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 Examen as a 15-minute daily discipline that builds spiritual depth and practical leadership self-awareness at the same time.   Mike also translates the practice for listeners who are skeptical or still sorting out the God question, without watering down what the Examen is meant to do. 

Transcript

Leadership Ceiling Starts Within

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Last week we talked about the ceiling on your leadership. The ceiling that isn't external, the one that's not set by your context or your challenges or your strategy. It's not set by your team. It's not set by the market or your board. It is set by how far inward you've been willing to go. I also made a claim last week that I want to return to before we go further, that the same interior qualities that bring you closer to God are the very qualities that make you a better leader. I believe that, I've lived that. And today I want to give you the exercise, the daily discipline that builds those qualities. Not as a theory, but as something you can start tonight. Before I do, here's something worth considering for a moment. You will have somewhere between twenty and fifty significant interactions today, conversations that carry real weight, decisions made, trust built or eroded, judgment exercised under pressure, emotions navigated or avoided. You will feel things in those interactions that carry real information, discomfort that's telling you something, clarity that arrives unexpectedly, a flash of irritation that if examined would reveal something worth knowing about yourself. And almost none of it will be examined. Without examination, those inner experiences can't become windows into your interior life. You miss what they're trying to tell you about yourself, about the people you lead, about the situations that are unfolding around you. You miss the chance to build deep interior attentiveness and exercise real agency over your own inner life. By tonight, most of it will be gone. Not because you don't care about it, but because you don't yet have an exercise routine to help you notice and understand these interior movements. A disciplined daily practice of interior review, not therapy, not journaling in the conventional sense, not a productivity audit, but a specific, structured practice for processing your experience at a level that changes you. That practice exists. It's 500 years old. It's called the Examine. I'm Mike McDonnell. This is CEO Exercises. Ignatius of Loyola developed the examine in the 16th century. If you heard the first episode, you have a sense of who he was, a nobleman, turned mystic, and founder of one of the most intellectually rigorous and globally impactful organizations in the history of the Catholic Church. I first encountered the examine as a young Jesuit novice. Our novice master introduced it to our small group with a directness I've always remembered. He told us this was the most practical and most powerful practice available to us, the most reliable way to develop our spiritual lives, to find God in the midst of daily experience, and understand how God was present and active in and through our lives. Not a bad opening pitch. I started practicing it twice a day, as Ignatius had directed for all Jesuits. And what struck me from the very beginning was that the examine felt less like a review and more like an encounter. Each time I sat down to do it, something happened that I could only describe as a meeting with God and with myself. In the Ignatian tradition, those two things turned out not to be entirely separate. I've been practicing it in one form or another for nearly forty years, and it has never once felt like a chore. I want to give you a fuller picture of how this practice came to be, because the origin story matters. Ignatius developed the examine in the midst of an active life. The first insights began during his recovery from a serious battlefield injury by paying careful attention to his interior experiences. He had a lot of time to lie there and think. And what he noticed was that different kinds of thoughts and feelings left him in different interior states, some alive and hopeful, others restless and flat. He started paying attention to that, carefully, systematically. When he was well enough to leave home, he spent the next ten months at a place called Manresa. There he underwent intense spiritual experiences, consolations, desolations, illuminations. He kept careful track of his interior states, observing patterns and how he moved through them. This practice of regular interior review, essentially a lived examin, gave rise to the formal practice he later codified in the spiritual exercises. Ignatius eventually practiced the examin as often as once per hour as a principal way of connecting with God. His autobiography, written in third person, records that he reached a point where he could find God any time he chose. And I quote from him every time, any hour that he wished to find God, he found him. That is the ultimate fruit of this practice, the capacity to find the divine in all things at any moment. And it was built over years through the daily discipline of looking inward. The examine became a cornerstone of Jesuit practice, one of the very few fixed rules of prayer Ignatius imposed on the Society