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.
In this season finale, host Mike McDonnell closes Season 1 of CEO Exercises by answering seventeen listener questions gathered throughout the season. He explains why he created the podcast — primarily to share practices that elevate leadership, but also to convey the growth potential and the sheer adventure of exploring the inner life — and why he began with a secularized adaptation of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. He offers practical guidance on where to start (the daily Exa...
11 Jul 2026
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 fr...
4 Jul 2026
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 insights never cross into action. Mike McDonnell argues this is why decades of investment in leadership development haven't increased engagement scores or reduced executive derailment patterns — the field keeps treating knowledge as the bottleneck when the ...
27 Jun 2026
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 are two competing value systems alive inside every leader at all times, the destructive one and the life-giving one. The destructive one never announces itself. It always arrives looking like good business. Host Mike McDonnell stages Ignatius...
20 Jun 2026
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, framed not as theology but as a leadership meditation that any leader—believer or skeptic—can use. Mike walks through Ignatius's startling staging of the scene: before any manger or baby, God surveys the whole earth, refusing to see humanity as an abstrac...
13 Jun 2026
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 capability. This episode draws on the "Second Week" and adapts one of its most important meditations, Ignatius's Contemplation of the Kingdom of Christ, also known as the Call of the King. After recapping the arc of the series so far, Mike guides l...
6 Jun 2026
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, two-hour reflective practice designed to give leaders an honest, complete picture of what kind of leader they have been across their professional lives, deepening self-awareness. The Field Notes draws on a five-hundred-year-old Ignatian practice from th...
29 May 2026
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 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 of the first five episodes as a coherent whole, showing how each built toward the central question: who...
23 May 2026
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 Principle and Foundation from the Spiritual Exercises, Mike argues that a sound foundation offers "inner freedom" by anchoring a leader's identity in something more durable than their work, their self-image, or their reputation. The episode introduce...
20 May 2026
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 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
16 May 2026
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 Igna...
10 May 2026
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-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. The Examen is where that integration happens. Mike McDonnell lays out the Ignatian...
3 May 2026
The Ceiling
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 decisions, the depth of their relationships, and the performance and fulfillment in the cult...
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