THE PHILOSOPHICAL HEALTH OF THE CEO

A SMILE-PH Journey for Leaders and Decision-Makers
Live online dialogue · 8 individual sessions · 45 min per session

You run a company. You make decisions that shape liveS. You are, by SOME measures, successful — and by OTHER measureS, you are alone with something you cannot quite name.

Every strategic decision a CEO makes is, in its deepest layer, a philosophical decision. What is this company for. What counts as purpose and success. What trade-offs are we willing to live with. What future are we actually committing to. What kind of person does this choice ask me to become.

You are trained to translate these questions into business vocabulary: strategy, vision, alignment, stakeholder value. The translation is useful. It is also a quiet form of impoverishment. The philosophical content of your decisions does not disappear when you rename it. It accumulates. Over years, it becomes the silent weight that makes you wonder if there is more to it.

Most CEOs describe this condition in one of three ways. Some call it isolation, the sense that nobody in the organization can be spoken to as an equal about what actually matters. Some call it compression, the feeling that an entire self has been metabolized into a single role. Some call it drift, the suspicion that the life being lived and the life once intended have quietly separated, and that nobody will point this out because nobody has the standing to.

These are not problems for executive coaches. They are not problems for therapists. They are a fertile ground to dialogue with a philosophical counsellor.

The unique method for you: SMILE-PH

SMILE_PH (Sense-Making Interviews Looking at Elements of Philosophical Health) is a structured dialogical method developed over more than a decade of philosophical counselling. It works across six senses: bodily sense, sense of self, sense of belonging, sense of possibility, sense of purpose, and philosophical sense. Together, these form a diagnostic and generative map of where you actually live, as distinct from where your calendar says you live.

For executives, SMILE_PH is typically delivered as a structured 8 sessions engagement. The work is confidential, serious, online or in person, and conducted at the intellectual and pragmatic level you expect. It is not coaching. It is not therapy. It is philosophical practice with a trained eudynamicist.

THE FRAMEWORK

Philosophical health is the dynamic and good relationship with the possible and the compossible across four dimensions of a life: Person (the embodied self), Earth (the places and non-human presences that sustain you), Work (what you make and what it makes of you), and Society (the human connections that matter). Call this the Tetractys. A life in philosophical health holds all four in compossible tension. A CEO's life, characteristically, has collapsed three of the four into the fourth.

This is not a moral failing. It is the structural cost of running something at the scale you run it. But the collapse is reversible, and the work of reversing it is itself philosophical — not therapeutic, not motivational, not strategic. It is the work of learning to perceive, engage, and transform the conditions of your own existence as an active philosophical practice rather than as a set of problems to be optimized.

Bodily Sense

What does running a company do to your body? What does your body do to the decisions you make? Years of composure in rooms where everyone watches your face, pressure absorbed without being shown, sleep made instrumental, meals timed by calendars, all of this leaves traces. This dimension invites you to attend to what your body carries, absorbs, and knows, as a source of intelligence you have been overriding, not as a wellness project.

Sense of Self

Identity, coherence, authenticity. Who do you become when you sit at the head of the table? How has the role shaped the person? The executive persona can become so practiced that the line between professional presence and personal identity blurs. Here we explore whether the CEO role has expanded the person you are or quietly eclipsed them.

Sense of Belonging

Where does a CEO belong? Executive position creates a paradox: you are central to many, relied upon by many, and yet the asymmetry of the role and the confidentiality of what you carry can leave you feeling that you fully belong nowhere. This dimension examines where and with whom a leader finds genuine reciprocity beyond the network, beyond the board, beyond the people who need something from you.

Sense of the Possible

Has leadership expanded or narrowed your own horizon of possibility? Years of high-stakes decision-making can quietly close down what feels thinkable or desirable in your own life, even as the company's horizon expands. The options you defend for the organization are often larger than the options you still permit yourself. How do you restore and protect your sense that things, for you, could be otherwise?

Sense of Purpose

What sustains your deep orientation when the work is relentless? Is there a greater purpose that gives your leadership a backbone or has the company's purpose quietly replaced yours? Executive burnout often signals not exhaustion alone but a fracture in meaning: the moment when building no longer nourishes the builder's own sense of direction. We distinguish here between running a company and living a vocation, between momentum and calling.

Philosophical Sense

Capacity for integrative reflection. Can you think your own practice philosophically, beyond strategy? Frameworks, data, and execution discipline are necessary but not sufficient for wisdom. This dimension asks whether you can step back from the tools of your trade and reflect on what it actually means to decide for others, to shape a fragment of the world, to live a life whose consequences extend far beyond the reach of its own rewards.

WHO IS THIS FOR?

CEOs, founders, and senior executives who suspect that the most important questions in their lives are no longer being asked — and who recognize that the absence of those questions is not neutral. It is shaping their decisions, their relationships, and their capacity to act from anything other than inherited momentum.

This practice is not for everyone at your level. It requires a willingness to think about yourself with the same seriousness you bring to the company you run. Many executives are not ready for that. Some are.

IMPORTANT TO KNOW

This is not supervision.

This is not therapy. It is philosophical inquiry into the existential dimensions of your vocation.

What you receive

Eight live online sessions of 75 min each (an introduction, one sense for each of the above senses, a conclusion).
Pre- and post-program PHC assessment (Philosophical Health Compass)
The e-book Philosophical Health: A Practical Introduction

Facilitation by Dr Luis de Miranda, the creator of the method, philosophical counsellor, Associate Professor in Bioethics and entrepreneur

YOUR Cousellor

Luis de Miranda

Associate Professor in Bioethics at Uppsala University. Creator of SMILE-PH and Founder of Philosophical Health International. Philosophical Practitioner and author of Philosophical Health: a Practical Introduction (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Read more here