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.

Transcript

Introduction

Speaker 0:10

There is a distance between you and the people you lead. And the higher you've risen on the organizational chart, the wider that distance has grown, and the less able you are to see it. It doesn't feel like distance from the inside. It feels like reality. It feels like the way things are. Today we're going to do something about that. We're going to talk about one of the more cinematic meditations in Ignatius' spiritual exercises, a scene in which the view from above and the decision to come down are held in the same moment. I'm going to make a claim that I'll defend across the next thirty minutes or so, that the central move in this meditation is also the central move in any leadership worth following. I've been looking forward to recording this episode. Of course, all of these CEO exercises work together on the whole you. It's hard to associate any one exercise with an impact on a particular leadership trait. But this particular meditation changed me more than many of the others. Not in a lightning bolt way, in the way water shapes stone. It made me more empathetic, and not in a performed I read the chapter on active listening way, in a way that felt like something underneath the surface had been quietly rewired. I'm Mike McDonnell, this is CEO Exercises. Let's begin.

Speaker 1:34

In episode eight, we crossed a threshold. The first seven episodes were largely about self awareness and inner freedom. The examine, the foundation, the field notes. The first week in ignition terms. And then in episode eight we moved into the territory of the second week, where the exercises shift toward the external. In this podcast series, that external shift is about building leadership capability. We considered three leaders side by side and asked who we'd actually follow and why. One of those three, you'll remember, was Jesus of Nazareth, considered purely as a leader. I asked you to set the theological question aside and examine the leadership model on its merits, the way you'd study any case. Today I want to stay right there in the second week, and stay with that same figure. But go to one specific scene, because in the structure of the spiritual exercises, this is exactly where Ignatius takes you next. Right after the call of the king comes a contemplation he simply calls the incarnation. And I've come to believe it contains one of the more important pieces of leadership instruction I've encountered, hiding inside one of the most powerful gospel passages. A reminder of the agreement I've made with you throughout this season. I practice this as a person of faith. That's where I live, that's what I'm about, and I won't pretend otherwise. But in this series, these exercises are secular adaptations, where we extract leadership exercises from Ignatius' spiritual exercises. As I said in prior episodes, you don't have to believe anything theologically to do this work. You have to be willing to use your imagination and to look honestly at what you find. That's all.

A View From Above Then Descent

Speaker 3:22

So let's start with the scene. When you open the spiritual exercises to the second week, you arrive at the incarnation, God becoming human in Jesus. Now you'd expect that to be staged like a Christmas card, an angel, Mary, and eventually a stable, a star, a baby, and shepherds. And we'll get there. That's not where Ignatius begins. He begins before the drama. He asks you to imagine God looking down at the whole surface of the earth, the entire expanse of the world, he writes, full of human beings. Picture it. Before any rescue has been launched, before anything has been decided, God is looking, just looking, taking it all in. And then Ignatius does something I find fascinating in its specificity. He refuses to let you picture humanity as an abstraction, as a concept, a gray mass, a bundle, a statistic. He insists you see the particulars. People people of every kind, some in peace and some at war, some weeping and some laughing, some healthy, some sick, some being born and some dying. The high and the low, the rich and the poor going about their lives in every conceivable condition and mood. He wants you to hear it too. Listen, he says, to what the people on the face of the earth are saying, the ordinary conversation, the arguments, cries. And then watch what they're doing wounding, helping one another, building, breaking, the whole glorious, suffering, contradictory mess of it. So before there's any baby, before there's any manger, there is this, God surveying a world that is, to put it plainly, in real trouble. A world of people doing terrible things and beautiful things, often within the same hour. And here's the linchpin of the entire meditation. Ignatius asks us to imagine God, having taken all this in, deciding, let us work the redemption of the human race. Let us not stay above this. And the decision is made. God will not save the world from a safe distance. God will save it by entering it, by being born into it, by taking a body, a family, a hometown, a language, a tax bracket, a political situation, dusty roads, and difficult neighbors. Only then does Ignatius take us down to Nazareth, to the small room, the young woman, the angel, the announcement. He has us notice the smallness of that room against the bigness of the decision we just witnessed in the heavens. That's the arc. From the widest possible aerial view, the entire planet, all of humanity, all at once, down, down, down to a single room. Most people when they meet this scene focus on the theology, the metaphysics of God becoming human. But after many years of practicing this meditation, what gripped me and still grips me is the sequence, the order of the story. Notice what happens first. Before God acts, God looks, and not a casual glance, a total, unflinching, particular looking. God doesn't redeem an idea of humanity. God doesn't redeem the version of humanity that exists in a strategy deck. God looks at the actual people, the ones being born and dying, weeping and laughing. Then notice the second thing. Having looked, God doesn't stay up high. God doesn't issue a decree from the clouds. The verb of the incarnation is descent. God comes down, God closes the distance. God takes on the actual conditions of the people God is trying to help. A real body, real hunger, real exhaustion, a working class family in an occupied country, real grief, real hardship. Part of the logic of the incarnation is that you cannot redeem from a distance. You have to come down. You have to get inside the conditions of the people you're responsible for. You have to know what it is actually like to be them.

