Imaginative Contemplation - The Leadership Instrument Hiding in Plain Sight

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 rigor in their inner lives.

Mike traces the method to its origin: Ignatius of Loyola, recovering from a shattered leg, discovered that different daydreams left him in measurably different interior states. From that insight, Ignatius built a sophisticated practice — composing a scene in vivid detail, entering it as a humble participant, and applying all five senses until the imagined experience becomes real enough to change you. Modern neuroscience confirms the mechanism: vividly imagined experience runs on much of the same neural machinery as lived experience. This is why contemplation bridges the knowing-doing gap that mere knowledge cannot cross — as Ignatius wrote, "It is not much knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but the interior feeling and relishing of things."

 Mike offers five leadership applications: entering the experience of those affected by your decisions; pre-living major decisions using Ignatius's three election techniques (the stranger's counsel, the deathbed view, the honest accounting); rehearsing hard conversations from the other’s perspective; contemplating failure with the same intensity leaders lavish on success; and contemplating the leader you want to become. 

 Two personal stories anchor the episode: a plant closure announcement changed after Mike contemplated receiving it as a twenty-year maintenance technician, and a career-capstone acquisition he walked away from after contemplation exposed that his ego — not strategy — was influencing a possible decision. In both cases, the analysis was sound, but only contemplation could examine the decision-maker rather than the decision.

 The episode closes with a step-by-step exercise, a caution distinguishing contemplation from ego-driven fantasy and anxious rumination, and connections to the Examen, the Foundation, and the Field Notes.

Transcript

Welcome And AMA Invite

Speaker 0:10

Hello, everyone, and welcome to CEO Exercises Podcast. Before we begin, I'd like to mention that I want to do an Ask Me Anything episode next week. And so I'd like to invite you or ask you to please send in any questions you might have or stories that you think you'd want to share for an Ask Me Anything episode next week. I'd really appreciate it. I've got quite a few questions already saved up, but would love to have more and love to have yours if you haven't sent me anything. You can use the button on the podcast to send me a note. Thank you.

Introduction

Speaker 0:45

So now let's get started with episode 12. You already trust your imagination with enormous sums of money. You just don't call it that. Every scenario plan that your strategy team builds is an act of imagination. Every war game, every premortem, every what happens if our biggest competitor acquires a number three player in the market? Exercise. All of it is disciplined, structured imagining. You make big, consequential decisions based on it. You would never dream of running a company without it. I use imaginative contemplation every day, in my prayer, of course, and also in my leadership, and I have throughout my career. I used it constantly. I'll share examples in this episode. And yet, you know, I find so few leaders that use this practice with the same training, discipline, and structure as they do with their analytical brains. But Ignatius of Loyola used it 500 years ago. And he built what I consider a sophisticated technology of the imagination. He created a method so central to the spiritual exercises that without it, the exercises simply don't work. He called it contemplation. Today we call it imaginative contemplation. And here's what I want to show you over the next 30 or 45 minutes. Your imagination is a leadership practice of the first order. And if you've been with me for the last several episodes, you've already been using it. I just haven't talked about the engine yet. Today, we open the engine. I'm Mike McDonnell. This is CEO Exercises. Let's begin.

Speaker 2:29

So first let me situate today because we build this week by week, and today's episode is a little different from the ones around it. In episode eight, we put three leaders side by side and asked who we'd actually follow. In episode nine, we drew empathy out of the contemplation on the incarnation, the descent, the exit from the bubble. In episode 10, we worked on the two standards, the two competing value systems alive inside every leader. And in episode 11, we combined the three classes of persons and the three kinds of humility into a diagnostic tool to tell whether your freedom is real or imagined. Now here's what I haven't told you directly yet, although you probably sensed it. Every one of those episodes ran on the same underlying method. When I asked you to picture God surveying the whole earth in episode nine, to see this one weeping, that one laughing, that was imaginative contemplation. When I asked you to stand between two banners in episode ten and feel the pull of each one, that was imaginative contemplation. When I asked you to imagine three people who would each come into a fortune, that was it again. In each exercise, Ignatius gives you scenes and he asks you to enter them. So today, instead of adapting another meditation, I want to step back and spend some time with you on the method itself. Because once you understand it, what it is, why it works, how to use it, how it can be misused, every exercise we've done becomes more powerful. And a whole set of new applications opens up in your daily leadership that we haven't touched yet.

