67. Want to Become a Better Leader? The #1 Leadership Principle Every Christian Physician Should Know

What if becoming a better leader has less to do with getting a title and more to do with how you lead yourself when no one is watching?

Leadership begins long before you lead a team, department, organization, or ministry. It begins with your everyday choices, habits, reactions, priorities, and willingness to follow through on what God has already asked you to do.

In this episode, we’re talking about self-leadership as a spiritual discipline and why self-control is more than a productivity skill. It’s a fruit of the Spirit.

We’ll talk about:

• Why you can be highly disciplined and still struggle with self-leadership
• How your reactions, boundaries, and follow-through affect your leadership
• The difference between self-control and simply trying harder
• How to recognize procrastination, avoidance, and misplaced priorities
• Why sometimes “waiting for more confirmation” is actually keeping us from obeying what God has already shown us

Here’s your challenge: Where is God asking you to lead yourself better in this season?

Take that question into your quiet time this week. Ask the Lord to show you one area where you already know what to do, but haven’t consistently followed through.

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Step 1: Join the Heal the Healers Facebook community for Christian physicians

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 Step 3: Join us at the Heal the Healers Physician & Healthcare Conference in Boston, October 30–31, 2026. Come get: Healed. Restored. Equipped.

Episode mentioned in this podcast

🎙️ Ep. 6: 6. Discerning Divine Timing: Are You Truly Trusting God, or Stuck in Procrastination?

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

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This event is for physicians and healthcare professionals!