Leadership That Refuses To Stay At a Distance

Speaker 7:50

And when I understood that insight, when I saw that the central act in the entire story is fundamentally an act of radical, costly, embodied empathy, I could not unsee its relevance to leadership. Because that descent is exactly what most of us, as leaders, often fail to do. We try to lead from above, we try to fix from a distance. We make decisions about people whose actual lives we've never really looked at, and whose conditions we have never stooped to enter. For the skeptic listening, set the divinity question aside. Just look at the structure of the move as a model of perspective taking. The most capable actor in the story possesses every right and reason to stay above the situation, fully insulated, and instead chooses to enter the lived conditions of the people it intends to serve. As a pure leadership template, that is as instructive as anything in the case literature. You don't need a creed to learn from it. Now let me get personal. I was a CEO, and at a certain point in any leader's career, it happens to all of us, and it happens so gradually you never notice, you stop living in the same world as the people you lead. Be honest about it. Who do you eat lunch with? Other executives. Whose problems sound like your problems? People with your income, your education, your zip code. When something breaks in your house, someone fixes it. You don't lie awake wondering how you'll pay for it. When you travel for work, you're insulated at every single point of contact. The limo, the lounge, the upgrade, the hotel, the handler who makes sure nothing goes wrong. Your calendar is curated. Your information arrives predigested, summarized, sanitized, often by people whose sense of security depends on not upsetting you. And it reaches you only after ascending through multiple layers, each of which shades the truth a little more golden. You live in a bubble. And the insidious thing about a bubble is that from the inside it doesn't feel like a bubble. It just feels like reality. That's exactly what makes it so hazardous. It's invisible to the person inside it. So when I made a decision affecting a frontline employee earning fraction of what I earn. A decision about scheduling, about benefits, about a plant, about a layoff, I was making it from inside a reality so different from theirs that I might as well have been on a different planet. As in the meditation, I was looking down at the earth, except I'd skipped the part where I actually looked. I skipped the actual seeing part. I went straight to the decision. I stayed in the clouds, and I called it leadership. Here's the insight that deeply affects me every time I do this meditation. In Ignatius's scene, God, who has every reason to stay above, and God could have done it all from above, chooses to come down, and I, a finite, fallible, deeply flawed human, who owed his people an enormous amount, had somehow concluded that staying above was my prerogative, that the view from the top was sufficient, that I could understand people I had never spent time with, never listened to, never let interrupt my curated world. The meditation opened my eyes to what I was doing, gently, but thoroughly.

Empathy Is the Fruit of Attention

Speaker 11:22

Here's a precious insight this meditation gave me. We talk about empathy as if it were primarily an emotion, as if some people are just naturally warm and feeling, and others aren't, and that's that. I don't believe that's right. Empathy is the fruit of a particular kind of attention. It's what grows in you when you look at people the way Ignatius makes you look at them in the scene, particularly, concretely, without abstraction, without averaging them into a category, without reducing them to a function or a role or a line item. Look again at how he stages it. He doesn't say imagine humanity. He says see this one weeping, that one laughing, this one being born, that one dying. The entire exercise is a discipline of de abstraction. It is the deliberate refusal to let people become a blur. And that's the whole ballgame for a leader. The failure of empathy at the top is almost never a failure of the heart. Most leaders are not nasty or brutish. It's a failure of attention. The people they lead have become abstract to them. A headcount, a cost center, an FTE, a person on a slide. And you cannot feel for an abstraction. You can only feel for a particular person whose face you've looked into, and whose voice you've actually heard. So when I say this meditation made me more empathetic in a natural and naturally expressed way, not in a forced performative way, this is precisely what I mean. It didn't teach me to act more caring, it retrained my attention. And once you truly see a particular person, the empathy doesn't have to be manufactured. It arrives on its own. You see the person working the night shift not as a scheduling variable, but as a human being, and the feeling shows up uninvited. You don't have to fake it because it's real. That's the difference between empathy as a technique and empathy as a fruit. Techniques are exhausting because they're performances, and people can always feel the performance. Fruit is sustainable because it grows from something true. And here's the paradox. The more I stopped trying to seem empathetic and just did the inner work of looking at people the way this meditation taught me, the more it showed, precisely because it was no longer a show.