Speaker 4:13

And now the usual reminder, I practice Ignatian spirituality as a person of faith. That's where I live, and it's the source of everything here. But in season one, I extract what I believe to be the exercises with the most impact on your leadership development in a mostly secular form. You don't have to believe anything theologically to get value from this. You do have to be willing to use your imagination in a structured and disciplined way. And today, that price of admission is the entire subject. Now, season two, to follow, will take the spiritual exercises in their full faith context, releasing their full power to transform. Today we stay on the leadership side.

The Origin of Ignatian Contemplation

Speaker 4:54

Let me take you back to where this whole tradition began. Remember the story from episode one? Ignatius, the ambitious, ego-driven nobleman, severely injured, and bored out of his mind, reading books he didn't want to read. And what happens? He starts to daydream. He imagines his old life, the courtly glory, the romantic conquests, the honors. And he imagines a different life, simplicity, service, following Christ. Two sets of daydreams, two imaginative worlds. Then he notices something no one had taught him to notice. The two kinds of daydreams left him in very different interior states. One left him dry, hollow, and desolate when it faded. The other left a sense of peace and deep fulfillment that stayed. Now think carefully about what that means. The founding of Ignatian spirituality, the insight the entire 500-year-old tradition flows from, happened inside the imagination. In a daydream, examined very honestly. Ignatius discovered that the imagination doesn't have to be entertainment. It can be a place where the deepest movements of a person become visible, where you can watch your own desires and attachments and fears operate in real time and read them as data. So as Ignatius developed the spiritual exercises, he built them around that discovery, and he gives the practice its full form.

How It Works

Speaker 6:22

So here's how it works. He takes a scene, in his case, a gospel scene, and he does not ask you to think about it, he asks you to compose the place, to build it in your imagination with enough specificity that you can set yourself inside of it. See the scenes, notice the surroundings, the lighting, the room, look at the people, their faces, their facial expressions, their body language. Who are they looking at and how? What are they doing with their hands? And then and this is the big move, he puts you into the scene as a participant, not just an observer, but active, humbly in the scene. He suggests you imagine yourself being there, watching, listening, interacting, helping where you can. And then he adds the instrument's finest calibration, something he calls the application of the senses. Don't just see the scene, hear it. The voices, what are they saying? The surroundings, the hum of the electrical lights and air conditioning, the shuffling of feet, the scraping of a chair, perhaps just the entire silence of a room. Use your sense of smell. What does the room smell like? Maybe stale air? Maybe the sweat of a large group of people waiting. What do you taste? Perhaps the dry mouth that comes with adrenaline? Use your sense of touch. Feel any tensions in your muscles, in your temples. Ignatius wants the scene rendered at full sensory resolution. Because he understood something we've only recently confirmed through science. An experience rendered vividly enough in the imagination is processed by the human person as something very close to a real experience. It reaches places that concepts cannot reach. And here is an Ignatian insight that sums up what he thinks about knowledge versus feelings. I consider it one of the great insights of Ignatian spirituality. He writes it in his introductory notes, and I'd ask you to ponder it. He says "It is not much knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but the interior feeling and relishing of things." Not much knowledge, the interior feeling and relishing of things. So if you were with me for episode 11, you'd recognize immediately what he's referring to. The gap between the leader who has much knowledge and the leader who has actually moved from knowing to doing, to changing how they lead. This knowing doing gap that we spent that whole episode on is the gap between knowledge and interior feeling. You can know that humility outperforms pride. We made that case in episode 10. Knowing it changes almost nothing. But when you felt it, when you stood inside a scene and experienced in your body what it's like to be led by each kind of leader, or to be the person on the receiving end of your own decision, something different happens. The insight stops being information and starts becoming formation. That's what imaginative contemplation is for. It's the bridge across the knowing, doing gap. It's how truth gets from your bookshelf into your nervous system, which as I said back in episode six, is where your foundation actually lives.

