CEO Exercises
The ceiling on your leadership isn't external. It never was. Mike McDonnell is a three-time CEO and former Jesuit. In CEO Exercises, he makes the case that developing your interior life is the highest-leverage investment a leader can make — and offers practical tools drawn from five-hundred-year-old Ignatian spirituality and The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius to help you do it. No spiritual background required.
Episodes
12 episodes
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 tr...
What Have You Actually Let Go Of? — The Two Questions That Test a Leader's Inner Freedom
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 insi...
Which Value System Is Running You?
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 a...
The Descent--The Empathy Every Leader Owes
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, fr...
Who Would You Follow - and Why?
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 c...
The Leader You've Actually Been
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, ...
Who Are You When Your Scorecard Is Empty?
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 achiev...
Inner Freedom Isn't Soft
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 Pri...
A Guided Ignatian Examen Practice
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 insig...
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 ...
The Practice Ignatius Wouldn't Give Up
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-n...