Before You Develop Others, Develop Yourself

There's a particular kind of coordinator or assistant director who becomes, almost by accident, the most generous mentor in their entire department, the one every student staff member wants supervising them, the one whose one-on-ones somehow always run long because the conversation kept being worth having. Colleagues describe this person as a natural leader, someone who simply has a gift for developing people. And yet, follow that same person through their own calendar for a semester, and a different pattern usually emerges: they haven't attended a professional development session in over a year, haven't had a real mentor of their own since graduate school, and would struggle to name the last time anyone invested in their growth the way they invest in everyone else's, every single day, without seeming to notice the imbalance at all.

This pattern is common enough in collegiate recreation to be almost the default. It deserves more scrutiny than it typically gets, because it rests on an assumption that sounds noble but doesn't actually hold up: that a leader's job is to pour into others, and that pouring into oneself is either a lower priority or, worse, a faintly selfish diversion from the real work. The truth underneath that assumption is more mechanical than moral. A leader who is not actively developing their own capacity is running on a finite, depleting reserve, and depleting reserves eventually run out, regardless of how good someone's intentions are or how much they genuinely care about the people they're developing.

You Cannot Coach From an Empty Toolkit

Every skill a great mentor uses with their staff, like active listening, the ability to notice when someone's struggling before they say so, the capacity to give hard feedback without damaging the relationship, the patience to let someone fail safely and learn from it, had to be developed somewhere. Nobody arrives at these abilities fully formed. They're built the same way any skill is built: through deliberate practice, through feedback from someone more experienced, through genuine reflection on what worked and what didn't. A fitness director who stopped actively developing their own capacity the moment they reached a leadership position isn't drawing on an infinite well of interpersonal skill. They're running on whatever toolkit they happened to have built by that point, applying the same techniques indefinitely, with diminishing returns as the specific challenges they face inevitably evolve past what that toolkit was built to handle.

This becomes especially visible during genuinely difficult moments: a serious conflict between staff members, a crisis involving a student's wellbeing, a budget cut that forces impossible trade-offs. These are exactly the moments when a leader's own capacity gets tested most severely, and exactly the moments when a leader who has neglected their own development for years discovers the limits of what they actually know how to do. The instinct in these moments is often to push through on willpower and good intentions alone, because there's rarely time to pause and develop a new skill in the middle of an active crisis. But the leaders who navigate these moments well are almost always the ones who invested in building the relevant capacity well before the crisis arrived, not the ones improvising entirely from instinct in real time.

The Cost of Skipping Your Own Growth Shows Up in Everyone Else First

There's a specific, easy-to-miss consequence of a leader neglecting their own development: it rarely shows up as an obvious personal failing first. It shows up, instead, as a slow ceiling on everyone the leader is trying to develop. A fitness coordinator whose own coaching skills stopped evolving five years ago can still be a genuinely caring, well-intentioned supervisor, but the specific techniques they're using to develop their staff are five years old, and the staff being coached with those techniques are absorbing whatever limitations those techniques carry, often without anyone involved fully realizing why certain patterns of miscommunication or stalled growth keep recurring.

This matters enormously in a field built around developing student staff into confident, capable professionals, because the quality of that development is directly bound by the quality of leadership doing the developing. A department genuinely serious about developing its student staff, its group fitness instructors, its personal trainers, has to take equally seriously the ongoing development of the supervisors doing that work, because a mentor's growth ceiling eventually becomes their mentees' growth ceiling too. Investing in a coordinator's or assistant director's continued development isn't a luxury layered on top of the department's real priority of developing students. It's a direct precondition for that priority actually being achieved at the level the department hopes for.

Self-Investment Isn't Selfish. It's Structural.

Part of what makes this pattern so persistent is a genuine, if misguided, sense of virtue attached to constant self-sacrifice. A fitness director who spends every available hour and ounce of energy on their staff and their students, with nothing left over for their own growth, often experiences that imbalance as evidence of their dedication, proof that they're putting the people they serve first. There's something genuinely admirable in that impulse, and it shouldn't be dismissed as simply misguided. But the framing that treats self-development as competing with, rather than enabling, the development of others gets the actual mechanics backward.

A leader who invests in their own growth isn't diverting resources away from their team. They're expanding the total resource available to give. A fitness coordinator who attends a genuinely challenging professional development experience, who finds a mentor of their own, who takes on a new certification or skill outside their comfort zone, returns to their team with expanded capacity, not depleted capacity, because the growth itself becomes new material to draw on in every subsequent coaching conversation, every difficult staff situation, every moment that calls for exactly the kind of skill that particular investment happened to build. The math here isn't zero-sum. Self-investment and investment in others aren't competing for the same finite pool of time and energy. Properly understood, one is the source that replenishes the other.

What This Actually Requires in Practice

Taking this seriously means treating a leader's own professional development with the same intentionality most departments already apply to their student staff's development: structured, budgeted, protected on the calendar, rather than treated as something to pursue only if time happens to remain after everyone else's needs are met, which in practice means it almost never happens at all. This might mean actively seeking out a mentor, someone further along in their own career willing to invest in this leader the way this leader invests in their own staff. It might mean genuinely engaging with professional communities and conferences, not as a box to check for continuing education credit, but as a real source of new skills and perspectives. It might mean something as simple as regularly protecting reflective time to process what's working and what isn't in their own leadership, rather than moving from crisis to crisis without ever pausing to metabolize the experience into genuine growth.

None of this requires abandoning the generosity that makes someone a genuinely good mentor to their own staff in the first place. It requires recognizing that generosity itself has a source, and that source needs tending just as deliberately as anything else a good leader tends. The fitness coordinators and fitness directors who sustain genuinely excellent mentorship over an entire career, rather than burning brightly for a few years before their own depleted capacity starts limiting everyone around them, are almost always the ones who understood early that developing others was never actually separate from developing themselves. It was the same project, running in both directions at once, and neglecting either half eventually starves the whole.