A Guided Meditation Practice For Leaders

Speaker 13:54

Let me make this concrete, because this is CEO exercises, not CEO vague inspirations. I want to give you the practice, an adaptation of Ignatius' contemplation on incarnation for leaders. If you can, find a quiet place where you won't be interrupted. Twenty or thirty minutes, sit comfortably, take a few slow breaths, and let the noise of the day settle. Clarify your objective. You want to see the people you lead as they really are, particularly not abstractly, and to discover where your leadership needs to descend rather than simply decide. First, go up in altitude. In your imagination, ascend until you can see the whole of your organization or your team or your community laid out beneath you. Not the org chart, the people, everyone, all at once. Take in the bigness of it, the full expanse of the world you're responsible for, full of human beings. Stay there for a little while. Then descend into the particulars and look. Refuse the blur. Pick out specific faces and go deliberately to the people you rarely think about. Not your peers, not your inner circle, the ones at the edges, at the bottom, whose daily reality is most different from yours. See one of them weeping over something you'll never know about. See one laughing. See another with a worried look, possibly thinking about a sick child, or a healthcare bill they can't afford, or their retirement savings that seems never to grow. See one joining your organization, a new hire full of hope and a little bit of fear. See one nearing an ending, a retirement, a layoff, and no less carried quietly to work every day. Feel authentically the gap between your condition and theirs. Don't look away from it. Put yourself into it. Let it be uncomfortable. Now, listen. As Ignatius says, hear what they're saying. Not what they say in the town hall when you're watching. What they say to each other in the break room when you're not there. What they say at home, at the end of a long day, about their work, their pay, and about you. Let yourself imagine it honestly, even the parts that sting. Take five or ten minutes here, and don't rush it. And now watch what they're doing. This is the last thing Ignatius has us notice in the scene. Not just who the people are and what they're saying, but what their minds and their hands are actually busy with. So watch them work. Someone is operating a machine. Someone is maintaining the equipment that everyone else depends on. Someone is leading a meeting, another is writing a report. Someone is cleaning the building after hours when the floor is empty. Someone is helping a customer who's frustrated. Another is running an experiment for the tenth time. Someone is sitting with a struggling employee, and another is working through the financials line by line. Watch all of it at once, the whole vast coordinated effort. Every one of these people, in their own corner, doing the specific things that move the company forward. None of it abstract, all of it real, and all of it carried out by particular human beings whose names you may not even know. Let yourself feel the weight of that. How much is being done every single day by people you almost never see? Now ask the incarnation question. Having seen and heard, ask yourself how do I come down? Where in my leadership right now am I staying in the clouds, issuing decisions when I should be a descending? What is the equivalent for me of taking on a body and entering the actual conditions of these people? Where's the distance I've allowed to grow? And what would it cost me to close it? Be specific. Name one descent you could make this week, one real concrete act of getting out of the bubble and into the lived reality of someone you lead. And then stay there a moment and let it land. How different this leadership model is, and how much it asks of you. The most capable actor in the entire story chooses not to lead from above, but to come all the way down, into limitation, into vulnerability, into the mess. If that's the shape of the highest leadership there is, then maybe the view from the top was never a place to stay. Maybe it was only ever the place you survey from before you go to where the people actually are. Repeat this meditation as often as you can. There's a richness here that doesn't surrender itself on the first pass. Now

The Real Cost Of Descent

Speaker 19:03

I want to say something we tend to skip over because it's uncomfortable. The descent was costly. In the story, God doesn't beam down in some invulnerable form, observe humanity through bulletproof glass, and leave. It meant a poor family, an occupied country, and a story that leads toward the cross. The descent was not a tourist visit. It cost everything. There's a hard lesson there for leaders. The descending kind of empathy is not free. It costs you the comfort of your bubble. It costs you the convenient ignorance that lets you sleep at night after hard decisions. When you really see the particular human being who will be affected by your choice, the choice becomes heavier. You can no longer hide behind the numbers. And I think a lot of leaders unconsciously protect their bubble precisely because they sense somewhere that descending will cost them something. So that the bubble isn't only a consequence of wealth and status. Sometimes it's a defense mechanism. We curate our world so that we don't have to feel the full weight of the people we're responsible for.

