CEO Exercises

In Episode 12 of CEO Exercises, Mike McDonnell steps back from adapting individual Ignatian meditations to reveal the engine that has powered the last several episodes: imaginative contemplation. He opens with a provocation — leaders already trust disciplined imagination with enormous stakes through scenario planning, war-gaming, and pre-mortems, yet few leaders apply imagination with that same ri...

Episode 11 of CEO Exercises tackles the most stubborn failure in leadership development: the gap between knowing and doing. Many leaders can speak fluently about ego, attachment, and inner freedom, yet lead exactly as they always have. The insights never cross into action. Mike McDonnell argues this is why decades of investment in leadership development haven't increased engagement scores or...

Episode 10 adapts one of the most psychologically sophisticated meditations in Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises — the Meditation on the Two Standards — into a practical leadership tool. At its core is a single, unsettling claim: there are two competing value systems alive inside every leader at all times, the destructive one and the life-giving one.  The destructive one never announce...

Episode 9 continues the Second Week of CEO Exercises, picking up directly from Episode 8's examination of Jesus as a leader. Host Mike McDonnell guides listeners through an adaptation of Ignatius of Loyola's Contemplation on the Incarnation, framed not as theology but as a leadership meditation that any leader—believer or skeptic—can use. Mike walks through Ignatius's startling stag...

Episode 8 marks a turning point in CEO Exercises. After seven episodes devoted to self-awareness and inner freedom — the "First Week" of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises — Mike McDonnell pivots into new territory: actively building leadership capability. This episode draws on the "Second Week" and adapts one of its most important meditations, Ignatius's Contemplation of th...

Leaders often move from crisis to crisis and success to success without ever stopping to ask a harder question: What are the actual patterns in how I lead? In this episode, Mike McDonnell introduces the The Field Notes exercise — a structured, two-hour reflective practice designed to give leaders an honest, complete picture of what kind of leader they have been across their professional lives, dee...

Episode 6 of CEO Exercises serves as both a capstone and a deepening. Host Mike McDonnell opens by revisiting the four foundational questions posed at the end of Episode 5 — questions about ultimate purpose, identity stripped of achievement, disordered attachments, and the fear of loss — framing them as a leader's personal Principle and Foundation. He then steps back to map the architecture o...

Every leader operates from a foundation — a largely unexamined cognitive operating system that shapes how they filter information, assess risk, and make decisions, often invisibly and without their awareness. Drawing on Ignatius of Loyola's Principle and Foundation from the Spiritual Exercises, Mike argues that a sound foundation offers "inner freedom" by anchoring a leader's i...

The Ignatian Examen is the one practice Ignatius wouldn't give up.  I thought it might be helpful to provide you with a guided Examen for your use as you begin the practice.  The podcast will move into other tools, practices and insights from Ignatian spirituality for leaders, but I hope you will continue to practice the 15 minute Examen each day.   Send CEO Exercises a message

This episode provides a perspective on the fundamental questions that underlie the claims made so far in this podcast:  that there is a dimension of human experience that is meaningfully called spiritual, and that this spiritual dimension is constitutive of great leadership.  This episode is specifically for those who might be skeptical about spirituality and its place in leadership development.  ...

Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuits, one of the most intellectually rigorous and globally impactful organizations in the history of the Catholic Church — and at the center of his own life was a single daily practice he considered truly non-negotiable for himself, for Jesuits, and for anyone who wants to integrate their inner life with their active life in the world.  He called it the Examen.  T...

Mike McDonnell introduces the CEO Exercises podcast, arguing that the developing your interior life is the highest-leverage investment a leader can make.  The ceiling on leadership isn't external, it is internal.  Most leaders develop strategically, mentally, and physically but neglect their interior life, which quietly limits the clarity of their thinking and judgement, the quality of their...