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 cultures they build.  The show explores integrating deep spirituality with high-stakes business leadership using practical, field-tested practices from 500-year-old Ignatian spirituality, adapted for busy professionals and open to listeners across beliefs. McDonnell shares his background as a three-time CEO and former Jesuit in formation, describing how a realization about the difference between happiness and fulfillment led him to the Jesuits and later back to business with a new framework for leadership. He outlines Ignatius of Loyola’s core ideas—God present and active in all things, discernment through interior movements, and freedom from “disordered attachments”—and explains the podcast’s aim to build consistent interior practice that strengthens self-awareness, humility, empathy, resilience, and clearer judgment.

Transcript

Speaker 0:12

The ceiling on your leadership isn't external. It never was. CEO exercises. That's the name of this podcast, and it's a deliberate provocation. Most leaders I know have invested seriously in their development strategically, mentally, physically. They work hard. They read, they get coaching. They take their own performance seriously in almost every dimension, almost every dimension. Very few of them have given the same disciplined attention to their interior life, not because they don't care, because they didn't think it was a priority, and nothing in the external environment rewards it directly. The market doesn't measure it. The board doesn't ask about it, and so it waits quietly setting the ceiling on everything else. This podcast makes the argument that developing your interior life is the highest leverage investment a leader can make. That the clarity of your thinking, the quality of your decisions, the depth of your relationships, the culture you build, all of it only goes as deep as you have gone yourself. And it draws on a 500 year old tradition, rigorous, practical field tested to give you the tools to actually do that work. That tradition is Ignatian spirituality. I know how that sounds. Stay with me. I'm Mike McDonnell. This is CEO exercises.

Speaker 1:50

This first episode is an introduction and foundation for the CEO exercises. It's also an appeal to all leaders, whether you continue with this podcast or not, to develop your inner life, your spirituality with as much energy and commitment as you do for your mental and physical development as a leader. The CEO exercises podcast works at the intersection of two worlds that we often compartmentalize and keep all two separate. These two worlds are deep spirituality and high stakes business leadership. I like to say that these two worlds almost never get invited to the same dinner party, and I realize that metaphor already sounds a little unusual. Which is sort of appropriate because the whole premise of the show is a little unusual. My argument, the central claim of everything we're going to do here is that developing your spirituality is one of the most powerful things you can do for your inner life, for your leadership, and honestly for the people whose lives you have the privilege of influencing through the work you do. We're going to explore how you as a busy professional, can develop your spiritual life by exercising it, using adaptations of the practices and insights from a tradition called Ignatian spirituality to find and connect with God in your business life. Now I realize I just said God and business in the same sentence. And some of you are already tilting your heads. Stay with me. I'll explain what I mean by all of that, and I promise it's not as strange as it sounds, or maybe it is, but in a good way.

Speaker 3:33

Ignatian spirituality is a 500 year old tradition developed by a man named Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius founded the Jesuits who are a religious community within the Catholic Church. Ignatius wrote what he called a practical manual for progressing in the spiritual life. He called it the Spiritual Exercises, and that's where the name of this podcast comes from. Now, these spiritual exercises and this podcast called CEO exercises aren't physical exercises. Nobody's doing pushups or burpees. No one's being asked to run a 5K for Jesus. These are exercises to develop your spiritual life. After all, you exercise your body to improve yourself. You exercise your mind to improve yourself. Why not also exercise the spiritual dimension of your life? That's the idea. A workout routine for the interior life. When I talk about spirituality on this podcast, I want to be specific because the word carries a lot of meanings. I'm not talking about religion, which is a structured system of shared beliefs and rituals and community practices. I have a deep respect for religion, and we'll talk about it, but that's not the specific focus here. What I mean by spirituality is more personal and fundamental. A dimension of your life that involves searching for and experiencing things that are greater than yourself. Deeper meaning, real purpose, genuine connection with your deepest self, with others in the world and with God, or whatever name you use for that. The invitation is open regardless of where you stand on the God question.

