RSD, Leadership, and Brand Grief — A Guide for Neurodivergent Leaders

If you’ve ever felt gutted by a leadership moment that dismissed your work or erased your voice, you’re not alone. For ND leaders, this hits hard. Here’s how to move through it with clarity and heart.

Why This Hits So Hard

As a neurodivergent leader and builder, I’ve felt this many times. You lead with heart. You build relationships. You invest in culture and trust.

And then.. one leadership moment, one email, one meeting, feels like rejection, erasure, or betrayal.

If you’re wired like me, it doesn’t just sting, it hits your whole nervous system.

That’s the hidden layer of RSD (Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria) that we don’t talk about enough in leadership and brand work.

It triggers:
• "What did I do wrong?"
• "Why am I being rejected?"
• "Am I the problem?"
• "I’ll never be trusted again."

And your body feels shame, panic, sadness, and rumination. It’s normal. And it can be moved through, cleanly.

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What It Looks Like in Leadership & Brand Work

These are some example moments that can trigger RSD in leadership and brand work:
• Getting a cold or defensive reply after reaching out in good faith.
• Watching a culture you helped build erode and seeing it dismissed as "perfect."
• Being erased from brand narratives or leadership recognition.
• Being excluded from leadership conversations you helped shape.

These moments can be extremely difficult to move through because they land as professional grief and personal identity pain. Because brand builders lead from the heart. And ND leaders can feel relational grief deeply.

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How to Process It Without Burning Yourself Out

Here’s the leadership + RSD processing arc I now use, and I’m happy to share it with you:

1. Name the relational grief, don’t minimize it.

2. Spot the leadership pattern — is this personal, or consistent with their brand?

3. Reclaim your leadership lane; their pattern does not define your worth.

4. Inject humor — corporate theater IS absurd once you see it.

5. Teach from the experience — alchemize grief into brand wisdom.

Key principle: Feel it fully, but don’t perform your pain publicly — build from clarity, not reaction.

For example, if someone sends you a cold text, email, or message, you might write one back (but never send it). Just get the ickiness out on paper, or verbally, whatever works for you.

Matching energy temporarily is fine, but don’t lower your standards of emotional maturity and integrity.

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Why This Matters for ND Leaders & Brand Builders

ND leaders feel deeply, and that is an incredible gift in leadership and brand work.

However, unprocessed RSD moments can erode confidence and damage trust networks. It only takes believing something about yourself based on someone else’s narrative, and you can lose yourself in these moments.

Learning to navigate relational brand grief effectively is essential if you want to lead in this space long-term, especially if you want to have a voice and a platform to share stories authentically.

Sometimes that voice is a threat to someone’s ego or the perspective they once held over you.

That’s what the corporation is: a collection of narratives and policies policing your behavior as a human.

And I’m not saying all policies aren’t necessary, but as a former HR nerd and neurospicy human who lives in the gray, I can see both sides of this coin.

Many of these policies are designed to tell you:

• Who you can talk to

• What you can say

• How you can earn a living after you leave

I used to write and enforce those policies. But after being in the thick of it myself and through helping others, I realized I don’t necessarily agree with the system’s version of what "moving forward" should look like.

Join a company. Sign something.
Leave a company. Sign something.

But none of it protects YOU as a person. It protects the company.

And your ability to stay clear, human, and wise after these moments, that’s what makes people trust you MORE.

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Closing

If you’ve felt this, you are not alone.
You’re not too sensitive.

Your relational depth is a leadership strength.

But it means learning how to process brand grief differently, so you can keep building from heart and clarity, not burnout and bitterness.

And using what you’ve learned to share with others and walking beside them, not above them.

I’m walking this path too.

Let’s build leadership and brand spaces where this kind of depth is honored — not dismissed.

PS: This is the work I help leaders and brands do — because alignment matters. And trust IS the brand.

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