of Jesus. Every Jesuit must practice it twice daily, at noon and at the end of the day. When asked what single practice a Jesuit should prioritize when apostolic demands crowded out everything else, Ignatius said the examine. Not the Mass, not the divine office, the examine. He was flexible about nearly every other form of prayer. The examine was non-negotiable. That should tell you something. So what exactly is the exam? Well let me start with what it isn't. The examine is not a secular self-examination. It is not merely reflecting on what you did well and what you could have done better. That kind of reflection is useful, it has a purpose, and it can sharpen your performance, but it doesn't reach the deeper territory the exam is designed to explore. The examine asks you not only to look at your actions, but importantly also your thoughts and your words throughout the day, and the interior movements that precede all of them. The feelings, moods, urges, and impulses that you experience throughout the day. It offers awareness, insight, and understanding of your interior life. It opens you to questions that most leaders almost never ask. What is happening inside of me? Why? What does it tell me? The practice typically runs 15 minutes and is done at the end of the day. It has five steps which I'll walk through very carefully. It probably sounds simple. It isn't. Not because it's complicated. Anyone can learn the five steps in about 10 minutes. The difficulty is that paying careful attention to your own experience is really hard for high achieving people. We are trained by our education, our careers, our culture, to direct attention outward to the problem, the opportunity, the next quarter, the person across the table. Turning that same quality of attention inward consistently is a discipline. It takes time to develop. And it builds in ways that are slow at first, and then quietly transformative. Here's what it builds over time: a self-knowledge that is qualitatively different from anything a 360 review, a coach, or a personality assessment can give you. Those tools tell you how others see you or how you compare to a model. The examin tells you from the inside what's driving you and in what directions. That is information of a fundamentally different order. Before I walk you through the five steps, I want to be clear about something. The examin is a spiritual practice. That's not a caveat, that's the point. I practice it the way Ignatius practiced it, as a daily conversation with God, a review of where I found him and where I missed him in the texture of my day. The growth I've experienced through this practice, in self-awareness, in leadership, in the integration of my inner life and my work, comes directly from practicing it that way. I'll speak to it from that place because that's where I live. But I also know that many of the leaders listening to this are somewhere else on the God question, skeptical maybe, still searching, or just simply not there. I'll speak to that too, and I'll be clear when I'm doing it, because the exam still offers something real, even in those earlier stages of the journey. What I won't do is water it down to make it more comfortable or more superficial. That wouldn't serve you. So let's go through it carefully. Before the review begins, there's a little bit of preparation. Take time to ground yourself in the present moment. Take a few slow deep breaths. Let the activity and noise of the day settle. You're making a transition from doing to attending. And the preparation creates the conditions for that shift. Step one is gratitude. You begin not with review and not with what went wrong, you begin with gratitude. For Ignatius, for Jesuits, for me, this is more than a mood reset. It's an act of theological honesty. Everything I have, my life, every capacity, every relationship, every opportunity, is something I'm grateful for. They are gifts, and yes, I worked hard and used what I was given to the best of my ability, but they are gifts. The gratitude step is a moment of acknowledging that, of saying, before I assess my day, let me be grateful for all I have and recognize that these are gifts. I can tell you the moment when this step changed for me in a way I didn't see coming. I was making the 30-day silent retreat, the full spiritual exercises, and I was deep into the fourth week. I went out for a run one morning, in between prayer sessions, and somewhere out on that run, something happened that I can only describe as an experience of presence. Not an idea, not a theological proposition, a presence. I could see it, hear it, feel it, smell it, almost taste it. The presence of God abiding in all things and active in all things, in the trees, in my own breathing, in the ground under my feet. That was forty years ago. I can still see it. And what changed from that day forward was that gratitude stopped being something I practiced in retrospect during the exam, and started breaking through in real time, spontaneously, in the middle of an ordinary moment, a conversation, a difficult meeting, a walk across a parking lot to my car. The practice had moved from something I did during the exam to something I was beginning to inhabit during the day. That shift from retrospective gratitude to gratitude as a way of moving through the world is one of the quiet