Killing the CEO

What if the version of you that's driving your success is also the one destroying you?

That's the question Darren Copland was forced to confront on a psychologist's couch in August 2021, burned out, broken, and barely holding together. His first words in that session? "I am the CEO." Not a job title. An identity. A false self that had consumed everything he was.

Killing the CEO is Darren's raw, honest account of a decade leading an adventure education organisation from the inside out, the rapid growth, the organisational wins, the culture he built, and the slow, brutal, internal collapse that followed. Diagnosed with major depressive disorder, stripped of his title, and forced to face the man beneath the role, Darren's journey is one of the most unflinching leadership memoirs you'll encounter.

The "CEO" isn't a job title. It's the false self, the driven, achieving, never-resting version of you that confuses performance with identity, success with worth, and busyness with purpose. Drawing on real journal entries written during the darkest years of his journey, Darren traces exactly how the CEO took over his life, and what it took to kill it.

This audiobook is equal parts leadership memoir, spiritual reckoning, and practical wisdom. Darren weaves together his personal story with insightful reflections that invite engagement and promote transformation. This audiobook is for the high achiever who can't stop. The driven person who won't rest. The Christian leader who loves God and serves hard but suspects something is deeply, quietly wrong. And it's for anyone who has lost sight of who they are outside of what they do!

Darren writes not as someone who has it all figured out, but as someone who has walked through the valley and found the way through. His story is proof that surrender is not weakness. It is the path to finding God and life. It is the most courageous act a leader can make.

Killing the CEO was Darren's only option, it may also be yours…