Hey friends. It's been a minute. Like... a month minute. 

I didn't send anything in June, and I'm not going to pretend that was some strategic content calendar decision. June was an absolute wash, work was busy, kids were in and out of camps, and then we packed up and took the family to Italy and Switzerland, which if you're going to disappear on your newsletter for a few weeks, is a pretty good reason to do it.

I'm also sending this on a Monday morning instead of Sunday night, so let's just get that out of the way too. Blame America's birthday. Blame the World Cup. Blame me for spending Sunday watching both instead of working through the final draft of this newsletter. Sorry, Ronaldo.

But I got around to it, and sometimes that’s the most important part, right? :) So here’s what’s in this one. 

First, I'm taking you to a bridge in Milan, covered in padlocks, with a brass band dancing down the street next to it. It sounds like a weird setup for a newsletter and it is, but it's actually about the parts of you that want to hold onto a moment and the part that wants to “feel it.” If you've been following the Internal Family Systems stuff I've been working through with my therapist Michael, this one goes deeper... including a new framework I've been calling the NBA (yes, because I live in Pacers country and I will find a way to use that acronym).

I’m a marketer. I needed something easier to remember. :)

Second, I'm getting back on my soapbox. I published a take on LinkedIn last week about whether the CMO role is dying, and I think it’s bullshit, so I expanded on it. It's for anyone in a VP of Marketing or CMO seat who's watched a board get twitchy about brand spend the second pipeline dips for a quarter. Spoiler... I don't think the role is dying, and brand is the equalizer. I think a lot of leadership teams just forgot what it actually does.

Two very different stories in one edition. A bridge in Milan and a fight for a role that should be more powerful in the age of AI, not less. 

Enjoy.

♥️kyle

Continuing to Work on My Head Trash

Back to the holiday, our last night in Milan we walked down to the Navigli cana1. My parents, my wife, my kids, all walking towards dinner and a night without a plan (which is the way we prefer to vacation even though it stresses me out sometimes). :) 

We crossed a bridge covered in padlocks. If you've traveled, you know the deal. I’m in love. I buy a lock and a Sharpie to write our names on the lock. And then, you understandably bolt them to the bridge. The idea is that you're locking you love (or a memory) in place.

I get it. I've done it more than once with my wife.

We walked off the bridge and a group of... I'm going to say eclectic individuals... came dancing down the street. A few of the people had brass instruments and a bass drum which were blaring and thumping in the evening sun (it was hot as hell). And despite the heat (it was so hot I’m pretty sure the trumpet was sweating), they were dancing and singing with was felt like zero concern for locking in any kind of experience. . Someone holding up what looked like a woven sun. People dancing and singing with zero concern for locking in any kind of experience. Completely free, or at least it felt that way from the sidewalk. Oh, and just to add to the eclectic nature of the group, there was a dude holding a hand woven sun, which I haven’t figured out why.

And I stood there watching both things at the same time.

Here's what I noticed, and I couldn't stop thinking about it for the rest of the trip: I understood the locks immediately.  I wrote about this feeling back in Entry 32... that weird instinct to hit pause on a moment while you're still inside it. To capture it before it slips. I've felt it at a stoplight listening to my son tell me about his dreams. I felt it on that bridge. 

Of course you want to mark the moment before it disappears. 

Of course, you want to hold on to the good stuff. Loving something and knowing time is moving does that to you.

But I also felt something pull toward the dancers. Not to join them exactly. Just... to be less concerned with holding on.

If you read the last entry, you know I've been working with a therapist named Michael and spending time within the Internal Family Systems framework. The core idea, if you missed it, is that you're not one person. You're a collection of parts, each with its own history and job. And standing on that bridge in Milan, I could feel two of mine showing up at exactly the same time.

The Achiever was completely at home with the locks. Obviously. Secure the moment, hold the feeling, don't let it slip. He's been running that play since my twenties and look, I'm not going to trash him for it. He's gotten me pretty far. But he also doesn't know when to stop. Rest feels like falling behind. Stillness feels like something's wrong. Dancing down a canal street with zero destination and concern for how it looks? Hellllll no, bro. Not on his watch.

But something else showed up on that bridge too. And this one surprised me because it’s been a journey for me to find over the last couple of months working with Michael.

The Self. The thing underneath all the parts. The one who actually put the phone down for a week in Switzerland and didn't feel like the world was ending. The one who sat with my kids at dinner without trying to write an email or respond to a LinkedIn post. He surfaced on that bridge in Milan, standing above the dancers and brass ensemble…. Up on that bridge filled with locks… and felt something.

I've been thinking about what De La Rosa writes in Outshine Trauma about this exact kind of moment: Where you catch two parts operating at the same time and you notice it before you get pulled into either one.

I’ve discovered that “noticing” is the whole game.

Alright, Kyle? How do you action it?

De La Rosa writes that we generally begin noticing a part when some sort of disruption arises. A thought, a feeling, a body sensation. Parts don't have another language to use, not one we'll actually pay attention to anyway. He compares it to an infant crying because it's hungry. Disruption is the only reliable way to get our attention.