Four Reasons Why Imagination Complements Analysis

Speaker 9:55

Now let me anticipate the objection because I can kind of almost hear it. Mike, I'm a rigorous analytical leader. Imagination is for creatives. I deal only in data, in facts, not in fantasies. Well, I want to challenge that, and I want to give you four points. First, you're already living in your imagination far more than you admit or realize. Every worry about what can go wrong next quarter is an act of imagination. Every anticipated conversation you rehearse in the shower is an act of imagination. Every fear of what that difficult board member will say, every fantasy of what the acquisition could become, every reading of a competitor's intentions, it is imagination, imagination, imagination. Of course you use this faculty. The only real question is whether it runs wild, driven by anxiety and ego, undisciplined, unexamined, or whether you train it and direct it in the way you've trained and directed your powerful analytical mind. Many, if not most, leaders have a world-class analytical engine, bolted on to a quite feral imagination. Ignatius offers the training program for the latter.

Speaker 11:07

Second, there are things that analysis structurally just cannot do, and leadership depends on several of them. Analysis can tell you that the layoff affects 1,200 people. It cannot make you feel what it's like for a laid-off employee to drive home and tell their spouse that they lost their job. Analysis can tell you the strategy is risky and has a reasonable chance of failure. It cannot tell you who you will become if you spend three years defending it after it starts to fail, which is a question that really matters. Analysis operates on what can be measured from the outside. The imagination is the only instrument you possess that can take you inside, inside another person's experience, inside a future version of you, and inside the felt reality of a decision before you've made it.

Speaker 12:02

Third, and I want to keep a promise I made back in episode one, where I told you the ancient tradition and the modern science laboratory are now telling a similar story. Because on this specific point, the convergence is remarkable. Modern neuroscience has established that vividly imagined multisensory experience and actually lived experience run on substantially overlapping neural machinery. When you image seeing something in rich detail, your visual cortex activates, the same regions that fire when you actually see and experience it. When you imagine performing an action, your motor systems rehearse it. This is why elite athletes have used structured mental rehearsal for decades, and why the research consistently shows that vivid imagined practice produces measurable gains in actual performance. It's why your heart rate climbs during an imagined confrontation that is happening only in your own head. The brain uses much of the same network to imagine the future as it uses to remember the past. Researchers call it prospection, the brain running simulations of what hasn't happened yet, built from the material of what has happened. In other words, the imagination isn't a separate, softer faculty off to the side of your real cognition. It's core equipment, the simulation engine your brain runs constantly, whether or not you ever take the controls. Now Ignatius obviously didn't have brain imaging technology, but what he did have was forty years of meticulous attention to interior experience. And he arrived at the same conclusion the imaging studies point to now. An experience rendered vividly enough in the imagination is, to the person having it, functionally very close to real, real enough to train on, real enough to learn from, and real enough to change you. That's the mechanism. And it's why the application of the senses is what drives the simulation deep enough to reach the level where formation happens.

Speaker 14:10

And my fourth point, and this is a more subtle one, the imagination is diagnostic. Here's what I mean by that. When you run a scene in this instrument of contemplation, you're not fully in control of it. Things arise. Details appear that you didn't choose or plan or script. Resistance shows up in specific places. In some cases, the scene hits a snag instead of flowing easily. Maybe some parts of the scene remain blurry in contrast to others that appear vividly. Perhaps you just very subtly but intentionally change certain parts of the scene to make yourself look better. All of this is data about your attachments. In episode nine, I asked you to imagine what your people would say about you at home at the end of a long day. Some of you couldn't do it. The scene went vague, or your mind changed the subject. That vagueness was not a failure of the exercise, that was the exercise working. The imagination was showing you exactly where the bubble's walls are. The scale from episode five, the one that gets tilted by disordered attachment, tilts the imagination first before it ever tilts a spreadsheet. Which means the imagination, carefully and honestly watched, is where you can catch the tilt earliest. Unfortunately, leadership development typically doesn't even touch on this powerful instrument, your imagination, much less provide you with the tools to develop it to become a better, wiser leader.

Five Practical Leadership Applications for Imagination

Speaker 15:46

So let me get concrete. Here is how this instrument works in the practice of leading a business. Each one probably deserves its own episode, and some may get one, but I want you to see the range today. The first application is entering the experience of others, the empathy application. This is episode nine's territory, so I'll be brief, but I want to emphasize that it is a repeatable technique and not just a one-time meditation. Before any decision that impacts people significantly, such as a restructuring, a relocation, a change in compensation, or demanding new operating cadence, you contemplate the scene of its arrival. Yes, you'll announce it, but that's not the main focus here. I want you to contemplate how it is experienced by those you're announcing it to. You compose the place, maybe it's the kitchen table where the news gets discussed, maybe it's the break room or the commute home. You enter as Ignatius entered his contemplations, as a humble, insignificant person in the corner of someone else's life. And you apply the senses until the person stops being a headcount and becomes a living, breathing human being. I told you in episode nine that empathy is the fruit of a particular kind of attention. Imaginative contemplation is the discipline that pays that attention. You cannot feel for an abstraction. The contemplation is how you color in the abstraction, making it real.

