The Formation Practice with Dr. Ella Thompson, PhD
A podcast for leaders who carry significant weight across business, ministry, higher education, and organizational life. Each episode is a focused formation conversation built on thirty years of scholarly and practitioner wisdom.
Episodes
11 episodes
The Story So Far: Formation, Authority, and the Journey Inward
If you are joining The Formation Practice, this episode is the perfect place to start. And if you have been here from the beginning, this one is a gift — a chance to pause, look back, and see how far the conversation has come. In this episode, ...
From Formation to Authority
We've been building toward this question: what does formation actually produce? In this episode, Dr. Ella Thompson turns the conversation outward and names what intentional formation generates in a leader's life —not a product, not a performanc...
The Discipline of Accountable Community
No leader forms alone. In this episode, Dr. Ella Thompson completes the three-discipline trilogy with the most transformative and most consistently avoided discipline of intentional formation: accountable community. This episode makes the...
The Discipline of Truthful Language
Honest attention tells you what is happening in your interior life. But access alone does not change a formation — something has to happen with what honest attention reveals. In this episode, Dr. Ella Thompson goes deep into the second discipli...
The Discipline of Honest Attention
Of the three disciplines introduced in Episode 6, honest attention is the one most consistently neglected by high-capacity leaders — and the one whose absence most reliably produces the kind of quiet interior fragmentation that eventually...
The Practice of Intentional Formation
Recognition is only the beginning. In this episode, Dr. Ella Thompson answers the question that every formation conversation eventually arrives at — now what? Having named the patterns, counted the cost, and reclaimed the distinction between ca...
Capacity Is Not Consent
You can do something and still not owe it to anyone. This episode names a collapse that happens quietly to capable people: capacity mistaken for consent, ability treated as an agreement no one actually asked for. Dr. Ella Thompson traces how re...
The Cost of Ungoverned Strength
It is their strength, not their weakness, that leads so many capable people into crisis. This episode names a formation wound that rarely gets language: the cost of being so competent that no one, including yourself, ever asks what sustaining t...
Formation is Not Performance
Episode 2: Formation Is Not PerformanceWe live in a culture that rewards visibility, celebrates achievement, and often mistakes activity for growth. The pressure to produce, perform, and prove ourselves can quietly shape not only our wor...
The Formation That Found You First
Before formation can be intentional, it has to be recognized. In this episode, Dr. Ella Thompson goes back further than Episode 2's foundational distinction and asks the question every formation conversation must eventually face: wh...