64. Is Your Leadership Lid Limiting Your Calling? 3 Ways Christian Physicians Can Grow Their Impact

Is Your Leadership Lid Limiting Your Calling? 

What if the biggest obstacle to the impact God has called you to make isn't your circumstances, but your current level of leadership?

As physicians, we spend years developing our clinical expertise, but very little time developing our leadership. Yet if God has given you a bigger vision, He will often grow your capacity before He expands your influence.

In this episode, I explore The Law of the Lid—a leadership principle that has shaped my own journey for more than a decade. We talk about why leadership is a learnable skill, common leadership blind spots physicians face, and practical ways to grow your influence so you can better steward the calling God has placed on your life.

You'll learn:

• Why your leadership sets the ceiling for your impact
• Common leadership lids that keep physicians stuck
• Why growth requires intentional investment
• Questions to help identify the leadership lid God may be asking you to raise in this season

If you're ready to grow as both a physician and a Kingdom leader, this episode is for you.

I'd love to hear from you—what leadership lid is God asking you to raise in this season?

Join the Heal the Healers Facebook Community to continue the conversation, and if you'd like to grow alongside other Christian healthcare professionals, learn more about the Heal the Healers Physician & Healthcare Conference this October in Boston:
https://healthehealersconference.com/boston2026

Early Bird registration closes 7/31/26

Are you a Christian physician or healthcare professional longing for a deeper walk with God and a supportive community that truly gets it?

📍 Mark your calendar: October 30–31, Boston, MA
The Heal the Healers Physician & Healthcare Conference on Healing & Miracles

This is more than a conference—it’s a space to encounter God, be restored, and be equipped to live out your calling in medicine.

This event is for physicians and healthcare professionals!

Registration is NOW open. Sign up today. https://healthehealersconference.com/boston2026