Speaker 17:19

Now the second application is pre-living the decision. This one comes straight from Ignatius' own toolkit. He offers it in his rules for making a good election, which is his term for a significant life decision. He gives three imaginative techniques, and I want you to hear how startlingly practical they are, coming from a sixteenth century manual. Technique one. Imagine a person you've never met, but someone you wish every good thing for, who comes to you with your exact decision that you're trying to make, your exact circumstances that you're in. How do you advise them? What do you say? Notice what happens when you run this. The moment the decision belongs to a stranger rather than you, the attachments start to loosen their grip. Your reputation isn't in the scene anymore. Your sunk costs aren't in the scene. Very often the advice you give the stranger comes with a clarity that your own deliberation never achieved. And the difference between the two answers is a pretty good measure of how badly your scale is tilted. The second technique is to imagine yourself at the end of your life, looking back at this decision. From that vantage point, which choice do you wish you had made? Now the deathbed test sounds kind of morbid until you try it, and then you discover what it actually does. It collapses the false urgency of the present. The board pressure, the news cycle, the fear of looking weak this quarter. And what remains is what truly mattered. I've used this exact contemplation before some of the hardest calls of my career, and I will tell you plainly, it has reversed or at least changed my intended decision more than once. And the third technique is to imagine standing before an honest accounting of your whole life. For Ignatius, the judgment. For our secular adaptation, imagine the people you most respect, the people you love, and who love you, reviewing this decision with complete knowledge of your real motives, not what you said, not your stated motives, your real motives. Three imaginative moves. Each one is a technology for achieving, at least temporarily, the ignation indifference we built in episode 5. The level scale, the clean read. Notice that none of them adds new information, they change the position from which you perceive, and the perception improves. This is a central principle of ignation spirituality. Interior first, exterior always. Simply put, better seeing produces better deciding.

Speaker 20:02

And the third application is rehearsing the encounter. You have a hard conversation coming, such as the underperforming leader who's also a friend, the board member who's losing confidence in you, the town hall after bad news. Many, if not most, leaders rehearse these the feral way. They run the scene with themselves at the center as the intended good person, or maybe even the hero. They script the other person's lines and come out looking reasonably good. The rehearsal makes the real conversation worse because you practice the scene that may not or probably will not occur, and you encased yourself inside of it. The contemplative rehearsal is different. You compose the place, you enter the scene, you engage all your senses, and then you spend most of your time on the other side of the table. You let the other person be as intelligent, as hurt, as legitimately aggrieved as they might actually be. You listen to what they say in your imagination. And here's the really counterintuitive but reliable power of this practice. They will say things you don't consciously script, things that are true, things some deeper part of you knew. I've walked out of these contemplations with my entire approach changed. Not softened necessarily, sometimes firmer, but truer to the actual human situation, because I had visited it and experienced it before I arrived at it.

