September 19, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 3 min read · Radio & Broadcasting
One particular listener call, years into doing radio, permanently changed how I explain technical things — on air, with clients, basically everywhere since. It wasn't a dramatic, headline-worthy moment. It was a single, slightly frustrated, completely fair question that exposed a real, ongoing blind spot in how I'd been communicating without ever quite realising it.
What Actually Happened
I'd been explaining a fairly common tech problem, using language that felt completely plain and ordinary to me, having worked with this material constantly for years at that point. A caller, politely but with real, evident frustration, said something close to: "I have no idea what any of those words actually mean, and I don't think I'm the only one listening right now who feels that way."
Why That Specific Comment Landed So Hard
I'd genuinely believed I was already explaining things in plain, accessible language, because the words felt completely ordinary and unremarkable to me personally. That caller's comment made it obvious, immediately and uncomfortably, that "ordinary to me, after years of constant immersion" and "genuinely ordinary and accessible to someone who doesn't work with this material daily" are two completely different, easily confused things.
What I Actually Changed Afterwards
I started deliberately testing my own explanations against a specific, real mental image of someone with genuinely zero technical background — not a hypothetical, idealised "beginner," but someone real and specific, like a particular relative who I knew, concretely, would not follow industry-standard jargon at all, no matter how casually and naturally I delivered it.
The Specific Technique That Actually Helped Most
Replacing every piece of jargon with a genuine, concrete analogy to something completely ordinary and familiar, rather than just a simpler-sounding technical synonym that was, underneath, still essentially jargon wearing a thin, simpler-sounding disguise. "The bit of software that tells your phone how to even start up" instead of "the bootloader." Small change in approach. Genuinely large, measurable difference in how many people actually followed along afterwards.
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds in Practice
The better and more fluent you get at any specialised subject, the harder it genuinely becomes to remember, accurately and viscerally, what it actually felt like not to understand the basics in the first place. Expertise quietly erases your own memory of confusion, which is precisely why an outside, less expert perspective — like that one listener's blunt, honest comment — is so genuinely valuable and hard to fully replace from the inside alone.
Where This Shows Up Constantly in Client Work
I catch myself, even now, occasionally sliding back into jargon with a client who's clearly not following along, and that single old radio memory is what reliably snaps me back to actually checking, explicitly, "does this analogy genuinely make sense to you, or should I try explaining it differently instead," rather than assuming my own explanation was already sufficiently clear just because it felt that way to me.
What I'd Tell Anyone Who Regularly Explains Technical Things to Non-Experts
Find your own equivalent of that listener call before someone has to hand it to you directly and a little uncomfortably. Ask a genuinely non-expert person you trust whether your explanations actually land clearly, and take their honest answer seriously rather than defensively, even when it's mildly humbling to hear. The gap between "I believe I'm explaining this clearly" and "this is actually landing clearly for the person listening" is real, it's common, and it's almost always considerably bigger than the explainer themselves assumes.