The Questions Behind the Questions

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.  The next episode will then resume with the tools, practices and insights from Ignatian spirituality that can take your leadership and your inner life to a higher level.  

Transcript

The Big Claim About Interior Life

Speaker 0:20

I've made several claims in the first two episodes of CEO Exercises. This first claim: That the ceilijg on your leadership is't external. It never was. The second claim: That developing your interior life is the highest leverage investment a leader can make. That the clarity of your thinking, the quality of your decisions, the depth of your relationships and the culture you build, all of it only goes as deep as you have gone yourself. Those are significant claims. If they're true, they change something fundamental about what leadership development means and what it requires. And I've been making them, carefully I hope, and honestly, for two episodes now, without ever fully stopping to address the foundational assumptions that I suspect have been sitting underneath everything, for some of you at least, since before the first episode began. That spirituality is a real dimension of human life, and that it's constitutive of great leadership. Today I want to address those questions directly. Not because I've been avoiding it, but because I was waiting until the moment when I could address it properly. I think that moment is now. This episode is specifically for those who are skeptical about spirituality and its place in leadership development. Feel free to skip it if you're okay with where we're at. I must admit it isn't the most exciting episode of the podcast. But I do think the topic is worth addressing one time. Before we continue with the tools, practices, and insights of ignition spirituality that can take your leadership and your inner life to a higher level. I'm

Why Spirituality Triggers Skeptics

Speaker 1:46

Mike McDonnnell, this is CEO Exercises. I've known something for a long time from my experience as a leader, and in conversations with many leaders. I knew that most serious business professionals would not on first encounter be very open to a podcast about the intersection of spirituality and business leadership. They are analytically rigorous, performance-oriented, evidence-driven people who have built real things in the real world. Spirituality, at least on the surface, just doesn't fit. I knew that going in, I didn't find it surprising. Actually, I found it completely understandable for reasons I want to come back to. And I made a deliberate choice because of it. I chose not to open with the foundational assumptions, I chose to start elsewhere. I started with a story, a specific, concrete story about a burrito dinner and a young engineer who realized somewhere between the celebration and the drive home that he didn't feel what his boss felt, that there was a gap between happiness and fulfillment that he couldn't explain and couldn't ignore. I started there because that story is not a story about spirituality. It's a story about a human experience that I suspect is more common in high-achieving people than we typically admit. The quiet, unsettling discovery that what you worked hard for is real and worth having, and also somehow not quite the thing you were ultimately looking for. I started there because I wanted to share with you that my entry point into spirituality was an experience. If someone had told me the very next day that my experience was my spirituality trying to break through and get my attention, I would have laughed at them and immediately dismissed the remark. Then in episode two, I went straight into one of the most important practices in Ignatian spirituality, not the foundational assumptions, the examine. Five steps, 15 minutes, done daily, and what it builds over time. I described it as best I could, including the parts that took me years to do well. I walked you through consolations and desolations, not as theological categories, but as data, information your interior life is trying to give you about what's happening inside of you, information that most leaders have been trained systematically to ignore. Both of those episodes were designed to start the conversation with experiences, mine, Ignatius's, and yours. I wanted you to have some actual sense of what the experiences felt like from the inside before I asked you to evaluate whether the conversation was worth having. So the sequence was deliberate: stories first, a practice second, foundational assumptions third, when we've established enough together that the question can be asked and answered on its own merits, rather than in the abstract. And that moment is now. In