Speaker 21:37

The fourth application is contemplating failure. And I want to spend some time here because it addresses one of the most consistent asymmetries I've observed in senior leadership. Leaders imagine the upside of their initiatives at full sensory resolution. That's what a pitch deck is a vivid, detailed, emotionally engaging contemplation of success. The market s cooperate, the trends are all favorable, the appreciative investors giving a standing ovation at the investor day. But the downside? The downside usually gets imagined to some extent, but abstractly, almost as a footnote, a scenario that gets downgraded and neutralized. The opportunity gets contemplated. The risk merely gets acknowledged. And that asymmetry is not an accident. It's an attachment at work. How many times have I seen leaders filter out the warning signs so they seem less urgent than they actually are? Look, we all have trouble vividly imagining our strategy or initiative failing because our identity can get bound up to some extent or to a great extent with the strategy or initiative. When that happens, our imagination works to protect what our identity depends on, rather than revealing reality. So here's the discipline to counteract this, and to be more successful in the opportunities generally. Manage the risk with the same imaginative intensity you lavish on the opportunity. Before any major commitment, run the Ignation premortem. Now you may know the conventional premortem. Assume the project failed, list the reasons why. It's a good analytical tool. But notice that it stays analytical. It produces a list. And lists don't reach the nervous system. The Ignation version goes further. You don't list the failure, or at least not just list the failure. You enter it. Compose the place. It's two years from now. The initiative has failed. Where are you sitting? The boardroom where you're explaining it. What does it feel like? What does that room feel like? With the numbers on the screen. Walk the floor of the operation you bet on. Hear the conversation with the team you recruited into it. The ones who left good jobs on the strength of your conviction. Feel in your body what you feel, and then watch what you're tempted to do in the scene. This is the part that matters. Does the failed future version of you face it cleanly? Or do you catch yourself even inside your own imagination, reaching for the spin or the reframing or the defending or buying more time? What you do in the imagined failure is a preview of what you'll do in the real one. And it's a direct reading of how much your identity is riding on the outcome. If you can't enter the failure scene at all, if it goes blurry or if your mind slips away from it, that is your scale telling you it's already tilted before you've committed a dollar. And here's the payoff, which is thoroughly practical. Leaders who have truly contemplated the failure build better risk management, not a more timid strategy. They see the early warning signs more clearly, with less tendency to dismiss them or underappreciate them. They've already met those signals in the imagination and stripped them of their threat to the ego. They can name the tripwires, the specific conditions under which they'll pivot while the scale is still level, and manage them. Then they can more successfully de-risk the initiative to improve the outcome, rather than negotiating with themselves after the sunk costs pile up. This is that and again. Bold commitment to the opportunity and unflinching intimacy with the risks in order to manage them better. The leader who has pre-lived the failure is not weakened by it. They're sort of inoculated, free to pursue the opportunity aggressively precisely because the failure has already lost its power to distort their perception of the risks. Not to avoid the risks, but to deal with them with precision.

Speaker 25:52

And now on to the fifth application: contemplating who you are becoming. This is the deepest one, and it connects to everything since episode eight. You take the leader you said you wanted to be, humility, selflessness, inner freedom, love, fused with that passion for results bordering on the extreme. And instead of holding it as an aspiration, you contemplate it. You build the scene of yourself leading that way, at full sensory resolution, in the specific situations where you currently don't. You feel what it would be like. You let the desire deepen. Ignatian spirituality differs from much of conventional leadership development, and imaginative contemplation is the mechanism behind it. You don't change by being told what you should do. You change by coming to truly desire something greater than what you've been settling for. And desire is trained in the imagination. It always has been. Ignatius simply had the experience to say so and the inspiration to build the training program.

Two CEO Stories Where Imaginative Contemplation Changed Decisions

Speaker 27:02

Let me share just two personal examples, because abstract talk about imagination is exactly the kind of knowledge that Ignatius warned us doesn't fill the soul or inner life. During one of my CEO roles, we made the decision to consolidate manufacturing and close a big plant. The analysis was sound. My team and I stress tested it every way we knew. The board agreed. And I believe we had done the human diligence too, severance beyond the norm, outplacement services, transition timelines clearly defined and supported. On paper, we were handling it with unusual care, and I was quietly proud of that. The announcement was ten days out, and I was preparing my remarks. And because the Examen had been surfacing a low grade unease all week, a desolation I couldn't account for, the kind I've learned not to ignore or discount, I decided to do something that I had been trained to do and had been avoiding. I contemplated receiving the announcement rather than delivering it. I composed the place, that plant floor, which I've walked many, many times, the smell of it, the machine oil, and the coffee in the break room, the winter light through the high windows, third ship coming off, first shift coming on because we'd scheduled the announcement at the change so both could be there. And I didn't stand at the microphone in the scene. I stood in the crowd. I made myself one humble, insignificant person. In fact, a maintenance technician, twenty plus years in, a man whose actual face I knew, but whose name I realized with disappointment I did not. And I listened to myself give my own prepared remarks from inside his eyes, ears, and other senses. And I remember what happened, like it was yesterday. Phrases I had written, phrases I thought were compassionate, were delivered, and he heard something very different. For example, "difficult decision" was heard as "difficult for whom?" "Positioning the company for the future" was heard as "a future without me in it." My careful expressions of care were heard as the sound of a man protecting himself. And there was one moment in the contemplation that I did not script. It just happened. The technician looked down at his hands. Just that. Looked at his hands, which had maintained our equipment for twenty years, while I talked about strategic footprint. I stopped the contemplation and sat there for a long time. The remarks I eventually gave were different, shorter, more direct, with the corporate anesthetic stripped out, with more silence and humility in them, and with a commitment I hadn't planned to make about how personally I would stay involved in the transitions.