Speaker 5:17

And here's what the Ignatian tradition has always been about, and what I think is one of the most extraordinary possibilities available to any human being. That through grace, and yes, through hard work, you can become deeply attuned to the awareness to presence and the movement of God in all things. Not just in your prayer life or your quiet moments on Sunday morning, but in your daily work as a business leader. In that town hall meeting at a manufacturing facility, in a hiring decision, in an investor call, in a strategy session, in the hard conversation, in the decision that keeps you up at night. Now, spiritual development doesn't just form you as a person. It also helps develop traits that are shared by many of the world's most effective leaders. Think about what we're talking about here. Self-awareness, humility, empathy, resilience. The capacity to read a person or a situation with clarity, separating reality from the noise and distortion that come from self-interest, ego, fear, or being emotionally attached to a particular outcome that's not just spiritual formation. That's extraordinary leadership. We're talking about leaders who can walk into a room and perceive what's happening, not just the surface dynamics, but what's really going on and respond with the kind of insight and intuition that others can't quite explain, but can absolutely feel. Leaders who can look at an organization and accurately assess what it needs right now. Maybe a tweak of the strategy or a cultural intervention, or a structural change, or simply a coaching session with a leader. They get this ability, not because they ran the numbers, though, they did that too. But because they developed a quality of perception that cuts through complexity in ways that pure analytical intelligence simply cannot replicate and then there's the human dimension of this, which might be the most valuable part. People who have worked for these kinds of leaders will tell you sometimes years later that it was one of the most formative experiences of their professional lives that they were truly seen, not just managed. Not optimized, but seen that their work had a meaning and a quality they haven't been able to find anywhere else since that's not a small thing, that's the kind of leadership that elicits extraordinary effort and it flows directly, directly from the interior life of the leader. Who among us wouldn't want to have that kind of impact? I've mentioned traits like humility, self-awareness, resilience. These aren't just buzzword concepts. You can't open an issue of the Harvard Business Review without tripping over them. We know they matter. We know the best leaders have them. The question is, how do you develop them, not read about them, not attend a seminar about them, actually develop them at depth at what I'd call the cellular level. That is what this podcast is about. That's the intersection we're exploring. Here's a bit about my background, because I think it's either a reasonable argument for this podcast or the most confusing resume you've ever heard. Possibly both. I was honored and privileged to be a CEO three times. I led a private equity backed company, then a public company that we later took private to transform it. And then a public Fortune 500 company. Like so many other business leaders during that time, I've navigated full economic cycles, the highs, the lows, the great recession, and the slow grinds in between, I hired a lot of great people, some of whom are now CEOs themselves. I led cultural transformations and new strategies and made the hard calls. The kind of calls that keep you awake at night, staring at the ceiling, second, guessing everything. I know the pressure of quarterly earnings and how it feels to look at a board of directors or shareholders and tell them something they don't want to hear year. I understand the weight of knowing that the decisions you make affect people's livelihoods, their families. Their sense of meaning and security. I've been so fortunate to have these opportunities to learn and practice leadership.

Speaker 9:56

That part of my resume is pretty conventional, but here's the part that tends to make people do a bit of a double take. Early in my career. After four years of work, I joined the Jesuits with the intention of becoming a Jesuit priest. I left a promising corporate career to enter a religious order. The reaction from the people around me was not all I hoped it would be. Colleagues were baffled, friends thought I'd had some kind of a breakdown. The consensus seemed to be Mike seemed like he was on a good track, but something has gone wrong, and I get it. It's not a conventional move, but here's how it happened.

Speaker 10:37

It wasn't a dramatic lightning bolt moment. There was no vision, no apparition, no burning bush. It actually started, and I'm completely serious about this, with a burrito dinner. I was a few years into my career as a chemical engineer. We had just wrapped up a complex successful project that kind of takes everything you have for months on end, and when it's finally over, there's an enormous release of relief and pride. We were celebrating, I was having dinner with my boss, who was a great guy, smart, respected the kind of leader you want to work for. We were eating burritos, his treat and my favorite food, and celebrating the win. And he started talking about how deeply fulfilled he felt when we achieved successes like this one, he was glowing, he was describing this engineering success as though it were the pinnacle of human experience. Like he had arrived somewhere meaningful and permanent. And I remember sitting there chewing my burrito, nodding along. And feeling nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. I felt happy that we'd succeeded. I felt relief. I felt the ordinary satisfaction that comes with finishing something hard, but deeply fulfilled. That profound sense that this was my purpose in my professional life. No, that was not happening.

Speaker 12:03

And it was the first time I fully grasped something that I think I've been circling around for a while. There is a difference between happiness and fulfillment. Happiness is a feeling, a mood. It comes and goes. Fulfillment is a state of being. It's quieter. It goes all the way down. And sitting at that table, I realize I didn't have it in my professional life. If you've ever worked hard for something, achieved it and then found it strangely empty, you know exactly what I mean, that gap is real and it matters more than most of us realize.