What Changes After You Descend

Speaker 20:20

I'd like to share with you what changed in me. First, I stopped trusting my gut about what my people needed, because my gut has been calibrated inside the bubble. My gut would say everyone's fine with this. I'd be fine with this. This meditation taught me to distrust that. Because I'm not them. My financial cushion, my options, my stress, none of it was a reliable proxy for theirs. Second, I started going to people instead of waiting for filtered information to climb up to me. I went to the manufacturing floor, the call center, the research lab. Quietly, not on a staged walkabout with an entourage and a camera, but to be interrupted, and to be told things I didn't want to hear. That practice killed many bad decisions of mine, more than any spreadsheet ever did. It changed how I delivered the hard decisions, and what I did to soften the landing. Because I had actually entered, in my imagination, what it would be like to be on the receiving end. And the third thing, the one I treasure most, people started telling me how different this approach was, how much better it was than other leaders they may have had in the past. Not just because I did it, because the quality of my attention to them had actually shifted, and people can always feel the difference between a leader who sees them, really sees them, and a leader who is performing seeing them. This exercise doesn't stand alone. It plugs directly into everything we Built so far in this podcast. The descents you commit to in this meditation become material for the examine. In your nightly review, watch for the moments you stayed in the clouds, where you reached for the abstraction instead of the person, where you issued a decree instead of going to look. Those are desolations worth noticing. And watch too for the consolations, the moments you actually came down, and how alive and clear that made you. This meditation also goes straight to the foundation. Remember the disordered attachments we keep returning to? Like status, reputation, the need to be insulated, and important. The bubble is built out of exactly those attachments. Empathy requires enough inner freedom that you don't need the insulation, that your identity doesn't depend on the separation between you and your people. The descent is only possible for a leader whose scale is reasonably level.

Connection With Other Exercises

Speaker 23:00

This exercise doesn't stand alone. It plugs directly into everything we've built. The descents you commit to in this meditation become material for the examine. In your nightly review, watch for the moments you stayed in the clouds, where you reached for the abstraction instead of the person, where you issued a decree instead of just going to look. Those are desolations worth noticing. And watch too for the consolations, the moments you actually came down, and how alive and clear that made you. This meditation also goes straight to the foundation. Remember the disordered attachments we keep returning to status, reputation, the need to be insulated and important. The bubble is built out of exactly those attachments. Empathy requires enough inner freedom that you don't need the insulation, that your identity doesn't depend on this separation between you and your people. The descent is only possible for a leader whose scale is reasonably level. In the field notes will show you whether distance from your people is a pattern. Look back across your career. Where did the bubble thicken? Where did you make a decision about people you'd stopped actually seeing? Strength and shadow travel together, remember. The very drive that lifted you to the top is often the same drive that sealed you away from people at the bottom.

Puncture The Bubble And Lead

Speaker 24:25

So let me bring this home. The bubble is seductive precisely because it's comfortable, affirming, and safe. And the higher you rise, the thicker it gets, and the more invisible it becomes. Until one day you can no longer see the people you're making decisions about, and you don't even know that you can't. That's the trap that catches almost every leader who rises far enough. Not malice, just distance, accumulating silently, until empathy becomes literally impossible because the data it requires, that is the sight and sound of actual human beings, can no longer reach you. From a leadership perspective, this meditation is a technology for puncturing that bubble. It forces the aerial view, and then it forces the descent. It retrains your attention until empathy grows on its own, not forced, not performed, just real. And it helps us to realize that the choice to refuse to lead from a distance is the very model of greatness. I can't promise it will change you the way it changed me. But I can tell you that the empathy this practice built is among the more valuable leadership traits I ever carried out of the spiritual exercises and into my work. So do the practice, and then go find one person you lead, whose world you've never really entered, and enter it. That's the whole thing. That's this entire leadership lesson scaled down to the size of an hour on an ordinary day. Until next time, thank you for listening. I'm Mike McDonald. This is CEO Exercises.