Helllooo from beautiful Indiana. We are a few months on the other side of the best month in the state (May). The Indy 500. Memorial Day. Our community pool is officially open. I also turned 42. It’s been a whirlwind.
Usually a birthday alone would make me reflective, but May had other plans. A lot happened. This one is personal.
This past year has been a struggle with age, self-identity, and my head trash. Three months ago, I picked up The Second Mountain by David Brooks. Gut punch about identity and purpose. Then Mark Kosoglow introduced me to Dr. Michael Brabant of Candor & Coherence. Some would call Michael “a therapist.” I call him “a healer,” which sounds like hippie bullshit, but I promise it’s not. His work is one part leadership development, one part depth psychology, one part spirituality. His whole thing is helping leaders become “truly trustable.” Not just to their teams but to themselves.
A few weeks after starting with Michael, I was at OrangeTheory and my heart rate skyrocketed and wouldn’t come back down. It felt like my heart was fluttering between 110 and 140 bpm for four hours straight. EKG, echocardiogram, everything came back clear. But I still need to see a cardiologist before I can fully train again. Additional wake-up call, to put it mildly.
So. Forty-two years old. Stress everywhere. A heart that briefly rebelled. David Brooks slapping me in the face. Introspective conversations with Michael. It led to some fascinating discoveries about head trash.
Before we go further, let’s define it.
Head trash: The internal noise that drowns out your actual capabilities. The constant commentary that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with fear. The voice that whispers “what if you get this wrong, too?” in the board meeting, after you’ve already done the work and you already know the answer.
I can hear it right now, even typing these words.
My first session with Michael introduced me to the book Outshining Trauma by Ralph De La Rosa. The title made me nervous. I’m a CMO. I workout. I write a newsletter. I’m not someone dealing with trauma.
I was wrong.
De La Rosa writes through the lens of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a framework developed by psychologist Richard Schwartz. The core idea: You are not one person. You are a collection of parts, each with their own history, their own job, their own fear. At the center is a core Self that can actually lead, if you can get all of the parts to trust it.
IFS identifies three types: Exiles carry old wounds. Firefighters are reactive, sprinting in when things get triggered. Protectors are the managers, running interference before the pain can surface.
The Protector has been running my life since I was about 21.
Michael introduced me to a method for working with your parts instead of being drowned out by them.
1 - First Person. Come to terms with the notion that you and the part are the same thing. “I’m behind. I’m not enough. I’m falling apart.” You’re not having a thought. You are the thought.
3 - Third Person. Step back and observe. “There’s a part of me that’s scared right now. It’s sounding the alarm.” The feeling isn’t you. It’s a part of you, and you can see it.
2 - Second Person. Turn toward it. “Hey, what do you need right now? What are you trying to protect me from?”
Here’s a real example: Walking through Atlanta airport, three months of nonstop travel behind me, a flight to catch, an important email I haven’t sent yet. The spiral starts.
First Person. I’m behind. I’m dropping things. People are noticing. I should be working right now. I’m falling behind and it’s going to catch up with me.
Third Person. There’s a part of me that’s scared. It sees a threat and it’s pulling every alarm it can reach.
Second Person. Hey, what do you actually need right now?
It told me that all it needed was 20 minutes to finish the email and send it. One small action to signal things weren’t falling apart. That’s it.
And when I thanked it? The voice quieted. That’s not nothing.
Thanks to Claude and voice notes, I’ve been logging my parts as they show up. This is what I’ve found:
The Achiever woke me at 5am on a Saturday wondering why I wasn’t already learning more about AI. He’s gotten me far. The problem is he doesn’t know when to stop. Rest feels like a threat. Stillness feels like a symptom.
The Approval Seeker wanted to ask a stranger about his car at my son’s flag football practice, then spent 10 minutes talking me out of it. He’s in conference rooms, dinner invitations, text messages, scanning every interaction for the possibility of rejection.
The Worrier turned a mudroom renovation budget into an existential crisis about whether I should be working more. He runs on incomplete data and tries to solve problems that aren’t his to solve.
The Impatient Father lost his patience with my eight-year-old for being distracted by a 3D-printed toy when we were already late for flag football. He was reacting to a standard he’s never examined but holds himself to constantly, and not the situation itself.
What IFS helped me see is that none of these parts are villains. The Achiever is protecting me from irrelevance. The Approval Seeker is protecting me from rejection. The Worrier is trying to keep things from falling apart. The work isn’t to fire them. It’s to let them know that the core of me can handle things and that it’s okay for them to relax a little.
The parts running your head are also running your leadership. They’re in your one-on-ones, your board presentations, your team meetings. You can optimize the funnel, sharpen the messaging, build a world-class team, and still have a part quietly undermining it from the inside.
Pick up De La Rosa’s Outshining Trauma. It’s not what you think it is.
The voice that shows up when you’re walking to your next thing is trying to tell you something. Start there.
Kyle Lacy is the CMO of Docebo, an AI-powered enterprise learning, skills, and knowledge platform. He’s spent 15 years building marketing teams inside high-growth software companies, including ExactTarget (acquired by Salesforce), Lessonly (acquired by Seismic for $300M), Seismic, and Jellyfish, before landing at Docebo. He writes Revenue Diaries, a weekly newsletter on marketing leadership, GTM strategy, and the harder questions that lie beneath both. Kyle is based in Indianapolis with his family.
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