Speaker 30:04

But I want to share the deeper thing the contemplation showed me, because it's the real point here. My unease that week hadn't been about the wording. It was that I had been managing the closure as a communications problem, because managing it as a human reality would cost me something, the comfort of my bubble, exactly as we discussed in episode nine. And my picture of myself as the caring leader who had already done the human diligence. That's a second class move in episode eleven's language. I had built the apparatus of compassion in a way that let me keep my distance intact. The contemplation caught it ten days before the analysis ever could, because the analysis was never going to catch it. There was nothing wrong with the analysis.

Speaker 30:53

Now the second story. This instrument works on almost every decision, including strategy, and maybe even more powerfully there. We were deep into pursuing a major acquisition, and I mean deep, months of diligence. Our bankers were fully engaged, our board supported it, we had a strategic logic that I could recite in my sleep. It would have been a large deal, one of my biggest. The strategic fit was almost perfect. The synergy model worked. The market logic worked. The only problem was that the acquisition bids were climbing, the way prices do when a process gets competitive. And we looked for more synergies and revised the model accordingly. The latest prices were justifiable, but just barely. Then the prices nudged up again. We had to make a decision whether to boost our offer further to win the deal or not. Now you may already know where this is going because you've heard episode ten. Every individual step holds up. Every step is defensible. Before the board recommendation, I took the decision into contemplation, and I ran two of Ignatius' election techniques back to back. First, the stranger. I imagined the CEO I'd never met, but someone I truly wanted the best for. I imagined that CEO sitting across from me with my exact deal, with my exact escalation pattern, and my exact revised model. And I listened to myself advise him. And what I heard myself say to him was, The deal you diligenced months ago and the deal on the table today are not the same deal. The model changed to keep the answer the same, and it would have to change even more to justify the latest price. Why did the model change, and why should it change more? Now I never would have put that question that bluntly to myself. But to a stranger it took 30 seconds. And look, models do change, otherwise, many fewer deals would get done. But what makes us change them to the point where they become unrealistic, but we don't realize they're unrealistic? We think we can still justify them. That's the question. Then I did something even harder. I contemplated the future, a future where we were successful in buying the company, and we're now in the second year of integration. An ordinary day, two years in ownership, two years into the future. And I entered it from inside the acquired company. I made myself a member of their leadership team, a person who had built something over 15 years and now worked for us. I composed the place, their offices which I had visited, their coffee, which by the way was much better than ours. And in that scene, totally unscripted, two years into the future, this person asked me a question. Which of the commitments from the road shows are we still keeping? And inside the contemplation, I couldn't tell them the answer I wanted to give. Because at the price we were now considering, the synergy targets require breaking most of those commitments. And I knew that breaking those promises would damage our credibility and trust with the acquired company, leading to performance and retention issues. And breaking those promises might still leave us short of our financial goals for the acquisition at this very high price. Underneath all of it, the contemplation showed me the thing I least wanted to see, my real motive. This deal had quietly become a capstone for me, a legacy transaction, the thing that would be in the first paragraph of the story people told about my tenure. Remember, riches, honors, pride, the whole three-step sequence from episode 10, wearing its usual respectable front. And I had been marching under that banner for at least two months while calling it strategic conviction. So what do we do? We set a walkaway price that afternoon, based on leveling the scale to our indifference point, holding aside our attachments. The process then blew through our walkaway price offer, and we walked. I won't pretend it wasn't painful. It hurt for a year. But here's the insight. The analysis never flagged the problem, because the analysis had been quietly conscripted by the attachment. The model was answering the question my ego was asking. The contemplation was the only instrument that could catch that, because it was the only one pointed at the decider, me, instead of the decision, the acquisition target. And two years later, I watched from the outside as that asset struggled under the buyer who overpaid for it. I understood that that contemplation hadn't just protected my inner life, it protected our balance sheet. Still, it took my board a while before they realized we made the right call. Better decisions and better execution of decisions, that's what this instrument does. It goes where the spreadsheet can't go, and it tells you the truth you had carefully arranged not to hear.

