Years ago I trained a coach who was excellent on the floor. Clients loved him. His technique was clean, his sessions were full. By every measure I had, he was one of the best.
Then I asked him to lead two newer coaches. And he froze.
I remember being confused, then quietly annoyed, then honest with myself. I had taught him everything I knew about training a body. I had taught him almost nothing about growing a person. Not because I was hiding it. Because I didn't actually know how to hand it over. I only knew how to do it, slowly, on real things.
We Treat Growing People Like a Subject You Can Study
There's a quiet assumption most of us absorb without noticing: that leadership is content. Read the right books. Sit through the right course. Collect the certificate. Then you'll know how to develop the people under you.
I believed that for a long time. I bought the books. I underlined them. I built training levels on paper that looked complete and logical. I thought knowledge would transfer the way a manual transfers, that if I understood it clearly enough, I could simply pass it down.
It didn't work like that. The understanding stayed mine. The skill of actually growing another human being did not arrive in any chapter. I could explain it well and still watch it fail in the room. That gap between knowing and doing bothered me for years before I had words for it.
An Old Idea: You Get Polished on Real Things
There's a line I keep coming back to, from a Ming-dynasty thinker named Wang Yangming. In Chinese it's just four characters: 事上磨练. Roughly, you are polished on actual events, not in quiet contemplation. Knowing and doing aren't two separate steps. They're one thing, and the doing is where the knowing actually forms.
A person must be polished on the affairs of life. Only then can he stand firm.
When I stopped fighting that idea, three things got simpler for me:
1. Reading gives you the vocabulary, not the skill. Books gave me language for what I was feeling. They never once did the rep for me. Naming a thing and being able to do it are different distances apart than we like to admit.
2. The skill forms in the friction. The hard conversation. The wrong hire I held on to too long. The talented coach who froze. Every one of those was uncomfortable, and every one of them taught me something no calm afternoon of reading ever could.
3. You cannot shortcut the reps. Ability gets filed down one event at a time, like a blade on a stone. There's no version where you skip the slow part and arrive sharp. I wanted one for years. It doesn't exist.
What the Work Polished in Me
We co-founded Fitcom in Melaka in 2019, opened Seremban in 2024, and now run four studios across two cities. Most of what I know about developing people, I learned in the messy middle of those years, not before them.
Here's the clearest example. We once had six coach levels. A whole ladder, carefully designed, each rung with its own criteria. On paper it was beautiful. In practice it grew almost no one. The levels described progress. They didn't cause it. The real growth was happening in the in-between moments the ladder couldn't see: a coach handling their first difficult client, a senior staying back to walk a junior through a session that went wrong.
So we cut six levels down to three. It felt like undoing my own hard work, and it was the right call. We put the weight back where it belonged: on real mentoring, in real time, on real events. Less structure to hide behind. More doing.
That was the turn. I stopped trying to teach growing people as a curriculum and started doing it in the open, one coach at a time, where they could see the whole messy process and not just the polished conclusion.
The Takeaway
Here's what I came to, after years of getting it wrong before I got it slightly less wrong.
The most important thing I do can't be downloaded. It gets built in me, and in the people I'm responsible for, only by standing inside real situations and being worn smooth by them. The book points. The work shapes.
So I've changed what I measure. Not how much I personally know. Not how clever the system on paper looks. Just one thing: how many people can lead well when I'm not in the room.
You don't read your way to growing people. You get polished doing it, one real thing at a time.