How Leadership Development Drew Boundaries

Speaker 4:36

episode one, I said that the spirituality and business leadership are two worlds that almost never get invited to the same dinner party. I said it as an acknowledgement, an honest remark about the awkwardness most people in this audience would feel at the intersection I was proposing. But it isn't just awkwardness, it goes deeper than that. For many business leaders who have built things, who take evidence seriously, who have earned credibility through results rather than just through declarations, the word spirituality doesn't just feel out of place in a business context. It arrives preloaded. It carries associations that are difficult to separate from the word itself. Vagueness, soft thinking, a significant departure from the measurable, accountable world where most leaders build their careers and identities. For them, spirituality is at best a private matter, at worst, a kind of intellectual retreat from rigor. I understand that. An honest recognition of how we got here, of why those two domains have been kept apart, and why the keeping apart has made a kind of sense, even as I intend to argue that it cost us something real. I would have been there too. Here's what I think happened. Over the last decades, as leadership development professionalized, as it developed its own literature, its own frameworks, its own evidence base, it also quietly and mostly without intending to accepted a set of boundaries about what counted as legitimate territory. The inner life was permissible within limits. Self-awareness was fine. Emotional intelligence was welcome. Resilience was encouraged. But the deeper questions, questions about meaning, about purpose, about God or a higher power, and what you're ultimately oriented toward and why, those got bracketed. They couldn't be studied in the same way. They were treated as personal. Leadership development as a field inherited its assumptions from the same intellectual culture that shaped modern management more broadly. One that prizes what can be measured, compared across populations, and replicated in control conditions. The result is a profound methodological bias. The things that can be studied rigorously tend to be the things that get studied. And the things that get studied tend to become the things that the field treats as real and actionable. Behavioral competencies, cognitive assessments, three sixty-degree feedback instruments, personality frameworks. These work because they produce data that can be aggregated, normed, evaluated, tested, reproduced, and ultimately turned into development programs that scale. The interior life really doesn't cooperate with any of that. It's uniquely individual, resistant to standardization, and its most important movements, such as the fear driving a decision, the attachment distorting a perception, the quiet knowing that something is wrong before the analysis confirms it. It doesn't survive the journey into a survey instrument or a competency rubric. So the leadership development field ignored the interior life because the interior life refused to conform to the kind of examination the field knew how to conduct. The tragedy is that this methodological convention got quietly promoted into a fundamental assumption that what couldn't be measured wasn't quite as real or wasn't quite as relevant as what could. The result is that we have a generation of leadership development that has become very sophisticated about the outer dimensions of leading, strategy, execution, organizational behavior, communication. And has remained surprisingly underdeveloped about the interior dimension that actually drives all those things. That is the gap this podcast is trying to fill. And filling it requires us going into territory that the dinner party conversation has kept off the table. I think it's time to put it on the table. This

Two Foundational Assumptions Laid Bare

Speaker 8:35

podcast rests on two foundational assumptions, two claims about reality that I believe can be engaged on their merits, and that I think deserve more than the reflexive dismissal they sometimes receive. Let me state them plainly. The first assumption that there is a dimension of human experience that is meaningfully called spiritual, that it is real, not reducible to psychology, not fully captured by neuroscience, not merely a poetic description of emotional states, and that ignoring it costs leaders something real, whether or not they know what to name it or where it comes from. The second assumption is the more consequential, and for many leaders the more difficult to accept. It is that this development is not merely compatible with great leadership, but is constitutive of it. Not a nice addition to an otherwise complete leader, not a wellness practice that makes the real work easier or less stressful, but an integral dimension of what the highest levels of leadership truly require, and what its absence consistently costs, even when everything else is in place. Those are the foundational assumptions. They deserve to be addressed directly rather than assumed silently. So let me try. Before I make the argument I want to try something different.