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

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Transcript

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We often think leadership begins when somebody gives us a title, a team, or position of influence. But leadership actually begins much earlier. It begins when we are leading ourselves Today we're talking about the spiritual discipline of self-leadership and why leading yourself well may be the most important way you prepare to lead others. So stay tuned for after the music Hey, welcome back, dear physician colleagues and friends to another episode of this podcast. We're gonna continue in our series on leadership. We're on a little roll here, and I hope you have been enjoying these teachings and these lessons, giving you opportunity reflect on leadership and what it takes to be a good leader and the support even to help you become a better leader. Before we jump in, I want to invite you to the Heal the Healers Facebook community, which is also a support for you to become a better leader and to grow It's a growing community for Christian physicians who want to integrate faith and medicine, grow spiritually, and connect with others who understand the unique pressures of this calling. You can find the link in the show notes. I hope you join us there, and I am excited to welcome you. So today I want to continue our conversation on leadership, and we're gonna talk a little bit what it takes to lead well, which begins with us. What do I mean by that? Can we keep our commitments that we make? Can we regulate our reactions, protect what matters to us, follow through what God has already asked us to do, for example? We call that obedience in Christianese, right? These are all important leadership principles Over the years, I've coached many highly accomplished physicians who certainly know how to work hard. They've completed medical school, residency, fellowships, maybe do research many of my clients do, and years of demanding clinical work. You probably have been there. And usually discipline is not what is absent from their lives, right? We are all very disciplined to a certain degree, and we all know how to work hard. That's just ingrained in us. Yet even very disciplined people who work hard can struggle to lead themselves well in certain areas. That's certainly true for me. That is true a lot of times for my coaching clients, and that's why they usually come to me. We can avoid one important conversation perhaps, or repeatedly break promises to ourselves, or keep saying yes to everyone else while neglecting what God has placed in front of us. Anybody here? And it's not because we need another planner. Something deeper is often happening, and this happens to me too. I want to be very frank. This is something I continually to work on, although I do it with the help of my planner because it helps me self-reflect on my shortcomings, where I have patterns, for example, of m-maybe avoiding certain tasks. It might look like they just get dropped off the to-do list if I do that for a few weeks, I have to ask myself, perhaps I'm avoiding them or conveniently getting busy with other things for other reasons to self-examine that. This podcast is a great example, I used to have two podcast, and if you followed me on the Academic Revolution, and you're over here, welcome. Shout out to you. But yes, very true, and it became too much, and you could see by my very inconsistent recording and releasing podcast episodes number one, it was just too much. Number two, I was avoiding it. And part is which conversation do I have where? I felt a little bit split between what I was communicating, academia over here, but faith over here. When in truth, I needed to realize this is just all me, right? That is my unique me, Inga, coming from an academic research world passionate about equipping Christian physicians integrating faith and medicine. Have I lost my passion for academic medicine and my colleagues? Absolutely not. I love them, and I'm still here to help them and embrace them. But recording podcast p- episodes consistently, for example, became an issue of a number of reasons. Spread too thin, divided attention and focused, even maybe divided identity on who I'm speaking to at a given time. That took self-reflection and self-leadership to, number one, recognize that, to look that problem in the eye and say, "Ooh, I need to readjust." And it took self-leadership and discipline to say, "I'm gonna let that Academic Revolution podcast go." That was hard for me to do in order to step more fully into this one. Just as an example. I wanna give you a couple points how leadership really looks like. Number one, leadership begins with self-leadership. You have to lead yourself well. What do I mean by that? Before you lead anybody else, you have to lead yourself well, and that is the hardest person to lead. It's very easy to tell somebody else what to do, much harder to do that for yourself, right? So what do I mean by that self-leadership? It's the choices you make every day. It's the habits you have every day. It's how you show up and with your emotions, and also understand when your emotions and choices run your day, it's the words you choose or not to choose to say something. It's how to manage and lead yourself well with your time, your commitments, and priorities. And in my case, and what I'm hoping for you as a Christian physician, that it's all under the direction of the Lord, and that we are yielding to that in every aspect of our life. It's not about controlling every detail or being super rigid, it's becoming very intentionally with what I have in my hands in terms of times and resources, rather than simply reacting to demands, emotions, or circumstances So before we lead a department, an organization, a ministry, a family, a team, we have to lead the one person every day that matters the most, which is ourselves. And if we cannot do that well, we will lead others poorly. And I would encourage you, just pause for a second and think about good leaders that you have in your life and leaders that maybe have some room for growth. A lot of times the issue is self-leadership. They maybe still need growth in communication or maybe just inner wounds and healing they have not dealt with in their life. You have to be a well-healed person to lead yourself and others well, and certainly the Lord can help you with that, and I can help you with that actually. If you ever need help with that, I love praying for people and in a comprehensive way. We cannot lead others where we are unwilling to go either, so that is important. I cannot expect from others to lead them some place that I've never been that I'm also not willing to go So for example, very practical. If I constantly become defensive when I get feedback or get corrected, it's really hard then to give feedback to others because I've not modeled receiving feedback well. We cannot ask a team member to honor priorities if we are constantly changing priorities or not honoring ours and changing our direction. We cannot encourage others to set boundaries if we are refusing to establish our own boundaries, and we see