Sometimes the impact of leadership doesn’t show up for years.

Sometimes it takes 30.

A few weeks ago, I posted something on LinkedIn about why we should stop calling it role play and start calling it professional practice.

Someone I hadn’t spoken with in years commented.

He remembered being 24 years old, sitting in a group training session I was leading back in 1995.

At the time, I was a banker myself, leading branches and working directly with the people responsible for building customer relationships. Developing their conversational skills wasn’t some theoretical exercise. It was part of helping our teams become better bankers.

We practiced conversations, recorded them, played them back, and provided immediate feedback in front of the group.

He described it as one of the most embarrassing and humiliating experiences of his early career.

When I first started reading his comment, LinkedIn had cut it off. All I could see was how uncomfortable and humiliating the experience had been.

I remember thinking, Oh boy, where is this going?

Then I clicked See more.

And there it was.

The word “but.”

He went on to explain how that experience helped him learn to connect with people, recognize nonverbal cues, overcome his fear of rejection, and turn conversations into meaningful opportunities.

Those skills had stayed with him throughout his career and even influenced his personal life.

His comment led to a few exchanged messages and eventually a phone call.

Today, he’s a highly successful commercial banker who advises leadership teams across middle-market and mid-corporate businesses. He’s also passing along what he’s learned by coaching and mentoring others.

During our conversation, he kept thanking me.

At one point, he told me he felt indebted to me.

I told him, “I just gave you the hammer and the nails. You built that career.”

He didn’t hesitate.

“Yeah, but without the hammer and the nails, it doesn’t stick together.”

That one got me.

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the privilege of working with thousands of bankers, helping them develop their skills, build confidence, and become better at what they do.

You hope you’ve made a positive difference in their careers and maybe even their lives. But you don’t often get the opportunity to find out just how much.

This time, I did.

And it reminded me of something I’ve believed throughout my career.

Growth isn’t always comfortable.

He described that experience in 1995 as humiliating. That’s how he felt at the time, and I don’t want to dismiss that.

But what struck me was how differently he viewed that same experience 30 years later.

Think about how much time organizations spend developing training programs, introducing new skills, and teaching people what to say.

Yet when it comes time to practice those skills, particularly in front of others, we often hesitate.

We don’t want people to feel awkward. We don’t want to embarrass anyone. We want training to be a positive experience.

And it should be.

But there’s a difference between creating a safe environment for learning and eliminating the discomfort that comes with developing a new skill.

Good coaching should never be about humiliating people. It should give them the opportunity to practice, make mistakes, receive honest feedback, and improve.

And sometimes that process is uncomfortable.

The banker I spoke with didn’t build his career because of one training session in 1995.

He built it through years of applying what he learned, practicing his craft, and continuing to develop.

But that early experience gave him some tools he still uses today.

And now he’s passing those tools along to others.

That’s the part of leadership we don’t always get to see. The difference we make in someone’s life, sometimes long after we’ve forgotten the moment that made it.

Thirty years later, I got a reminder.

And I can’t tell you how much that meant to me.