The Practice Step By Step

Speaker 36:13

So now let me give you the practice as an exercise. A leader's adaptation of the Ignatian imaginative contemplation. So find a quiet place where you won't be interrupted. Thirty minutes or so. Sit comfortably, take a few short breaths, and let the noise of the day settle. Then, clarify your objective. You want to enter one scene from your leadership life, past, present, or future. Enter it vividly, so you can feel it from the inside and receive whatever it shows you. First, choose the scene. For your first attempts, I point you to one of the four applications. A decision you're currently deliberating, experienced from the side of someone it will affect, or a hard conversation coming in the next two weeks, experienced from the other chair, or pre-living the decision through the stranger's visit, someone coming to you with your exact decision, asking your counsel, or the failed future of the initiative you're most excited about, entered two years downstream. Choose the one that makes you slightly reluctant. The reluctance is a signpost, it tells you something.

Speaker 37:24

Second, compose the place. Take some time here and don't rush it, because the whole contemplation stands on this foundation. Build the physical setting in specific detail. The room, the light, the time of day, what's on the table? Then apply the senses, one at a time, the way Ignatius directs. What do you see specifically? What do you hear? Not just the voices, the ambient sound underneath them. What does the chair feel like? Is the room warm? The senses are what convinces the deeper part of you that this is real enough to respond to fully and authentically. They're what drives the simulation down to the level where formation happens.

Speaker 38:08

Third, enter, and enter humbly. You aren't the director dictating the scene. Take a position inside it and take the humble one, the listener, not the speaker, the affected, not the decided. The servant in the corner, in Ignatius's beautiful staging. Let the scene begin to move.

Speaker 38:28

Fourth, at the heart of it, let it play and keep your hands off the script. This is the discipline that separates contemplation from fantasy, and I'll say more about that distinction in a moment. Your ego will try to direct the scene, to make you eloquent, to make the other person unreasonable, to skip past the painful beat. When you notice yourself directing, gently release the controls and watch what happens instead. Let the other person say what they would actually say. Let the silence happen. If something arises that you didn't choose, such as a gesture, a line, a detail, like a man looking at his hands, stay with. Those unchosen arrivals are the most valuable material in the entire exercise. They are the deeper part of you finally getting a word in.

Speaker 39:19

Fifth, notice your interior movements while the scene plays. This is examine skill, imported into the contemplation. Where do you feel consolation? Where desolation? Where does the scene go vague or resistant? What are you having trouble picturing? Mark those places. The blur is the map of the bubble. The resistance, as we've said before, is the edge of an attachment.

Speaker 39:48

Sixth, close and harvest the experience. Step out of the scene deliberately. Then ask three questions and answer them very specifically. What did I see that I didn't know before? What did this reveal about my attachments and where was the scale tilted? And what one specific thing will I do differently now because of what I saw? Remember, a contemplation that doesn't end in something concrete risks becoming the sophisticated spiritual entertainment that a first class person, in episode 11's terms, could enjoy for eleven years while changing nothing. Remember that story? Repeat this often. Different scenes, different chairs. Like everything we do here, the instrument calibrates with use. The scenes get more honest, more real. Those arrivals that you didn't plan become more frequent, and the insights richer. There's a depth here that develops over years. I'm still finding it.

Two Misuse Cautions

Speaker 40:50

Now I want to give you a warning because this instrument can absolutely be misused, and misuse looks almost identical to the real thing from the outside. The counterfeit imaginative contemplation is what we call fantasy. The ego running the projector. In fantasy you're always subtly the hero. The scene flatters you or usefully frightens you, but either way it serves the attachment. It rehearses your victory, polishes your image, or feeds your anxiety in that strangely gratifying way anxiety has. Fantasy leaves you the way Ignatius' daydreams of glory left him, stimulated, then dry. The learnings are reliable, and by now you have the tools to read them. Fantasy is controlled, contemplation surprises you. Fantasy confirms, contemplation frequently costs you something, a self-image, a comfortable distance, a decision you've already fallen in love with. And fantasy leaves desolation's residue, while true contemplation, even when it's painful, and especially when it's painful, tends to leave the sober, clean aliveness of having touched something true. You learned to read consolation and desolation in episode two. This is where that literacy pays off. Run the contemplation, then read the residue.