fruits of this practice. It takes time, but it becomes real. For a business leader, even in the early stages, this step is a surprisingly powerful reorientation. Your day almost certainly contained both difficulty and gift. But your natural cognitive tendencies, particularly the negativity bias hardwired into every human brain and sharpened by years of leadership pressure, will pull hard toward the difficulty. Gratitude first pushes back. It is in its quiet way an act of resistance against a very ingrained habit of mind. So you ask, what am I grateful for today? Not generally or abstractly, specifically, concretely, the conversation that went better than expected, the team member who came through when it mattered, the unexpected clarity on a problem you've been stuck on for weeks. For those who are skeptical or not there on the God question, you don't have to direct this gratitude anywhere in particular to benefit from the step. What matters is the act of noticing, specifically and concretely, what was given today. That's a real interior shift, regardless of how you frame it theologically. Step two is petition. Before you review your day, you pause to ask for help in seeing it clearly. For Ignatius, and for me, this petition is an address to God. It is a recognition that I cannot fully see myself on my own, that the clarity I'm seeking is at least in part a grace. My ego is too invested, my defenses are too practiced, so before I look, I ask for help looking. There is something humbling about this step that I find useful as a leader. Before I have reviewed a single thing, I have already acknowledged my limitations. That turns out to be a good place from which to start. For the skeptic on the God question, the essential interior act here is choosing openness over defensiveness before you begin. Setting aside your ego's preference for a favorable account. Deciding in advance that you're willing to see what's really there. That is harder than it sounds. It may be one of the more difficult things a leader can practice consistently. And it is the move this step is asking for, regardless of how you frame it spiritually. Step three is the review. Here's the key instruction, the one that most distinguishes the examine from ordinary reflection on your day. You are not reviewing events. You are reviewing the feelings associated with those events. More precisely, you're reviewing what Ignatius called consolations and desolations. Consolations indicate movement toward God, and desolations indicate movement away from God. These are the interior movements of your experience. Where did you feel alive, energized, aligned, present, hopeful, peaceful? Where did you feel drained, diminished, self-obsessed, anxious, frustrated, empty, resentful? You walk through the day, attending carefully to those movements. For Ignatius, consolations and desolations are more than emotional weather. They are spiritual data, the way the inner life communicates. They point to what is life-giving and away from what diminishes life. Over years of practicing examine, I've learned to take them seriously as information, not as commands, but as genuine signals worth attending to. This is where the practice becomes most challenging for senior leaders. As a profession, we're not trained to value our feelings as data. We're trained to manage them, suppress them, project calm regardless of them. The examin asks something different, to treat your inner experience as a primary source of information about what's actually happening in your work, in your relationships, and in your interior life. A concrete example. You have a difficult conversation with a board member. On the surface it went fine, professional, productive, but something's been bothering you since. A low grade discomfort you can't quite name. In the exam, you sit with that discomfort. You don't push it away, you look at it, and you discover that what bothers you is not what the board member said, but something you said, an answer that wasn't fully candid, a position you took that you don't quite believe. That is important information, the kind that leads to better decisions, stronger relationships, and a more coherent sense of who you are as a leader. Or the opposite. You spend an hour in a strategic planning session with a small team and notice that something lit up in you during that hour. An engagement and aliveness you haven't felt in other contexts lately. The examine asks you to pay attention to that. What was it about that experience? What does it tell you about where your leadership is most alive and where you should be investing more of yourself? Consolations and desolations are not just emotional weather, they are data. And the examine is how you learn to read them. Now for the skeptic on the God question, the review still works if you approach consolations and desolations simply as emotional information. Signals about what energizes you and what depletes you, what aligns with your values and what doesn't. You don't have to hold a theological interpretation of these signals to benefit from paying careful attention to them. What matters is that you take them seriously. Step four is reflection. Here you look honestly at where you fell short today, not in a self-flagellating way, not with the kind of harshness that shuts down reflection rather than