Dr. Ndidi Musa was so impressed after experiencing professional coaching that she became a coach herself. | Photo courtesy of Dr. Ndidi Musa
Dr. Ndidi Musa has spent decades in rooms where the stakes are incredibly high — pediatric cardiac intensive care units, where a child’s survival depends on a physician’s ability to think clearly, act decisively and never stop asking why.
It’s the kind of work that demands an unflinching belief in your own ability to solve difficult problems, something Musa can back up with 30 years of experience in academic medicine, clinical leadership and global health
But confidence in your knowledge isn’t the only pillar of career success, and even Musa once needed coaching to better understand herself and her capacity to grow as a caregiver.
When she moved to the Pacific Northwest after 26 years in the Midwest, she arrived as a highly experienced senior physician and quickly found that speaking directly was being misread as criticism. She was asked to get coaching. Her initial reaction was resistance. Coaching, in medicine, has long carried stigma, something reserved for physicians with professionalism problems, not accomplished leaders navigating a new environment.
But then a friend reframed it this way: Treat it as an investment in yourself.
“I learned about how I listen to people, how I communicate,” says Musa, a Formidable member. “I never really recognized that I needed a coach until this happened, and then I decided, you know what? I benefited from it.”
She learned about her blind spots, her communication patterns and the ways she was unknowingly limiting herself. It was so valuable that she eventually trained as an executive coach herself at the Hudson Institute, one of the oldest coaching programs in the country.
In 2023, Musa founded NdidiMD Coaching and Leadership Development with a mission to change the culture of coaching in medicine and to give women in health care the tools they need to get out of their own way.
A Crisis of Confidence
That need, she says, is undeniable. The women who come to her most often are not struggling with competence but with how they see themselves.
“We tend to be perfectionists,” she said of women, “and that perfection spirit really hinders us from actually seeing who we are and what we have accomplished.”
Musa says women often look at a list of job requirements and immediately catalog what they are missing, while men tend to look at the same list and say “yes,” even if they’re overselling themselves.
This pattern has a familiar name — imposter syndrome — but Musa treats it less as a diagnosis and more as a belief system that can be examined, challenged and ultimately dismantled. Her coaching takes a woman through a rigorous process of confronting the internal narratives that keep her quiet in meetings, reluctant to apply for promotions and overpreparing when she is already the most qualified person in the room.
“I help them recognize that they can live out their potential,” she says. “They can unmute their voice and stand up and be counted.”
If anyone is qualified to teach on those topics, it’s Musa. In addition to executive coaching, she serves as a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine, directs the UW Pediatrics Career Coaching program and is an intensivist at Seattle Children’s Hospital.
She also gave a TEDx talk last November in which she wove threads of her personal journey as a child escaping civil war in Nigeria into the tapestry of her career and who she is today: A woman who has improved the lives of children around the world and who empowers other women to shake off the shackles of perfectionism and focus on how far they’ve already come.
