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.
CEO Exercises
Latest 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...