Underneath The Title: When High Achievers Start Questioning the Success They Built
You did everything right. Built the career. Earned the title. Hit the number. And somewhere along the way, you stopped recognising the person doing it.
Underneath The Title is a podcast for high-achieving professionals who are starting to ask the questions they've been too busy to ask: Who am I when the role goes away? What was I actually building toward? Is this it?
Host Kevin Simcock spent 25 years leading creative work for some of the world's most recognised brands at Ogilvy. He was furloughed from a global VP role at 50, turned down the replacement offer, and chose to figure out what success actually meant to him. What he found changed everything.
Each episode goes beneath the surface of professional identity to explore what drives the decisions we make, the success we chase, and the fulfilment we keep expecting to arrive. Kevin draws on his own experience, his work with senior leaders and business owners navigating major transitions, and his framework, The Dance, which holds that your professional and personal identity were never meant to be separate.
If you're in the middle of a transition, questioning what comes next, or simply wondering why the success you've built feels quieter than you expected, this show was made for you.
New episodes bi-weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
Kevin is also the author of Whose Ladder Is This? and an executive advisor working one-to-one with high-achievers navigating identity and transition.
Purchase Kevin Simcock's Book: Whose Ladder Is This?
Available on Amazon Kindle, paperback and hardcover HERE
Barnes & Noble here
Indigo Books here
Visit kevinsimcock.com for more information
LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-simcock/
Underneath The Title: When High Achievers Start Questioning the Success They Built
What the Most Cited Career Reinvention Book Gets Wrong
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Herminia Ibarra's Working Identity is one of the most cited books in career reinvention. It's been assigned in business schools, recommended by coaches, and trusted by high-achievers navigating major transitions. And it gets something fundamentally wrong.
Ibarra's central argument is this: don't wait for clarity. Act. Experiment with different versions of yourself, and let the feedback from those experiments guide you toward the right one. It sounds practical. It sounds liberating. But for the people I work with, people who have already built one version of success and found it hollow, this approach doesn't produce a new self. It produces the same self in a new context.
In this episode, I walk through exactly where Ibarra's model breaks down, why the "possible selves" she encourages you to explore are often unexamined personas built from fear, conditioning, and other people's expectations, and what needs to happen before action becomes meaningful.
I draw on the work of Carl Jung to explain why acting from an unexamined identity isn't reinvention. It's repetition. And I use an example from Ibarra's own book to show that the introspection she dismisses is quietly present in every success story she tells.
If you've read Working Identity, this episode will reframe it. If you haven't, it will save you from following advice that stops short of the answer you're actually looking for.
Action validates direction. But only when the direction is actually yours.
Purchase Kevin Simcock's Book: Whose Ladder Is This?
Available on Amazon Kindle, paperback and hardcover HERE
Barnes & Noble here
Indigo Books here
If today’s episode resonated and you’re ready to start asking your own version of that question, you can find Kevin at kevinsimcock.com.
Check out more episodes of Underneath The Title on Youtube
https://youtube.com/@kevinsimcock
Host: Kevin Simcock
LinkedIn Profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-simcock/