Speaker 12:43

That moment planted a seed, a curiosity about purpose and meaning. That is usually how these spiritual experiences begin. In a trivial moment. Over the next couple of years, that realization sparked a genuine curiosity about God, purpose, meaning, and connection. Just a small thread. I started pulling on it slowly at first. Then with increasing conviction. Until eventually that curiosity became a decision, I decided to follow it to what I can only describe as an invitation to find God. To serve something larger than my own career ambitions, to orient my life in a direction that felt real and honest and fulfilling in a way nothing else quite did. And I knew deep in my gut that there was no better time to make the change than right then, before a mortgage, before family, before the lifestyle I was growing into got too comfortable. So I joined the Jesuits. And I still think about that burrito dinner. An insignificant moment that changed my life

Speaker 13:55

During my years in formation as a Jesuit , and formation is a long, rigorous process, nobody fast tracks you into religious life, I went deep into Ignatian spirituality and what I discovered was not what I expected. I expected something otherworldly, something removed from ordinary life. What I found instead was a spirituality that is radically, intensely practical and pragmatic, rooted in real experience seeing the sacred, grounded in the actual texture and complexity of daily life. Ignatius was not interested in spirituality as an escape from the world. He was interested in spirituality as a way of engaging the world more fully, more truthfully, more wisely.

Speaker 14:45

But here's where my story takes another unexpected turn. As I went through those years of formation, something was happening in my inner life that I did not anticipate. I discerned, and discernment is a key concept in Ignatian spirituality. One will spend a lot of time on. I discerned that my vocation was not to be in a church. Or in a school or in any formal religious context, my vocation was to be back out there in the messy, contradictory, pressure-filled world of business. Now to a Jesuit, my vocation in business wasn't as strange as it might sound. Jesuits are teachers, physicians, authors, scientists, anthropologists, astronomers, mathematicians, and much more. In Ignatian spirituality, God is present in all things, not just in sacred spaces, but also in laboratories and classrooms, and yes, boardrooms and manufacturing plants. And we all know that business leaders can have a significant impact on the people in their organizations. Through the cultures, they build the values, they embody the quality of work they make possible, the incomes and stability they provide. That impact matters. That's mission and that I came to understand was my calling.

Speaker 16:08

It wasn't possible to be a Jesuit and work in business simultaneously, so I left the Jesuits. I still remain close to them. I'm deeply grateful to them and that formation shaped so much about me. But I left and returned to my business career, except now I was carrying something I hadn't had before. An inner depth, a framework, a set of practices, and a way of seeing God, others and the world that changed how I led. As I reflect back. Much of whatever success I had as a business leader was rooted in my ability to integrate Ignatian spirituality into my leadership.

Speaker 16:48

Two ideas sit at the foundation of everything Ignatius built. I want to share them now because nearly everything we'll discuss on this podcast flows from them. You don't have to sign on to these right now. Just stay curious and keep pulling on the thread. The first -God is present in all things, in all situations, in all circumstances of our daily lives, not just on Sunday mornings, not just in quiet moments of private reflection in the actual gritty, complicated real material of your life, including your business life. That difficult decision you've been wrestling with. God is in that. The celebration when you land a significant new contract, God is in that. That interview with a candidate for your senior leadership team, that tense conversation with a board member who's questioning your strategy, that painful discovery of misconduct in one of your foreign operations, God is in all of it. The premise is that finding and connecting with God in these ordinary, everyday high pressure situations is not a distraction from spirituality. It is spirituality. It's where the real work happens.

Speaker 17:59

And then there's a second idea, which to me is even more alive and more demanding. God is active and at work in all things and invites us to participate in creating the future that God desires for us. Ignatius saw human beings as co-creators. We're not passive recipients of a predetermined plan, but active participants in shaping what comes next, in collaboration with something larger than us. As business leaders, we have enormous latitude in how we do our work, the values we bring, the kind of culture we build, the way we treat people, the decisions we make when the profitable option and the ethical option aren't the same thing. That space, the space of our choices and our influence, that's where we can partner with God in building something that moves us toward the greater good.