Evidence From Your Own Experience

Speaker 9:55

I want to ask you to look at your own experience, with the same quality of attention you've been learning to bring to the exam if you've started practicing it. And I want to suggest that the interior territory this podcast is describing is not foreign to you. You've been in it. Maybe you just haven't had a framework for examining what was happening there. Think about my burrito dinner moment in terms of the kind of experience it represents. You've probably had your own version of it, and I rarely speak with a leader who hasn't. Perhaps it starts with a significant success, a milestone you've been working toward for months or years that finally arrived. And in the days after the celebration, after the congratulations, after the relief, something arrived quietly and uninvited. Something more like a question beneath the satisfaction. A faint sense that the thing you worked so hard for was real and worth having, and also somehow not quite the thing you were ultimately looking for. If you felt that, I want to suggest that you were not experiencing a psychological quirk. You were experiencing what I described in episode one as the difference between happiness and fulfillment. Happiness is a mood. It comes and goes. Fulfillment is a state of being, it goes all the way down. And the gap between them, when you feel it, is your interior life making itself known. Or think about a hard decision, and somewhere in the process of working through it, something arrived that felt less like a conclusion you reasoned your way to, and more like something you simply knew. A clarity that came from somewhere you couldn't quite locate, something you described afterwards if you described it at all, in language like instinct or gut or intuition. And it was qualitatively different from your normal analytical process, different enough that you noticed it, even if you quickly moved on. In Ignatian terms, what you experienced was consolation of a particular kind, a moment of interior clarity that cut through the noise of competing considerations and arrived at something more like recognition than calculation. You've had those moments, and if you think about the decisions they led to, I suspect you'll find that they hold up. Or think about the experience of being truly seen by a great leader earlier in your career. Not evaluated, not developed, not managed, seen. Recognized in a way that reached something real about who you actually were rather than what you were currently producing. If that happened to you, you know it was qualitatively different from good management or effective mentorship, even though it may have included both. Something about it felt like more. And if you've been a leader long enough, you know with certainty that whether or not your people experience something like that from you matters enormously, in ways that your structure, your strategy, and your incentive design can't fully substitute for. These experiences are not exotic. They're present in nearly every serious leader's history. What they often lack is a framework for taking them seriously as information, a language that is precise enough and rigorous enough to examine them honestly, rather than either dismissing them as sentiment or overinvesting in them with more certainty than they weren't. That is what this tradition provides. That's what Ignatian spirituality is building. Not a set of beliefs to adopt, but a quality of attention to develop toward what is already present in your own experience.

The Leader Who Is Missing Something

Speaker 13:27

Let me come at the foundational assumptions from the other direction for a moment, because it's often more clarified to look at what happens when something is absent than to argue for its presence in the abstract. Every leader listening to this has probably encountered a particular kind of leader who is missing something. Most of you have worked for one or worked alongside one, or perhaps in your most honest moments have wondered whether you were at risk of becoming one. Technically excellent, analytically sophisticated, strategically capable, who nonetheless leave something behind them that the people around them feel viscerally but struggle to name. Organizations that function but don't quite thrive, teams that perform but don't quite trust, decisions that are defensible on every measurable dimension, but that slowly erode something the metrics never fully capture. I'm describing leaders who have developed almost every capability that serious leadership development prioritizes, and who are missing something that those frameworks have no adequate category for. Something that shows up in whether people genuinely follow them or merely comply, in whether they can hear hard feedback or whether their defensiveness, however sophisticated and well-managed it might appear, makes the truth gradually unavailable to them. In whether they can separate their identity from their position, which matters enormously when the position changes, as it always eventually does. In episode one, I talked about disordered attachments, things we cling to that distort our vision and compromise our judgment. Status, the need to be right, the fear of looking weak. These aren't bad things in themselves. When we're attached to them in a disordered way, they start running the show. They shape our decisions in ways we don't recognize. We stop choosing based on what's right or true or good. We start choosing what protects our ego, our image, our position. The leader I'm describing, technically excellent, strategically capable, something quietly missing, is almost always a leader whose disordered detachments are running the show beneath a highly polished surface. And the reason it's so difficult to see from the outside and so difficult to see from the inside, is precisely that the people most affected by this are often those who have been most successful at constructing an external life that makes the interior one feel unnecessary. I'd like to drive this point home about how the absence of a well-developed interior life is the real ceiling on leadership potential.

