About This Episode
Welcome to The Overachievers Podcast, the show for ambitious professionals who want to achieve true success, without burning out.
In this episode, I dive into the invisible forces holding your income in place. Have you ever found yourself hitting a plateau, no matter how hard you push? It’s not just external factors like the market or competition, there’s often a hidden ceiling shaped by your own identity, quietly dictating what you believe you’re ‘supposed’ to earn.
I’ll explore how early experiences, ingrained beliefs, and the subtle choices we make every day can silently steer our financial progress, and I’ll share practical steps to help you recognise and challenge these internal limits.
If you’re ready to rethink what’s possible for your career and income, join me to uncover the real barriers, and learn how to move beyond them.
Key Themes
- Identity’s role in income ceilings
- Entanglement of income and self-worth
- Subconscious choices reinforcing income limits
- Separating identity from financial achievement
- Influence of upbringing on money beliefs
If You Prefer Video
Transcript
This is the Overachievers podcast for people who want success without the burnout. If you’ve ever noticed that your income seems to have a ceiling, you know, a level it reaches and then plateaus at, regardless of how hard you push. This episode is going to explain what that ceiling is actually made of. Foreign. Welcome to the Overachievers Podcast with Keith Blakemore-Noble. Because success shouldn’t cost everything. Hello, welcome back. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers coach, and this is where we explore what it really means to succeed in a way that that makes sense commercially, psychologically and as life.
We’re now well into series two of this podcast and the picture is hopefully becoming clearer. We’ve looked at the hidden psychology of money. We’ve looked at undervaluation and effort based thinking. We looked at the hard work ceiling and what leverage offers us instead. We’ve also taken a look at the identity discomfort which hides underneath pricing. And we looked at the difference between value and time. In the previous episode, we took a look at the visibility barrier, which is why capable people like yourself remain unseen. And we looked at what that cost them commercially.
In this episode, we’re going to bring a lot of these threads together because underneath almost every pattern we have explored through this series, the underpricing, the overworking, the reluctance to be seen, there is a common root identity, specifically the way identity shapes what someone believes they’re allowed to earn. And this is one of the most important ideas in the whole of series two, and I want to give it the space that it deserves. Here is the idea that I would like us to explore together throughout this episode. Most people think of income as something determined mainly by external factors. The market, the economy, the sector, the competition, the quality of the work. And yes, all of those things do play a role right enough. But there is another factor that plays an equally significant role, and this factor is almost entirely internal. I am of course talking about identity, in particular the sense of who you are and what level of income that person is supposed to have.
Now we all carry an internal image of ourselves, and embedded in that image, usually below the level of conscious awareness, is a sense of what’s normal, appropriate, even permissible for someone like us to earn. And that sense wasn’t formed by logic. It was formed by experience, by the financial environment you grew up in, by the messages, both spoken and unspoken, about money which surrounded you, and by the models that you had, or indeed didn’t have, of people who earned well. It’s also formed by the stories that you absorbed about what wealthy people are like and whether you want to be associated with that. And that internal sense, that quiet, largely invisible picture of what someone like you earns that acts as a ceiling, not a market ceiling, an identity ceiling. The striking thing about identity ceilings is that they tend to enforce themselves not through conscious decision making, but through the accumulation of small choices that keep the income within the range that feels familiar and safe. Let me describe this in a way that makes it concrete. I have worked with a number of people over the years whose income, when you plot it over time, shows a very consistent pattern.
It grows sometimes quite quickly, up to a certain level, and then it hits a plateau. Not dramatically, not through failure, it just stops moving upwards despite continued effort and genuine capability. This sounding familiar now. When you ask why the income stopped growing, the answers are always practical answers. It’s the market, or it’s a difficult year, or a client didn’t want to renew a project that just did not convert. But when you look at it more carefully, when you look at the decisions underneath the outcomes, a very different picture emerges. To explain what I mean, let’s take the case of someone I worked with. Well, we’ll call him Michael.
And Michael ran a training business. Very talented, very much in demand. His business had grown steadily for several years to the point where he was earning a respectable income. One, an income that was, you know, as it happened, almost exactly what his father had earned at the peak of his career. Interesting. Michael hadn’t noticed that. When I pointed it out, he went quiet for a moment. Then he said something really important.
I never thought I’d earn more than my dad. Not as a decision, not as a conscious limit he set, but as something that always somewhere felt like the ceiling, like the natural upper boundary of what someone from his background, someone from his family, someone with his story was supposed to earn. He hadn’t hit a market ceiling, he had hit an identity ceiling, one he didn’t even know existed until the moment it became visible. Here’s something worth considering. Think about the income level you are currently at or the level you seem to return to after periods of growth and ask yourself this. Don’t ask analytically. Ask intuitively what comes from the heart intuitively. What’s the answer? Does that level feel right? Not just financially? Does it feel like the kind of money that someone like you is supposed to earn? Let’s push that question a little further.
Who defined what someone like you is supposed to earn? Who defined what that level was? Where does that definition come from? And is it still accurate. Because those early definitions, they have a very long reach, much longer than most people realize. Here’s the distinction I invite you to draw. Income and identity are two separate things. But for most people, and particularly for overachievers, they become deeply entangled. When income and identity are entangled, what you earn becomes part of how you see yourself. A good month feels like confirmation of your worth. A difficult month feels like evidence of something more personal.