Speaker 18:55

Ignatius was born in 1491 in the Basque region of Spain into a noble family. By his own account in his autobiography, which is one of the more honest and self-aware autobiographies I've ever read, he was not, in his early years, a particularly spiritual person. He describes himself as, and I quote, "A man given up to the vanities of the world whose chief delight was the exercise of arms with a great and vain desire to gain honor in modern terms." He was ambitious, competitive, ego-driven, quick-tempered, and primarily motivated by status and glory. He wanted to be somebody. He wanted to be impressive. I can relate to some of these. Maybe you can too. Then in 1521 at the Battle of Pamplona, a cannonball shattered one of his legs and badly wounded the other. He suffered through a nine month painful treatment and recovery at his family's castle. And remember we're talking about 16th century medicine here. Weeks of lying there, unable to do much of anything. He was bored and desperate for distraction. He wanted novels, stories of romance and adventure and chivalry. But all he got, because it was all it was available, were books about the life of Christ and the lives of the saints. He read them reluctantly the way any of us would approach something we didn't particularly want to do. But he read them. And then he noticed something interesting about his own interior experience when he daydreamed about his old life. His courtly ambitions, the social prestige, the romantic conquests. He felt a rush of excitement and pleasure, but when those fantasies faded, he was left feeling dry, empty, and a little hollow. When he imagined a different kind of life, a life of simplicity, of service, of following Christ, something different happened. He felt a deep, settled, lasting peace. Not the exciting rush of the fantasies, but something quieter and more durable, something that didn't evaporate when the daydream ended.

Speaker 21:16

Ignatius being Ignatius, a man trained to pay close attention to detail in royal Courts and on battlefields, he started paying careful attention to this pattern. He began to realize that God was communicating with him through his own interior life. Through his desires, his feelings, his imagination, through the quality of what he experienced on the inside. This realization, that we can discern direction and truth by paying careful attention to our internal movements, became the bedrock of Ignatian spirituality. The whole tradition flows from this discovery. He spent decades fine tuning his awareness and understanding of these inner movements. He kept careful notes on his spiritual journey, and he used them to guide others, learning also from their experiences. He continued to revise them for many years as his spirituality matured. Those notes eventually became a book titled The Spiritual Exercises. Officially approved by Pope Paul III in 1548 in continuous use for nearly 500 years. That's a long run for any methodology.

Speaker 22:30

The goal of the exercises at the most fundamental level is intimacy with God, but the pathway to that intimacy runs through a very specific kind of interior work, becoming free from what Ignatius called disordered attachments. This is a phrase worth sitting with because it is directly relevant to anyone in a leadership role. Disordered attachments are the things we clinging to that distort our vision and compromise our judgment. Things like status, money, approval, that need to be right, that need to be in control. The fear of looking weak. These aren't necessarily bad things in themselves, but when we're attached to them in a disordered way, they start running the show. They shape our decisions in ways we don't even recognize. We stop choosing based on what's right or true or good, and we start choosing what protects our ego, our image, our position. Every leader I know has experienced this, including me, possibly including you.

Speaker 23:38

The Ignatian path leads to an inner freedom. Freedom from those distortions, freedom to see clearly, choose wisely and act generously. The Jesuits have a beautiful phrase for this kind of person, a contemplative and action.

Speaker 23:54

After founding the Jesuits in 1540, he spent the last 16 years of his life as essentially the CEO of a rapidly growing multinational organization. He was managing personnel, allocating resources, building a culture of performance, navigating strategy across different countries, cultures and volatile political contexts, all through handwritten letters that took weeks or months to arrive. No email, no slack, no video calls, and he did it with remarkable effectiveness. The Jesuits grew from a small band of companions into a globally influential organization that has endured for nearly 500 years. Whatever Ignatius was doing as a leader, it worked. His spirituality and his leadership weren't separate things. They were the same thing. That integration is the central point of this podcast.

Speaker 24:55

Now, I know some of you want more than just a 500 year old track record for a spiritual tradition, you want evidence that links it to leadership. The neuroscience here is really compelling. Modern brain imaging research shows that contemplative practices can physically reshape the brain in ways that directly improve decision making, emotional regulation, resilience, and empathy. The very same qualities we've been talking about. It deserves a full episode, and I'm going to give it one for now. Let's just say the ancient tradition and the modern lab are telling the same story.

Speaker 25:37

Here's what this podcast is not about. I'm not here to convince you that God exists. That's not my job, and frankly, I don't think it's anyone's job. That's a personal journey. And it unfolds on its own timeline in its own way for every person, whether you're a committed believer, an agnostic, a skeptic, a seeker, or someone who just happened to find this podcast because the algorithm was feeling adventurous, you're welcome here. The tools and practices we'll discuss can be useful regardless of where you currently stand on the question of God.