That's what happened on the bridge. The Achiever didn't raise his hand and introduce himself. He showed up as a feeling I recognized immediately. And the quieter part didn't announce himself either. He was just there, pulling in a different direction.

De La Rosa also makes a point I keep coming back to: parts aren't their burdens. They have a full range of emotions. They just get stuck in repetitive cycles because they're always choosing what feels like the lesser of two evils. The Achiever isn't controlling because he loves control. He's controlling because somewhere along the way, control felt safer than the alternative.

He's not the villain. He's just exhausted.

De La Rosa lays out a framework in the book called the Six F's for working with your parts when they show up. It's worth reading in full, but here's the quick version:

• Find — notice what you're feeling or thinking right now. That's your trailhead.

• Focus — give your attention to that specific part. Ask other parts to step aside.

• Flush — stay with it long enough to get more detail. A voice becomes an emotion. An emotion becomes a body sensation.

• Notice — ask yourself how you feel toward the part. You'll likely find other parts judging or critiquing it. Ask them to step aside too.

• Befriend — offer the part something. Curiosity. Openness. "I see you. I'm not here to fight you."

• Fear — ask the part what it's afraid of. What's the worse alternative it's been protecting you from this whole time?

It's a lot to hold in your head in the middle of a real moment. And my therapist Michael said something in our last session that I keep returning to: you don't need to fully understand the parts. You just need to notice them and talk to them.

So here's how I've actually been using this. I call it the NBA. (And yes, I live in Indiana. Pacers country. Every basketball reference is available to me and I will use them.)

Notice. When a part shows up, catch it. The bridge in Milan was a trailhead. Two feelings pulling in opposite directions at the same time. Don't ignore it. Don't analyze it to death. Just see it.

Befriend. Imagine sitting with the part... on a park bench, across a table, wherever feels right. Create enough distance so you're relating to it rather than being consumed by it. You're not the anxiety. You're sitting across from it. This is the move from first to third person I wrote about in the last entry. And here's what De La Rosa gets right: the part isn't your enemy. It's just been doing a job nobody asked it to stop doing.

Ask. This is where things get interesting. Ask the part: What are you trying to accomplish? What do you want me to know? And my personal favorite, because it's the most disarming question I've found: does it ever get tiring for you?

I asked the Achiever that on the plane home from Zurich. He didn't have a clean answer. But something shifted when I asked.

Not fixing the parts. Not firing them. Just making contact. Letting them know the Self is also in the room... and can handle things without them running every decision.

That's what I felt on the bridge in Milan. The Achiever doing his thing with the locks. And underneath him, quieter, the Self just watching the dancers and feeling something close to ease.

I'm still getting used to that feeling. But I recognized it. And maybe that's where it starts.

Is the CMO role dying?

I had to republish this “Soap Box Wednesday” post from last week around the CMO slowly dying. I wanted to republish and expand my thinking. 

Is the CMO a dying role? Honestly, who gives a f---? 

I've been part of the "thing X is dying" hype cycle since I taught myself Photoshop and started a design agency in 2009. Search was going to die. Then email was going to die. Then it was ABM's turn to make everything before it obsolete. Now it's LLMs eating search, and suddenly it's the CMO's turn in the barrel.

None of those things actually died. They got absorbed into whatever came next, and the people who survived were the same people who survived the last "misunderstood hype cycle" before it.

There will always be hot takes. There will always be boards making brash calls based on what's trending on LinkedIn that week instead of doing the harder work of understanding what's actually changing underneath their business.

Why? Because reacting to a headline is easier than rebuilding your mental model.

And brand is always first in the crosshairs.

Here's the scene I keep seeing play out, in different rooms with different names on the door: pipeline dips for a quarter, the board asks what marketing's doing about it, and someone floats pausing brand spend "just for now." Six months later, nobody remembers it was ever supposed to be temporary.

Companies will never outgrow the need for brand leadership. What's changed is how many leadership teams no longer understand what brand actually does, and they're making structural decisions off that misunderstanding at exactly the wrong damn moment.

So do I have an opinion on where marketing should live in the next five years? Sure I do. I'm not going to spend this post trying to win you over though. Just sit with this instead...

Product adoption and market perception are not the same problem. They don't share a timeline, a success metric, or the instincts required to get them right.

Product teams optimize for what ships and what works. Brand teams work on what people believe... whether they trust you, how you "feel" against a competitor when the feature sets are basically identical.

A great product experience can build belief. But only when your product is genuinely, undeniably different. Most aren't. And AI is closing that gap faster than any roadmap can outrun it.

What doesn't commoditize as easily? Trust. The sense of who you actually are.

That's the part that gets lost when a CMO gets graded on a pipeline number that was never brand's job to hit in the first place. You can't cut your way to differentiation. You can only build it, slowly, and then watch someone with a bad quarter decide it's expendable.

Brand is hard to copy because it isn't a feature.

So when a company guts its brand leadership right now, at exactly this moment, it's giving away the one advantage getting harder to replicate... not easier.

Brand marketing isn't a leftover line item. Trust has always been the differentiator, and building it has always been a human job.

The CMOs who get this are going to look like geniuses in three years. The ones who don't will be writing their own "what I learned getting let go" post.

Which one are you building toward?