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Transcript

0:00

What if the biggest obstacle to the impact God has called you to make is not your institution, your circumstances, or even lack of opportunity? What if the thing limiting your influence right now is your current level of leadership? Today, we're talking about the law of the lid, how to recognize where your leadership might be limiting your calling and what you could begin to do to raise that lid Well, welcome back to The Christian Physician Podcast. I'm your host, Inga Hoffmann, and excited to be with you today to talk about leadership. Leadership is really one of those topics I'm super passionate about, and actually the first topic that got me into personal development, leadership training, being a speaker and a coach and a mentor to many because I wanted to learn more about leadership. So super pumped up about this episode, but before we get into it, I wanna make sure you know that I have a free Facebook group. It's called the Heal the Healers Facebook Community for Christian Physicians, and it's basically a place where you can continue conversations like this one, encourage one another, and explore what it looks like to integrate faith and medicine, leadership, and all these different aspects into your work in medicine. You can find the link to the Facebook group in the show notes. So join us there to continue the conversation even questions about this podcast. So let's dive in and talk about leadership lids. As I mentioned, I'm super excited about leadership and passionate about this topic for over a decade. And the reason why is when I was a junior attending, just fresh out of fellowship, and then when I had children, I very quickly realized that I needed to shift how I did things in order to no longer be drowning. You might know how it feels to be a physician with young children who's trying to progress in their career. At the time, I was at Boston Children's Hospital in the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, so I was in a high-powered environment. I loved that training environment, but let's be real, it's intense. And once I had children, everything shifted, and I realized I needed to lead myself better in order to actually get my head above water because I was drowning. And I was seeking mentorship from other women in medicine in similar shoes that had gone ahead of me. But you know what they said to me when I asked? They said, "Inge, I haven't really figured it out either how to be a mom and a successful academic physician. So if you ever find out, please come back and tell me." And that was really surprising to me because they looked like they had it all figured out, and they certainly were very successful at the time and even now and I honor and adore them. But I was a bit discouraged leaving those meetings because I was hoping for the magic kind of pill the magic solution, the wonderful one thing that I could do to make everything better. And the truth is, that's just not how life works. Personal growth and development requires intentionality, and it requires leadership skills. And that's really the very short version how I got into leadership. I eventually joined the John Maxwell team as a certified speaker, coach, and trainer, which I have been now for a decade, and coaching others in this space for pretty much a decade. And I learned so much, and I wanna share some of those lessons here because leadership principles are critical Perhaps you have had seasons when you have a big vision or maybe you have an assignment you feel like you have from the Lord, and it seems so much larger what you're currently able to carry. And I totally get that. I'm in that position right now, planning for the Heal the Healers conference. That's much larger, the vision, than what I have ever done. So I need to raise my leadership lid and have grown into these things in order to accomplish and carry out what the Lord asked me to do. Medicine can convince us that because we are so highly educated and have trained so long that we are already equipped to lead. And to be honest, that is just not true. And you might have noticed that even in your jobs, in your careers, I don't know whether you're working in a private practice or in academic centers clinical expertise and academic achievement do not automatically produce leadership capacity. Usually we get to leadership roles, at least in the academic world, largely and historically by scholarly activity and credibility rather than leadership skills and capacity. And that was actually a key point when I got drawn into leadership that I wanted to change for myself. I was like, "No, I want to learn from the best leaders and leadership developers in the world to become a better leader," and I did exactly that. That is a key point. You can invest and be very intentional in leadership training. Oftentimes we think leaders are born, and there is not much else to it. And yes, leaders are born but leadership can be learned. It is a skill, like many other skills you have learned along your medical training. So you have to intentionally invest in leadership training, such as maybe books or courses or mentors, perhaps coaching, because you realize you cannot simply grow on your own, and that is certainly my experience over the last decade and more. You have to continue to grow yourself if you're gonna go further, because let's be real, what got you here won't get you there to your future vision and goals. I love what John Maxwell always taught, and he probably still says that quote today which is this: "Everything worthwhile is uphill all the way." You just don't get anywhere other than by being intentional, and it's an uphill climb. You're not cruising anywhere intentionally to a higher level. That's just not possible. Usually, when we're cruising, more or less things are eventually gonna go downhill. So We all love the idea of, I wanna have greater impact. I wanna have influence. I wanna have leadership opportunities. I hear that all the time with my coaching clients. Everybody is like, "I wanna have more leadership opportunities," especially when they're early or mid-career, and I totally get that. I was the same way. But we don't always love the uphill process of becoming the person capable of stewarding that leadership, of pouring ourselves into it and being intentional in actually acquiring these skills. Because you just don't get a title for a leader that gets you in the room. The title gets you in the room, but you have to have the skills and the leadership development, and that takes real deep personal work. I wanna underscore that. Personal work on yourself to actually steward leadership capacity and develop more leadership capacity. So let me give you three points how you can raise your leadership lid, meaning your leadership capacity. So the first point is your leadership ability places a lid on your impact. Now, you might wonder, "Inger, you keep on mentioning this leadership lid. What does that actually mean?" This is straight from what I learned from John Maxwell, and this is one of the irrefutable laws of leadership that he has in his leadership classic book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. I highly encourage you to read that book at some point. But the law of the lid means this: Your influence and your effectiveness rarely rises above your ability to lead. That means we all have ceilings. We all have a lid. It's like a lid on a pot. You cannot push past that lid, past that ceiling, without basically growing and lifting that lid higher. But let's say you have a level five of leadership out of 10. You