The Descent--The Empathy Every Leader Owes

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 abstraction and instead seeing particular people—weeping, laughing, being born, dying. Only after this total, particular looking does God decide to descend, entering human conditions rather than redeeming from a safe distance. Mike argues that this sequence—look first, then come down—is the central move in all empathetic leadership. He turns the lens on himself, naming the invisible "bubble" that forms around senior leaders through wealth, status, curated calendars, and filtered information, separating them from the people they lead until empathy becomes almost impossible. His core claim: empathy is not a feeling to be summoned but the fruit of a particular quality of attention. When leaders truly see individual people, empathy arrives naturally and unforced—never as performance. The episode includes a guided three-part practice (rise to the aerial view, descend into the particulars, ask "how do I come down?"), an honest reckoning with the cost of descending, and explicit connections back to the Examen, the Foundation, and the Field Notes. Mike closes by urging listeners to enter the world of one person they lead — the descent, scaled down to the size of an hour on any given day. Send CEO Exercises a message [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2601888/fan_mail/new]

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 listeners through a meditation exercise centered on three leaders, each extending the same offer to join them on a mission deeply appealing to you and aligned with your ultimate purpose. The first is the worst leader you ever worked for; the second is the best; and the third is Jesus of Nazareth, considered purely as a leader rather than a religious figure. For each, you examine the what, the why, and the how of their leadership, identify their most and least positive qualities, and decide how — and why — you would respond to their call.  The exercise is ultimately about clarifying your own leadership model. Mike shares his own answer: Humility, selflessness, freedom from disordered attachment, and love for the people right in front of you — all of it fused with a relentless commitment to the mission. He insists this is not a soft alternative to high performance but a high-performance model itself.  The episode closes by reconnecting the Second Week to the First: 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 then doing the work to get there.  Leadership at its best, Mike argues, is not a management technique but a spiritual achievement. Send CEO Exercises a message [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2601888/fan_mail/new]

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 the Spiritual Exercises — a meditation in which one systematically examines one's sins, organized by life period, to reveal deeper patterns of behavior. Mike encountered this meditation during his 30-day silent retreat as a Jesuit novice and has since refined it for secular leadership development. The secular version examines both sides of the ledger: not just failures and regrets, but moments of genuine pride, courage, effectiveness, when one is their “best self.”  The exercise is organized into three Parts. In Part One, the Positive Field Notes, leaders move through the segments of their professional life and identify the specific actions — not achievements — that represent their best self: moments of courage, integrity, generosity, or honest truth-telling. In Part Two, The Disappointments, leaders catalog the choices they made that, measured against their own values, they remember with regret or shame — such as moments of avoidance, self-protection, dishonesty, or harm to others. Critically, both Parts focus on personal agency: what you did, not what happened to you. Part Three, the Pattern Work, is where the real value emerges. By stepping back from the individual events and looking across time periods, leaders begin to identify recurring patterns and themes — the conditions under which their best self reliably appears, the triggers that reliably produce their worst behavior, and, often surprisingly, the ways in which their greatest strengths and deepest failure modes can be two sides of the same coin.  Mike closes by encouraging leaders to translate what they find into specific behavioral commitments, share their patterns with a trusted partner, and return to the practice annually. The Field Notes, he argues, provides leaders with the kind of self-knowledge that builds leadership capability and wisdom over time.       Send CEO Exercises a message [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2601888/fan_mail/new]

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 are you, really, when everything external is stripped away? From there, McDonnell moves into new territory, exploring what a sound Foundation actually feels and functions like from the inside. He argues that grounded leaders are not those who have resolved all uncertainty, but those who have developed a genuine relationship with the hardest questions about themselves — making those questions companions rather than threats. The practical consequence is significant: a leader who fears those questions spends enormous energy defending against them, energy that is permanently unavailable for leadership. A leader at peace with them is free — free to hear difficult feedback, acknowledge a failing strategy early, and make decisions from clarity rather than from ego protection. McDonnell extends his earlier metaphor of the Foundation as a cognitive operating system, arguing that a deep Foundation lives not just in beliefs but in the body and nervous system — in the automatic responses that fire before conscious thought. This means Foundation development is not intellectual work. It happens through practice, reflection, and daily examination, not through frameworks or behavioral training alone. He also observes that Foundations don't erode gradually — they fracture suddenly under pressure, precisely when clear perception matters most. The episode's centerpiece is an imaginative reconstruction of how Ignatius of Loyola himself might counsel a sitting CEO. McDonnell presents a portrait of the real Ignatius — an experienced organizational leader who had himself been driven by disordered attachments — and walks through three major components of the Principle and Foundation: the direct challenge to name one's ultimate purpose, the probing examination of where instruments have become ends in themselves, and the uncomfortable but essential question of whether the scale was truly level before a consequential deliberation began. Ignatius' concept of indifference, McDonnell argues, is not an instruction to stop caring about results. It is the precondition for the highest quality of judgment — the capacity to see clearly what a situation actually demands, undistorted by what we need to be true. McDonnell closes with two practical additions to the ongoing exercises: a periodic return to the four Foundation questions every six months, and a pre-decision check-in — a five-minute practice before any consequential choice to examine personal entanglement with the outcome. He closes with an image of the rare leader whose presence shifts the quality of attention in any room — and names that quality not as personality or style, but as the fruit of slow, cumulative interior work. Send CEO Exercises a message [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2601888/fan_mail/new]

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 introduces the Ignatian concept of indifference — not passivity or detachment, but the practice of achieving temporary inner equilibrium so that high-stakes decisions are made from clarity rather than distortions from ego or fear. Mike closes with four pointed questions designed to help listeners articulate their own Principle and Foundation, and reinforces that the daily Examen is the essential ongoing practice for making that foundation conscious, available, and constructive for the work of leadership. Send CEO Exercises a message [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2601888/fan_mail/new]