deepening it. But honesty. Where did you miss the mark? Where did your ego override your better judgment? Where were you less truthful, less present, less courageous than you could have been? Where did you move away from God's presence? For Ignatius and for me, this step includes an expression of sorrow for those failures and a request for forgiveness. That is not a ritual formality. It is a real interior act. I've led from places of fear and ego more times than I'd care to count. There is something that happens when you name that honestly before God, a release that's different from simply noting it and moving on. I'll be honest though, this step took me a long time to do well. For years when I sat down for step four, what I was actually conducting was a kind of a performance review. What did I do well? What could I have done better? It was tidy, it was manageable, and I completely missed the point. The real work of this step, moving from here's what I did wrong, to sitting with the actual feeling of having led from fear or ego or impatience, without flinching and without quietly constructing a reasonable explanation for why anyone would have done the same thing, that's a different level of honesty altogether. Facing your own full humanness, with all its contradictions and blind spots and recurring patterns, without being overwhelmed by it or rationalizing it away, that takes practice. More practice than I expected, honestly. And I say that as someone who practiced this tradition formally and had excellent teachers and mentors. The gap between understanding the step and doing it is real, and I don't want to paper over it. Now, for those who are skeptical about the God question, the essential goal here is honest accounting without rationalization, followed by a genuine letting go. Not carrying your failures into tomorrow is either guilt or denial, but processing them, owning them, and releasing them. I've known leaders so afraid to acknowledge their failures that they couldn't learn from them. I've also known leaders so burdened by their failures that they couldn't recover from them. This step done well is the path between those two traps. And finally, the last step, step five, is the look ahead. You end not in the past but in tomorrow. You look at what's coming, the conversations, the decisions, the challenges ahead, and you bring to them the awareness you've just developed. Where might tomorrow be difficult? Where might you encounter the same patterns you noticed today? How can my thoughts, words, and actions be more aligned with consolation and less with desolation? Where is there an opportunity to lead better tomorrow than you did today? The opportunity is to be more aware of God's presence and action. For Ignatius and for me, this is the moment of recommitment to the values, the relationships, and the purposes that matter most. It's also explicitly a moment of hope. Not thin optimism, not a forced positivity that papers over real difficulty, but the deeper kind that comes from believing the change is possible, that the interior work you're doing is slowly, cumulatively making a difference. I experience the step as something close to a prayer of intention for the next. Day. I find that it changes how I enter the next morning. There is something about closing a day consciously, really closing it, that makes the next day feel more open. For those who are skeptical on the God question, think of this as a deliberate intention rather than prayer. You can close the day consciously. You open tomorrow with direction. That small habit accumulated over months and years adds up to something significant. You might be wondering whether this practice really needs to be daily, whether you could do it once a week or when things get particularly difficult or when the mood strikes. Let me be direct. The daily practice is the practice. The examine is not an occasional audit. There is a different tool for that. The examine is the continuous, finely tuned awareness of your interior life. What it builds over time is something you might call interior sensitivity, the ability to notice subtle movements in your experience and read them accurately. That sensitivity only develops through consistency. Doing it occasionally is like going to the gym once a month and wondering why you're not getting stronger. For a business leader specifically, the daily rhythm matters because the stakes of your interior life are daily. You're making consequential decisions every day. The people you lead are being affected by your ego, your fears, your blind spots every day. The examine is not a luxury addition to an already full life. It's a daily maintenance on the interior equipment that runs everything else. I want to spend a few minutes on something I raised in the last episode because it goes to the heart of what this podcast is about. How does the interior life, the spiritual life, actually meet the leadership life? Not in the abstract, but in the concrete reality of a working day. This is the question I find myself returning to again and again, both in my own practice and in my conversations with leaders I work with. And the examine is where I've found the most honest answer. Ignatius taught that God could be found in all things, not only in prayer or the sacraments or formal religious practice, but in the ordinary