that a lot in physician culture actually. That's has been a chronic issue over history. Now it's all about we need to set boundaries, and sometimes it's a we slap that word on but it's not really happening. But that's really important. You demonstrate and lead what you wanna see in others and your team That doesn't mean you have to be perfect. That just-- that means you have to be willing to practice what you ask others to do and to be willing to still grow in that area yourself There's a great scripture passage that illustrates this well. In 1 Timothy 4:16 it says, "Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by doing so you will save both yourself and your hearers." This is addressing, of course, the responsibility of teaching others. But Paul doesn't temp Timothy to just, "Hey, make sure others teach well." No, go start with yourself first. Watch over your own heart. Watch over your own words. Watch over your own teaching. Are you in integrity what you preach? And we're not always in that place. None of us are fully, right? That is what we're striving for. But I would say that should be your goal, and you should continue to ask the Lord, "Search my heart. Search my heart if there's any offensive thing in there." Leadership credibility comes not only just from our words, but also how we live Number two Self-control is critical as a leader. So self-control is a spiritual formation. It's actually a fruit of the spirit, and not merely productivity. So Galatians five tells us that the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, faithfulness, et cetera gentleness and self-control. So self-control is not just like I'm trying to push by my own effort, although it will take some effort. It is a fruit of the spirit, which means we have to abide in Jesus, read John 15, in order to, as we abide in Him and in His presence, the fruit of the spirit becomes evident, and one of them is self-control. Self-control means I'm controlled, I am harnessing I'm keeping in check what is happening with me. I'm just not, like, all over the place saying everything I think, carrying my emotions everywhere and complain about everything. And if you are exhausted and overworked and have not set boundaries even for rest and Sabbath rest and those kind of things you will have a much harder time with this. Talking from personal experience, right? We get impatient. That's why this is really important. So self-control is the evidence of the Holy Spirit working in us. So that means controlling oneself in all aspects of our lives wisely under the truth of Scripture is really important. And that, honestly, you cannot do without being in Scripture and having an intimate relationship with the Holy Spirit, to help you with that And that takes a lot of grace because we all fall short of that. So that means we have to walk in that grace of the Lord To live in this daily act of self-discipline. In essence, that means my life is laid down before the Lord every day. And I would encourage you to have that prayer. I'm encouraging myself, have that prayer every day. Lord, have my life laid down before you every day in all aspects of life so that I grow the fruit of the spirit of self-discipline. It's a laid-down life because self-discipline is denying what you wanna do in the moment. Also denying oneself in some ways. Actually, a very practical way you can practice that and deny your flesh, right? Is fasting. Fasting is actually, that's what it meant to be, denying your flesh and saying, "My flesh, my will, my emotions, my, my circumstances, all that I yielded unto Christ, and my spirit is the authority, not my flesh or my emotions or whatever I want in the moment." So spiritual maturity can look very practically in these type of examples. And I'm preaching to myself here. How I spent my time. Am I getting out of bed when it's time to get up or am I gonna continue to lay in bed and scrolling on the social medias? Am I spending quiet time with the Lord every day no matter what as my utmost important sacrifice I can make? Because it is building a relationship with the Lord Am I being truthful to my word? Meaning if a deadline comes up at work, am I sticking to that? That is maturity and self-discipline and leadership. could be an emotional part. Am I mature enough in leading myself well to say, "I'm gonna pause before I react"? That could be to an email, to a conversation at work. That's a lot of times where I think people get into trouble and cause more drama than they need to when we have not quite learned yet that reflective pause button I don't need to react to any trigger that comes on from the outside I should pause. I should reflect with the Lord. I should maybe even seek somebody's counsel, et cetera. So these are some examples. Number three, leading yourself requires truth and priorities and follow-through What do I mean by that? Stay grounded in the foundation of truth of scripture. That's the most important part. What does the Bible say about who I am? What does the word of God say about me and my identity? And then practically, tell yourself the truth about what's going on around you. Am I truly too busy or I'm just avoiding a task? Am I truly busy or am I just wasting time on other things that are not that important? We all do that. Even I still have to correct myself every day and look at, oh, yeah, I could have dealt with that timing differently Another example in leadership is am I really truly pursuing excellence or am I actually trapped in perfectionism and therefore getting stuck and getting nothing done? Am I trying to serve or am I trying to please others, which is actually an issue of pride? These are things we have to ask the Lord to help us to also open our eyes. Where are some of these pitfalls, these obstacles coming from, and what is the truth and the underlying root cause behind it? Goes back to our last podcast episode on coaching, and that's exactly what a coach can also help you with to uncover what is really behind this because, again, we have blind spots The second part is protect the priorities that God has given you. That takes real leadership, and I'm seeing this now in my own life that, there's a conference in Boston which is a tremendous effort. So I have to really learn how to prioritize that over everything else because it is a full-time job, just that alone takes a tremendous amount of work. Make sure you protect what God has given you. Understand that not everything that in front of you is urgent and not everything is as important as you think it is. If you always forego the important over the urgent stuff that seems to come to you then eventually the important things will become urgent, and you live under this constant stress response. That's not how the Lord designed us My experience, I've worked on this for over a decade and I would say that this is never really totally going away, that now it's just so easy. It's always perfect how I choose my priorities, and I work it out in a daily basis. Because the more you grow and advance, things will just come to you at a much higher level, maybe with higher stakes at risk, et cetera. While I've learned the principles over a decade, I'm still