Speaker 26:15

I am also not here to promise that doing these exercises will make you a better person in a moral sense. Candidly, my spiritual practices have not made me someone who consistently chooses the right thing. I've made many mistakes in my leadership and in my personal life, the kind that I think about sometimes, and wince. These practices didn't eliminate those tendencies. What they did was make me more aware of the moral dimensions of my behaviors and decisions. They turned the lights on. And seeing clearly is different from always choosing correctly, but it is the necessary first step.

Speaker 26:53

So what's the plan? Here's how I'm thinking about this. I'll drop an Exercises episode every week or two on average as we find our rhythm. I'll draw on the tools, practices, and insights that I found most helpful to me and to others over the years. We'll connect the dots between the ancient tradition and the modern boardroom, between the interior life and the leadership challenge. We'll evolve over time into different formats, and I'll package it all in a way that fits into your incredibly busy schedule. If you're like I was, I didn't have time to spare for much beyond work and family, but I always found time for this.

Speaker 27:38

Here's my hope for you after this first episode: that you leave feeling motivated to develop your inner life, with or without this podcast. To take this dimension of yourself as seriously as you would the mental and physical dimensions. That's the real goal. Whatever path you choose to get there, I hope you choose something. Whatever way you go. Look to build a regular practice, a rhythm of interior attention in a life that is otherwise very loud, very fast, and very outwardly focused. Consistency is the key. A small, regular, faithful practice over time produces the kind of change that sporadic, intensive efforts simply cannot. And remember, you don't need to become a mystic, but you can become a leader who has a well-developed interior life. Those are very different things, and the second is entirely compatible with a full demanding professional life. This is slow, deep, cumulative work. It builds over time, not in a weekend retreat. But I've worked this integration for nearly 40 years. It's possible, and it's worth it.

Speaker 28:49

I want to close this first episode with a personal reflection. I spent a long time wondering whether I should do this, whether I was the right person, whether the combination of ex Jesuit and three time CEO was a credential, or just a punchline. Whether anyone would find it useful. I went back and forth on it for longer than I care to admit. What kept bringing me back was a simple conviction. I had to do something to help others who wanted experience the fruits of integrating spirituality into their leadership. Why? Because I've seen in my own life what it means to lead from a place of spiritual depth. To make hard decisions with an interior freedom. To sit with uncertainty without being paralyzed by it. To care authentically about the people in your organization, not as assets or resources, but as people, because your spiritual practice has been slowly eroding your ego and slowly growing your capacity to see and understand other human beings. I received a great gift in my Jesuit formation, but then I had to figure out almost on my own how to integrate it with my business career. There wasn't much help out there to navigate this intersection. Maybe I can help a few people go farther than I was able to go.

Speaker 30:08

This is what I hope for you. Whatever your background, whatever your tradition or lack of one, whatever your level of skepticism, I want to offer you a set of tools, practices, and insights that can help you become a more whole person and a more complete leader. Because here's the thing about trying to keep your spiritual life separate from your business life, living that way is exhausting. It costs energy you don't have to spare. But most important, it means you're only ever bringing part of yourself to each world, part of yourself to your spiritual life, part of yourself to your leadership, never the whole person. This podcast is about lowering the barrier between those two worlds. Not to blur the line between the sacred and the secular, but to stop pretending they have little to say to each other. To bring your whole self to both to discover that the same interior qualities that bring you closer to God are the very qualities that make you a better leader, and that the real world crucible of leadership is one of the most powerful laboratories for spiritual growth available to you.

Speaker 31:16

Ignatius figured this all out 500 years ago, beginning on a cot in his family's castle, reading books he didn't particularly want to read, with a shattered leg and a demolished career. He figured out that the interior life is not separate from the active life. They are the same life lived with attention. Intention and a willingness to keep asking the deeper questions. That's the invitation. That's what we're doing here. Most of the work you've done on yourself as a leader has been about expanding your capabilities, learning more, thinking more clearly, performing more consistently. That work matters. Keep doing it.

Speaker 31:58

But capability is not the ceiling. It never was.

Speaker 32:03

The leaders who have the most profound and lasting impact-- the ones whose judgment seems almost uncanny, whose people would go through walls for them, who can hold complexity without being consumed by it-- they've done a different kind of work. They've gone inward with the same rigor and intentionality they've brought to everything else. They developed the interior life that the outer work demands. That's what we're building here. Not a softer version of leadership development. A deeper one. The tools exist. They're 500 years old and they work. The only question is whether you're willing to treat your interior life as seriously as you've treated everything else. I think you are. Otherwise, you wouldn't still be listening. I'm Mike McDonnell. This is CEO exercises. Thank you for listening.