What Derails Leaders Over Time

Speaker 15:57

Let's look at a quick summary of the research on what derails leadership careers. When you look across the range of derailment research, a handful of patterns show consistently across many different organizational contexts. The first is lack of self-awareness, which is less a derailer in its own right and more a condition that makes all the others invisible to the person most in need of seeing them. It's the reason derailing leaders don't course correct before the damage is done. Growing directly out of that is arrogance or excessive pride, the slow and often unconscious transformation of healthy confidence into a closed system, where feedback stops landing, descent gets filtered out, and the leader becomes increasingly dependent on a reality of their own construction. Third is problematic interpersonal behavior, not occasional friction, but a chronic pattern of relating that leaves people feeling diminished, dismissed, or unsafe, and which tends to be insulated from correction precisely because the leader's positional power makes honesty too costly for those around them. Fourth is the failure to adapt, which matters more now than it may have in previous decades. The leader who built their identity around a particular set of strengths and cannot make the psychological transition when the role or context demands something different from them. And fifth, though it is less dramatic than the others, is the absence of backbone. The conflict avoidant leader who accumulates approval at the expense of integrity, defers when direction is needed, and quietly loses the respect of the people they most need to influence. What binds all five together is that they are not skill deficits. They are at their root problems of the interior life that no behavioral training alone has ever reliably solved. The ceiling isn't external. I said that at the very beginning of episode one, and I meant it as more than a provocation. I meant it as an observation about what actually limits leaders who have otherwise become proficient at the conventional leadership capabilities. The ceiling is interior, and the examine, the practice we covered in episode two, is one of the Ignatian practices for raising it.

Ignatius Treats The Inner Life Rigorously

Speaker 18:13

There's something about Ignatius of Loyola that goes directly to the foundational assumptions. Ignatius didn't begin his spiritual journey with a set of beliefs he then set out to confirm. He didn't start with a theological framework and worked backwards to justify it. He started with an observation. On that recovery bed in Pamplona, he noticed that different kinds of interior states left him feeling differently afterwards. The fantasies about his old life, his courtly ambitions, the romantic conquest, the prestige, gave him a rush of pleasure that evaporated when the daydream ended, leaving him dry and hollow. But when he imagined a different kind of life, simpler, oriented towards service, something different happened. A deep, settled, lasting peace, not the exciting rush of the fantasies, but something quieter and more durable, something that didn't evaporate. He started paying careful attention to these patterns and began forming observations, identifying regularities, drawing provisional conclusions, testing them against further experience, revising his understanding when the evidence required it. What he was doing with the tools available to him in the sixteenth century was running an experiment, applied to a domain that most rigorous people have hardly ever examined with any rigor, their own interior experience. But methodology nonetheless. This is the invitation that tradition has always been making, even when its spiritual packaging makes it difficult to receive. The invitation is not to believe, the invitation is to look at what's actually present in your own experience, to look honestly, carefully, with the same quality of attention you would bring to any serious inquiry, and to hold the conclusions of that looking with the openness that true inquiry requires. Ignatius was confident enough in what attentive people would find that he could afford to make that offer without requiring prior belief. For 500 years, Ignatian spirituality has been practiced across radically different cultural and intellectual contexts, and that suggests that his confidence was not misplaced. That I think should mean something to a leader who takes evidence seriously. I want to make one more observation before I come to what I'm actually asking of you. It's