applying and growing in them today. I just wanna let you know that, so that you're not listening thinking Inga has it all figured out. No, it's an ongoing laying my life down, learning how to prioritize what is in front of me, because seasons shift as well, and we need to recognize by the Lord and the Holy Spirit, what is He having us do in this season? Because not everything, by the way, that He has given you or that you feel like you're called to do is for the season, and you might wanna reflect on that. That's probably a word for somebody. Number three, follow through on what you already know. So where you have already been given direction from the Lord, follow through on that. Sometimes we just wait for more confirmation, which is really disobedience and just procrastination in disguise of, "I'm trying to seek discernment from the Lord." I did a very early podcast episode on that, I should link it in the show notes, when actually our procrastination is really just disobedience. When we say, "Oh, I really wanna wait on the Lord and be sure," we just, we have been given already. We're just not taking action. And I have, I've definitely done that. That's why I did the podcast episode. So act on what the Lord has already shown you. Sometimes it will not be the whole journey that He shows you step by step. It will be just the first step. Sometimes He might not show you exactly the details, and so don't overreact and overanalyze and look for, "How do I exactly should do this?" He gives you general direction. Run with it. I was reading Exodus this morning, and one thing I thought when you read Exodus and all the descriptions of, how to build the tabernacle and the tent of meetings and all these things, they were very detailed descriptions, for sure. No question about that. It was a whole blueprint. But was there still a nuance of interpretation, of artistic freedom, I should say? Yes. If I give 10 people these scriptures and say, "Draw out how it looks like," chances are every person will draw it slightly differently. So what I'm saying is the Lord giving you direction, but there might be nuances that He gives you the freedom to just walk out with your gifts and talents in how He equipped you, how you see best fit, as long as you stay in the guardrails of the Word and His direction. And then the other part of follow through, be careful to keep your commitments. "Oh I have lack of follow-through with certain commitments. Why is that?" Again, there's probably a reason behind it, so I don't wanna just condemn that. We have to look at where that is coming from. But that's a really important leadership skill. If you say you're gonna do something and repeatedly not follow through, then we have to look at why is that happening. And that is a self-leadership issue As a recap, there are three things to grow and to lead yourself well. Number one, leadership begins with self-leadership. So you need to lead yourself well. That is foundational. Number two, self-control is really a spiritual formation, and it's not just a productivity thing. It is a spiritual principle and a fruit of the spirit. Number three, leading yourself well requires understanding the truth, who you are in Scripture, understanding priorities, and following through with task assignments from the Lord you have been given. So I wanna give you quickly some practical homework. Identify an area that you already know "Oh, yeah, when you talked about that, I know exactly where I'm struggling." And then ask the Lord if you're not sure, what are the things? He will probably lay that right in front of you. So perhaps there's something to just help you, give you a couple questions. What has the Lord already asked you to do? And you're like, "I know. I wrote this. It's in my journal, but I haven't moved on that." Ask is there a roadblock? Am I disobedient? Am I waiting for more confirmation? Or maybe right now is not the right timing." That could be the answer. Where am I maybe dropping things or procrastinating on things that I know that I should be moving forward, but why am I procrastinating on this? Where are there are areas in your life that fear or bad habits or emotions just keep getting in the way? Just sit with the Lord in that in your quiet time. Pray to Him and say, "Lord, show me where I need to lead myself better, so I can represent the kingdom well, not just in my own home environment, but also in my workplace." And just journal on that for a few minutes. And if you love to come and get more connected with community of Christian physician leaders, come join my Facebook group, the Heal the Healers Facebook community and we would love to support you. And also, this is a great place to just come and say, "Hey, I listened to this podcast, and I wanna grow in this area. Anybody else struggling with this?" Or share what resonated with you. Perhaps you were listening today and you realize that your struggle is not just a lack of information. You're like, "I know exactly what she's talking about." And maybe you already have the planner and the time management tools, but you're still struggling and you're not sure what's going on. And that is where coaching can be really helpful. Sometimes we just need a confidential space to uncover what is really keeping us stuck and create a path forward. Somebody to helps us see our blind spot and encourages us to take the next step or how to get out of that place of being stuck and overwhelmed. So I put more information in the show notes for you how we can explore that together. Basically, there is a coaching application you can submit. If you're not an academic physician and you're like, "That doesn't apply to me," don't worry. If you're looking more for spiritual mentorship and coaching, just fill out the application the best you can. I don't have a separate kind of application process at the moment, but just fill it out. And basically what we'll do, it just gives me some information so I know a little bit about you, can prepare for our call together, and then we hop on a phone call to just see what you need help of. Also Make sure you don't forget to register for the Heal the Healers conference for physician and healthcare professionals. This is for, physicians and all healthcare professionals that work in the medical environment of all sorts of areas. So it could be research, science, counselors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists, et cetera. You name it, you're invited. It's a gathering of Christian healthcare professionals to explore healing and miracles to get you just in the presence of the Lord and community with others to get you healed, restored, equipped so you can return to your assignment the Lord has given to you in a better and healthier place. Link is in the show notes. Go to healthehealersconference.com/boston2026. With that, I say God bless you. Remember, leadership does not begin with a title. It begins with small, often unseen decisions we make every day, and I just bless you in making those decisions and and get in a community, but also get in the presence of the Lord and let Him show you where you can grow as a leader. With that, God bless. Have a wonderful day. Bye.