movements of human experience, in work, in relationships, in the small decisions and large crises of daily life. For Ignatius, the examine was the practice by which you learn to find God there, to notice where the divine was present in the texture of your actual day. Here's what that looks like for me in practice. When I do the examine and review a moment of genuine care for someone on my team, a moment when I set aside my own agenda and truly listen. When I saw them as full human beings deserving of dignity and respect, I don't simply note that as good management. I experience it as love operating in the world, worth noticing, worth savoring, worth asking how I might do more of it. When I review a decision I made under pressure and notice it came from fear or ego rather than from an inner clarity, free from those inordinate attachments, that is also spiritual information, not cause for shame, but information. Where was the fear coming from? Why was my ego straining for a particular outcome? What would it look like to make a decision from an inner freedom from these biases? When I notice moments of real flow where my specific gifts aligned with the needs of the situation, where I felt most alive and useful, I've come to understand those as signposts. The examin asked me to pay attention to them, accumulate them over time, and let them inform my larger sense of direction and calling. That is what I meant last week when I said that the same interior qualities that bring you closer to God are the very qualities that make you a better leader, a leader who makes better decisions. The examine is how you develop those qualities. It's how the integration of the inner life and the leadership life really happens, not as a concept, but as a daily practice. The invitation here is not to import God artificially into your business life, as a religious overlay on otherwise secular activity. The invitation is to discover that the divine was already present in the moments of genuine connection, courage, and real service, and that the examine is simply the practice by which you learn to see it. That is a different way of experiencing a workday. Over time it changes things. Let me give you the summary before I let you go. Five steps. Gratitude first. Recognize what was given today, specifically and concretely, before you assess anything else. two, petition. Ask for the clarity, honesty, and courage to see yourself accurately, and choose openness over your ego's preferred version of events. Step three, review. Walk through the day attending not to the events but to your interior movements, the consolations and desolations, the feelings, the moments of aliveness and diminishment. Step four, reflection. Look honestly at where you fell short. Own it without self-denigration and let it go. Step five, look ahead. Turn toward tomorrow with intention, with hope, and with a conviction that this work is cumulative. Fifteen minutes, done daily. That's the practice. I want to be clear about what the first few weeks will feel like. Slightly awkward. You'll be unsure whether you're doing it right, you'll sit down to begin the review and discover you can barely remember what happened this morning, let alone what you were feeling during it. You'll find that 15 minutes is either much longer or much shorter than you expected. You'll wonder whether what you're noticing is significant or whether you're just sitting quietly with mild confusion. Stay with it. Return to the level of feelings and remember that you're a work in progress. The examine is not a performance review. You're not trying to score well. You're learning to see. The discomfort at the beginning is not a sign that it isn't working. It's a sign that you're doing something really new. Paying a quality of attention to your inner life that it hasn't received before. One day at a time. Just keep going. And if you do, here's what I expect you'll find. Your self-awareness will deepen into real understanding of your biases, your ego-driven motivations, and your blind spots. Your decisions will improve, not because the examine gives you better information about the external world, but because it gives you better information about yourself and about how you interpret the world. Your capacity for genuine gratitude and appreciation will strengthen the people around you in ways that show up in retention, engagement, and performance. The stress that previously accumulated without outlet will begin to move, building over time into something more like sustained resilience. And you'll develop a deeply ingrained moral self-accountability that quietly guards against the kind of ethical drift that eventually catches up with leaders who never do this work. But perhaps most importantly, for those of you on the journey of integrating your inner life with your leadership, you'll find that this practice is where the integration in fact happens. Not through insight or intention alone, through showing up for 15 minutes at the end of each day and learning, one day at a time, to see what's truly there. The ceiling isn't external. We established that last week. The same interior qualities that bring you closer to God are the very qualities that make you a better leader. The examine is how you develop them. I'm Mike McDonnell. This is CEO Exercises. Thank you for listening.