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 recognizing the person doing it.
Underneath The Title is a podcast for executives and senior leaders who have experienced a significant exit and 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 recognized brands at global ad agencies like Y&R, Havas and 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
How to Choose Your Next Chapter
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Most people design their next chapter using the identity that built the last one. That's exactly why it doesn't fit.
In this episode, Kevin unpacks why defaulting to your past self when planning what's next leads so many high-achievers back to the same feeling they were trying to escape: successful on paper, empty underneath.
What you'll hear:
- Why "what do I want to do next?" is the wrong first question, and what to ask instead
- The pattern Kevin fell into after leaving his own global VP role, and what it revealed about identity versus achievement
- How mapping who you actually are now, not who you were trained to be, changes every decision that follows
- What it means to build a next chapter that fits the current version of you, not the version that got you here
This one is for anyone who's built real success and is now wondering why the next obvious move doesn't feel as obvious as it should.
Underneath The Title is hosted by Kevin Simcock, author of Whose Ladder Is This? and advisor to people who have outgrown the identity they built their success on.
New episodes every week. Visit kevinsimcock.com for more information.
Purchase Kevin Simcock's Book: Whose Ladder Is This?
Available on Amazon Kindle, paperback, and hardcover
Check out more episodes of Underneath The Title on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@kevinsimcock
Host: Kevin Simcock