cannot go push past a five in your goals, in your impact, in your influence, in your legacy if you stay a level five leader. You have to grow beyond that in order to have a greater impact, and that is really important for us Christian physicians who actually want to make an impact, who have an assignment, who want to see that come to pass. We have to actually do part of that work. It's not just gonna fly down in the glory cloud in, in-- at our feet. No, there's a part we have to play. That means you have devel-developed yourself, and the Bible's actually full of that. In churchy language, we call that spiritual growth, and leadership is part of that. The Bible is full of leadership principles. So you have to raise your leadership lid in order to raise your leadership capacity and make a greater impact. So you might have a strong calling, you might have excellent ideas or tremendous clinical expertise, but you might still struggle to bring people with you on the journey. That has to do with your leadership. A leadership lid does not mean you're failing. That just means there is more room to grow. I don't want you to be discouraged when you hear this, and you're feeling like, "Oh yeah, I do have some limitations here." No, that means it's an invitation from God to grow So here are some examples of common leadership lits we have as physicians, just because we don't usually get formal training on it. It's gotten a little bit better over the years, but let me tell you, when I trained as a leadership coach and as a physician coach over a decade ago, I had to go outside the hospital walls to acquire all the expertise and skills that I have acquired over a decade. Actually, probably by now fifteen years I have been mulling in this. And here's the thing there are a few things we really can all grow in. For example, difficulty communicating a clear vision. I still see this all the time amongst leaders. They have great ideas, but they have a hard time communicating that vision and then implementing it with their teams. It might be avoiding difficult conversations or communication skills. That is something you can learn. Perhaps you're trying to do everything yourself, right? That's a perfect example of us physicians. We're trying to do everything ourselves because you know the saying, better do it myself if I wanna get it done right. But that is actually putting a limitation on you. And how do I know? Because that's definitely been me so many times over the years. Struggling to delegate. Perhaps you're having trouble with indecision or overthinking. Super common for us too, because we are very detailed-focused people in general, and we like to carefully think about things, which is really important for patient safety and for good outcomes, but it's not very helpful in our personal life to overthink everything. Perhaps you're a person who needs approval before acting, looking for approval from others. That can have many different reasons. We won't go into it in this episode, but just to say these are leadership lits. Or perhaps you're just struggling to prioritize what matters most. We talked a little bit about prioritization in the last couple episodes So sometimes we keep praying for a bigger opportunity while the Lord is actually trying to develop the capacity that we will need to carry that opportunity. So if you feel like a little squished, a little stretched, a, a little challenged, don't always think it's the devil trying to get you. Maybe the Lord is trying to stretch you. And if you need help with that, reach out. And if we look at Jesus the ministry of Jesus and the disciples, the same principle is true. We know from Jesus when he was young, right? He grew in wisdom and stature, in favor with God and man. That's in Luke 2. But we also know from the disciples that they had a growing journey. Just read the Gospels. That throughout and how Peter developed over his course of a disciple in the Gospels, and then later writing letters and reading about Peter in Acts. He became a leader, but not overnight So even Jesus experienced this growth process and the disciples. When we grow, it's not evidence that something is wrong with us. It's actually evidence that we're still fully alive, and we're still stretching, and we're still improving, and that's wonderful And I also wanna say this, that spiritual maturity does not eliminate the need for growth and wisdom, relationships, skill, and leadership. So they often go hand in hand. Spiritual maturity, if applied rightly and you're in the Word and in the Bible, should lead to actually increase in wisdom, knowledge, improve of relationships, and even leadership skills, but you have to be intentional about those things. So point number one, you have to raise your leadership lid because leadership ability places a lid on your impact. Point number two, your will not rise accidentally. I said this in the beginning. Everything worthwhile is uphill all the way. Uphill means you put-- have to put energy in it. It doesn't just happen. That means time and experience alone do not guarantee growth. Because here's the thing, you can repeat the same thing over and over again, and 10 years later, find yourself in the same spot without becoming a better leader What raising your leadership really requires is reflection, feedback, practice, intentional investment in your personal growth. That will take time and money. So let me give you an example. I see this in my coaching practice all the time. People reach out to me, they're interested in coaching. It's maybe a physician who is in academic medicine who's been struggling with the e- early mid-career juggling basically their research, their clinical time, their family, and it is a challenge. Let me be real. There is not a magic pill to fix all that, but you can learn a lot. And in my coaching practice, I see that a lot when we work on leadership identity, performance habits, and changing your mindset through mastering your mind, these three key pillars that I work with people on, in essence, to actually really improve your care- career trajectory and get out of that overwhelmed cycle of stuck. And I have many people that come to me, they are like, I really wanna do this." And they have the need. They are suffering. They are in the pain point. Their career is literally in jeopardy, meaning, "If I don't get this grant, I think I'm gonna get booted out and have to find a new job and have to do clinical work, and I'm passionate about research," for example. And sometimes people are not willing to make that investment, and they say I'd rather not spend..." They don't say that out loud, but they basically typically ghost me and never really be in touch again. They had a real need. They were desperate. They were really struggling, but they weren't willing to invest the time and effort needed in order to get to the next level. And that often... That's so heartbreaking to me because The decision to say, I'm rather not investing like a four-figure investment in myself and figure it out myself, and I probably can figure it out because, hey, I'm smart," and totally true. But a lot of times I find these people, sadly, three, four years later, still in the same spot. Sometimes left their position, either forced to leave or they just couldn't make it work anymore, and they caved and they found another solution in industry or something. And it really makes me sad because incredible talented people, this happens often with physician moms, but even with guys, I see this actually with male physicians as well, leave what really was an excellent career path because they weren't ready to invest in themselves. So