Speaker 42:18

Now a related caution on the failure contemplation specifically. Because I know some of you have anxious minds that need no encouragement to imagine disaster. Contemplating failure is not the same thing as ruminating on it. Rumination loops, the same catastrophic scene replayed compulsively, producing nothing but depletion. Contemplation enters the scene once, deliberately, watches it honestly, and harvests it. It then exits, with earlier signals and with a cleaner read on your attachments. Then it ends, then it stops running and it completes. If you find the failure scene running you rather than you running it, that's rumination wearing contemplation's clothes. And the residue will tell you. Rumination leaves desolation. A true failure contemplation strangely tends to leave you calmer, because the imagined catastrophe has been converted into preparation. And one more caution. This is supplemental to rigorous analysis, never a substitute. Nothing today encourages you to skip the data and rigorous analysis. It's a must. It's the and not the or, full analytical rigor and a trained imagination. The analysis tells you what the situation is. The contemplation tells you what it means, who it touches, and where you can't see clearly. The best decisions I ever made use both. The worst use only one. And very interestingly, it wasn't always the same one missing.

How Imaginative Contemplation Connects To Prior Exercises

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As always, imaginative contemplation plugs in everything we've already built. It plugs into the Examen most intimately of all because they are two halves of one capacity. The Examen trains you to read interior movements, looking backward across a real day. Contemplation generates interior movements inside an imaginative scene and reads them there. Each strengthens the other. The consolations and desolations you learn to notice during your Examen at the end of each day are the same signals you'll learn to notice mid-contemplation and eventually mid-meeting in real time, which is where this whole training program has been quietly heading all along. This is so powerful for a leader. Imaginative contemplation also goes to the foundation. Told you in episode six that the foundation lives in the nervous system, not just the beliefs. That you cannot think your way to a stable foundation. Contemplation is one of the primary means by which the foundation is actually formed at that depth, because the imagination is the doorway to the level where the automatic responses live. And the neuroscience we discussed today is the modern explanation of why. And the four foundation questions, especially what you're most afraid to lose, will tell you exactly which scenes you most need to contemplate and are most avoiding. Imaginative contemplation also goes to the field notes. When you do your annual walk through your career, you now have a new instrument. Don't just analyze the pivotal episodes, re-enter them. Compose this place, compose the scene, stand in the room where it happened, and this time stand in the other person's position. Some of the most important pattern work of my life happened when I finally contemplated a 20-year-old scene from the other side. And it flows back through episodes 8 through 11. Go redo the Call of the King, the Incarnation, the Two Standards, the Three Classes, but now do them knowing the method. Full composition of place, full application of the senses, hands off the script. I suspect you'll find as I did that meditations you thought you'd completed have entire floors beneath them you never reached.

Closing

Speaker 46:13

So now let me bring this home. Every leader runs on imagination. The only question is whose hands are on it. Undiscipline, it becomes the ego's private theater. Rehearsing victories, inflating fears, flattering the very attachments that tilt your scale. Disciplined, it becomes something else entirely, the most direct instrument you possess for entering the lives of your people, pre-living your decisions with a level scale, meeting your risks and managing them before they meet you, and closing the gap between the leader you admire and the leader you are. Ignatius discovered this on a sickbed, watching his own daydreams and having the honesty to read them. Everything else, the exercises, the tradition, this podcast flows from that one act of taking the imagination seriously

Speaker 47:08

So here's what I'd ask you to do this week. Choose one scene you've been avoiding, the conversation, the announcement, the decision, or the failure of the thing you're most attached to. And contemplate it with your multisensory imagination. Choose the place. Apply the full range of senses deeply. Enter humbly into the scene. Keep your hands off the script, and stay for whatever arises that you didn't choose or plan or script. Then do the one concrete thing it shows you. "It's not much knowledge that fills and satisfies the soul, but the interior feeling and relishing of things." Five hundred years later, that sentence is still the deepest thing anyone has said about why smart leaders don't change and how they can. The ceiling on your leadership isn't external. It never was. And some of the most important interior work you'll ever do happens in a place you've been trained your whole career to dismiss. The imagination, taken seriously at last. Until next time, thank you for listening. I'm Mike McDonnell. This is CEO Exercises.