of as a system of interrelated tools. Drop in one new tool and over time, the others will change and adapt to that tool.
For example: over the years I've learned to use small talk (I'll blog about it sometime) that I understand that the skills of small talk are useful for questioning, for getting people to reveal their secrets, for challenging ideas and even for making a better presentation. (Uhhhhh...I clearly distinguish between small talk and gab, a distinction rarely clarified.) I've spent years refining the competency of small talk. Because of that, I can engage in a lot of talk-related skills that ostensibly have no relation to small talk.
When you learn one skill, it never stands alone. The experience of delivering on one skill successfully always impacts your ability to see, know and do other skills. That's why learning is best thought of as a spiralling and evolving experience, and definitely not a linear one.
Knowing how to do something means very little unless you can actually do it.