I'm stressing this point because if you wanna raise your lid, it does not happen accidentally. So what can you do? Sure, you can read books. You can go to classes. You can take courses online. It is so easy to gain a lot of information right now, and that's very valuable. You can have mentors through your job, for example, but if you want some spiritual growth, you need also spiritual mentors. You might want to hire a coach, which is different from a mentor. And we go into that another time. They both have their roles. You need people with honest feedback. Sometimes it's just a good friend, but usually, let's be honest, friends are rarely honest and upfront to the degree you n-you need it. Often we as friends tend to temper things a little bit down. Maybe you need to practice a new skill to raise your leadership rate. And then of course, get yourself in a room with people who are ahead of you and who are also eager to grow. Like the saying goes if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room, and that is very true. You need to get in a room where people stretch you. And I do that all the time. I'm like, "I need to be around those people," 'cause they not only inspire me, they spark something in me that pushes me to the next level, right? The Bible says, "Iron sharpens iron." It doesn't come from our own isolated self. We have to be in a community of others who challenge us in our thinking, whether it's in academia, whether it's in our professional ways, whether it's in leadership or spiritual growth. So information can show us what to do, but a lot of times what is missing is another person to help us see what we cannot see about ourselves. They're called blind spots for a reason, because you cannot see them, and you need another person who holds a mirror in front of you to actually show you what's going on. That's exactly what a coach does. But as I mentioned, it requires time, it requires financial investments. And I would just challenge you, like the example I gave earlier about people that often are just not willing to do that or scared to do that. I totally get that. I was the same way. But let's be real. We invested a lot in our medical knowledge and sometimes resist investing in our own leadership, spiritual growth or personal development. For you, it would be very normal to go to a conference of your specialty and say, "I need to keep up with all that knowledge." But we resist doing that for our own personal growth, for leadership and for sure in spiritual matters. And then we wonder why we're actually not growing. It doesn't fall from the sky. So the question is not simple, what does it cost? But what is staying at my current level actually costing me and the people that I'm supposed to impact? And I know these are sometimes hard decisions, but I have to tell you personally, every time I made that decision to invest in myself, whether it's financially or in time it was always richly rewarded, and I have not regretted any of those decisions, and I've done this. This is my default practice over the last oh, ten plus years. And that's not always easy. But I also know that I wouldn't have been and done some of the things without those sacrifices of investing in myself. Point number three, the last point is identify the lid God is asking you to raise now. There might be many things going on in your life, and I don't know w- what's going on with you right now. But there are probably areas as you have been listening where you're like, "Yeah, I'm struggling over here. I'm a bit stuck." And I'm just inviting you to invite the Lord in this journey and ask yourself and even in prayer, Where do I get stuck repeatedly? Wh-where have I been in a loop that I feel like I'm over and over in the same position feeling I'm stuck?" That maybe is an area where some growth is needed to get out of that. Perhaps there's feedback you have received more than once from people. It doesn't mean necessarily negative, but where you're like, "Oh, this keeps on coming up. I should probably pay attention to that." Or perhaps there is an area of leadership that totally drains you. That is also something to look at. If it's draining or maybe intimidating you, that's maybe an area of growth or ask yourself, what opportunity am I asking God for that may require more capacity? There might be things that you're dreaming and hoping about, something that is just a vision in your heart and a dream that you're like, "I so want to do this, but I don't know how and where to even begin." And part of it might be a capacity issue. Part of it, you might be just needing like a mentor or coach to help you walk through the process and figuring these steps out and put them into action. That is actually also leadership, because again, you need to learn, how do I get that vision and dream in my heart and make it reality? And then where am I blaming circumstances when I may need to grow? And let's be real, that's a hard one to look at. But that's probably a huge area where I have kept on growing over the years, where I used to blame my circumstances and needing to realize, no, I cannot blame my circumstances. It's not the institution or my boss, even there's challenges. It is I that has to grow. Because you already know the institution doesn't love you back, so it is your responsibility to grow into the person to make it work or grow into the person to say, "I'm gonna find something else." Different topic. So practical application. Ask yourself this. Finish this sentence: The leadership lid I need to raise in this season is X. So think about what area, based on these reflective questions we just went through, where do you need to grow? And then pick one of those things and take action. Maybe you take a course, you read a book, maybe you find a mentor, maybe you'll find a coach or maybe you just practice a behavior on a weekly basis. And if you are like, "I need a coach in this area," feel free to reach out. You can email me at inga@ingahofmann.com. So your current lid is not a permanent ceiling. You can grow for sure, and you can become more effective, and you can better steward what God has placed in your hands and even the dreams and vision He has given you as you grow. But it does require intentionality. So I would love to hear what leadership lid are you working on? Join the Heal the Healers Facebook group and continue the conversation there and share with, "Hey, this is something I wanna work on." And we can even have a chat there and have a discussion to help you. So over the next few episodes, probably gonna talk a little bit more about some of the specific ways we can grow and how to raise your leadership lid. And one of those is you get in the right room with the right people I mentioned earlier. And this is actually also exactly the reason why the Heal the Healers Physician Conference is coming up. So in October 30, 31st, I will be hosting the Heal the Healers Physician and Healthcare Conference in Boston, Massachusetts on healing and miracles. And that's also a conference where we're not just gonna gather information, but it's creating space and room where Christian physicians and healthcare professionals from all sorts of fields and areas of healthcare can receive, they can grow, to connect, encounter the Lord together, have conversation. And you can learn more about the conference and to register at healthehealersconference.com/boston2026. The link is in the show notes. Early bird registration closes on July 31st, so make sure you register soon if you wanna take advantage of that early bird discount. With that, I say God bless you, have a wonderful day, and talk to you soon.