And the level of which income stabilises, that feels, in a way that’s hard to put into words, it feels like where you belong. When income and identity are separate, income becomes information. It’s data about the market, about positioning, about what’s working and what needs adjusting. It rises and falls without that movement being experienced. As a statement of who you are. I’ll repeat that. When identity and income are separate, income is information. And it doesn’t come across as a statement about who you are.
It’s information about the market, positioning, etc. Etc. Now, most overachievers are somewhere between those two positions, not fully entangled, but not fully separate either. And the practical implication is this. If your income has a ceiling that doesn’t match the quality of your work, if you keep returning to a level that doesn’t reflect your expertise or the value you create, it’s worth asking whether that ceiling is external or internal. Because external stealings market constraints, sector limits, genuine price caps, they respond to a practical strategy. Better positioning, clearer messaging, different clients, different models. All of those can allow you to break through those external ceilings.
Internal ceilings, however, identity ceilings. Now, they don’t respond to strategy. They respond to examination, to the slow, sometimes uncomfortable work of updating the internal image of who you are and what that person is allowed to earn. And that’s a different kind of work. But it’s the kind that tends to move things when nothing else does. Here’s what makes identity ceilings particularly hard to see. They don’t feel like ceilings, they just feel like reality. They feel like this is just how it is.
The income level that your identity has normalised doesn’t feel like a limit that you’ve imposed on yourself. It feels like a reasonable assessment of what is achievable. It feels like an honest reading in the market. So like a mature understanding of your own position. All of which means the decisions that maintain the ceiling don’t feel like self limiting choices. They feel like sensible ones. They’re not. But that’s what they feel like.
The proposal that gets softened before it’s sent the conversation about fees that somehow gets avoided. The opportunity that’s passed over because it feels like a stretch, or the client that gets discounted without them even asking for a discount. Each of those feels in the moment, entirely rational. But cumulatively, they reinforce that ceiling quietly, consistently, and with complete plausible deniability. And this is why practical interventions, you know, pricing courses, sales training, business strategies, that’s why none of those produce lasting change. In these cases, the they address the behaviour without addressing the underlying belief. And that belief, being more fundamental, sooner or later reasserts itself. Lasting change comes from somewhere deeper, from genuinely updating the internal image of who you are and what that person, this person with this level of experience creating this level of value, is allowed to earn.
And that update does not happen through information. It doesn’t happen intellectually. It happens through experience, through reflection, through the gradual accumulation of evidence that the new image is actually accurate. So what is useful here? The first step is simply making the ceiling visible. Because once you see it, once you recognise it as an identity construct rather than a market, reality starts to loosen some of its authority, doesn’t get rid of it completely. But the first step is awareness. Make that ceiling visible, become aware of it. And a useful question to ask to help with this is if someone with exactly my level of expertise, my exact track record, and my exact results were pricing their work, if someone else with my exact level of these things were pricing that work, what would I think was a fair and appropriate level of income for them? Take yourself out of the question and imagine you’re considering someone else with the exact same situation.
What would you think was fair for them to earn? Most overachievers, when they apply that question to someone else rather than themselves, arrive at a number that is significantly higher than what they themselves currently charge. Isn’t it interesting? When we take ourselves out of the situation and look at it dispassionately, we get a much better view. The gap between that number and the current one is the identity gap. And seeing it clearly not as a failing, but simply as the next thing to work on is where the shift begins. In the next episode, we take the identity work a step further. We’ve been looking at how identity shapes income. In episode 20, we’re going to look at the reverse dynamic, how income fluctuations affect self worth. And we’ll also look at what it means to genuinely detach those two things so that the month’s numbers stop being experienced as a reference referendum on the person behind them and simply get recognised as a reflection of that month’s numbers.
That’s coming up in episode 20, detaching self worth from Income. It should feel like a natural and important step from today. So do remember, Give us a subscribe Give us a Like a comment, a Share subscribe to us on your favourite platform Give us a review on your favourite platform. Share the episode far and wide. Let people know what you’re getting from it and what they can get from it, and come back for the next episode. Until then, here’s something for you to take with you until the next episode. Think about the income level that feels like where you belong. I don’t mean just financial, I mean deeper.
What’s the income level that deeply feels like where you belong? And then ask yourself, is that a market assessment or is it just an identity assessment? Where is that number coming from? Because the answer to that question determines whether the ceiling is something to work around or whether it’s something to examine. If this series is making you look differently at the relationship between who you are and what you earn. Again, follow Us Give us a follow. Subscribe to us so that you stay with it and catch all the future episodes. We’re really building something very important across this series. Head over to https://KeithBN.link/TOP where you can find this episode. You’ll find all the other episodes. You’ll find the show notes for each episode, along with everything else from the individual episodes, including the Overachievers Quiz.
If you want to understand which patterns are most active for you. I’m Keith Blakemore-Noble, the Overachievers Coach, and I’ll be your guide as we explore a healthier way to succeed. Bye for now. It.