The Spiritual Beliefs You Already Live

Speaker 20:34

perhaps the one that surprises leaders I share it with the most. Most leaders who describe themselves as skeptical about spirituality already operate on a set of implicit assumptions that are at their root deeply spiritual, not in a religious sense. You believe in integrity, not as a policy or reputational strategy, but as something closer to a non-negotiable, a way of acting that is simply right, regardless of whether it's profitable, strategically advantageous, or whether anyone would ever know the difference. And you believe that violating it costs something real, even in cases where no external consequence follows. That belief is not fully explicable in materialist terms. It points towards something that the language of rational self-interest, however sophisticated, doesn't quite reach. You believe that the human beings in your organization deserve to be treated as ends in themselves. Not because treating people well is good strategy, but because they are people. There is a distinction between caring about your people and managing them effectively. And you believe the distinction matters and is visible to them even when the outcomes look similar on the surface. That belief also points towards something real that resists quantification. You believe in culture, an invisible shared reality that shares behavior in ways that no structure, incentive system, or policy fully captures. That is real enough and important enough that you invest seriously in it, even though you can't put it on a balance sheet. The language leaders use to describe culture, when they're being honest rather than corporate, is almost indistinguishable from the language people use to describe shared spiritual reality. I'm not trying to argue you into a position. I'm pointing out that the position you already hold, the one you act on every day, the one that guides your most consequential decisions, is already much closer to the foundational assumptions of this podcast than the word spirituality may have initially suggested. The question is not whether you believe in anything that could be called spiritual. The question is whether you're willing to take that implicit belief seriously enough to examine it rigorously and to develop the interior capacity that it actually requires. I

Hold The Question Open

Speaker 22:47

want to be clear about what I'm asking from you. I'm not asking you to believe that God exists. I'm not asking you to adopt a theological framework or to affiliate with a religious tradition, or to resolve a question that serious philosophers and theologians have not resolved in several thousand years of trying. I'm asking for something considerably more modest. I'm asking you to hold the question open. Not forever, not without criteria, but long enough to actually examine it. And specifically, I'm asking you to continue what we started in episode two, the examine, practice daily, with the honest attention that Ignatius himself described as the necessary starting point. Not with the goal of confirming a prior belief, but with the authentic curiosity about what you actually may find. This is in its way the most Ignatian thing I can offer you. Ignatius didn't begin with a conclusion. He began with a careful observation of his own interior experience, followed by a willingness to take whatever he found seriously and follow it honestly. He was confident enough in the territory that he could afford to make the offer without requiring commitment first. I share that confidence. What I've found in my own practice over nearly 40 years and in the experience of the leaders I've worked with is that the honest question, properly held, is itself the beginning of the interior life, and that many of you have been asking it, in one form or another, for longer than you may have recognized. The burrito dinner was the beginning of mine. Something was the beginning of yours. I

Closing Integration And Daily Practice

Speaker 24:25

want to close this episode by returning to where we began, not just today, but at the very beginning of this podcast. The ceiling on your leadership isn't external. It never was. I built a case for it in episode two through the examine, showing you one of the ignition practices by which the interior life is developed rather than simply discussed. And today in episode three, I've tried to do something I deliberately deferred until now. Address the question that's been sitting underneath everything, directly and with as much honesty as I can bring to it. Here's what I want to leave you with. The integration I'm describing, the integration of the interior life and the leadership life, is not a concept, it's not an aspiration, it's a daily practice, accumulated over time, that slowly changes things from the inside out. It changed how I led, I believe it can change how you lead. Not because it makes you a different person, but because it makes you more fully yourself, clearer about what you truly value, freer from the disordered attachments that distort your vision, more authentically present to the people and the situations in front of you. In episode one, I talked about leaders whose people would tell you, sometimes years later, that working for them was one of the most formative experiences of their professional lives, that they were truly seen, not managed, not optimized, but seen. I believe that. I've experienced it as someone who was led that way early in my career, and as someone who, on his best days, tried to offer it to other people in my organizations. That kind of leadership isn't a skill. It's not a technique, it's the fruit of interior work. Slow, cumulative, sometimes uncomfortable, always worth it. Ignatian spirituality is a way you can build it. Beginning with the examine, one day at a time. 15 minutes, five steps. And now, having addressed the question beneath the question, we're ready to explore more tools, practices, and insights from Ignatian Spirituality to take your leadership and your inner life to a higher level. Also, let's get going. Thank you for being here with me. I'm Mike McDonnell. This is CEO Exercises.