A lot of folks with ADHD have a thing they call “rejection-sensitive dysphoria.” In the olden days we would have called this being a sensitive wee sausage. RSD is a bit of a meme in the extremely memetic world of ADHD-posting, and it tends to activate my annoyance with overly-medicalised terms and engagement-driven relatability that doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions.
Whatever we call it, the term doesn’t quite capture the feeling of the “everyone hates me” anxiety that burns so hot that it’s sometimes almost impossible to leave the house.
I have/had it pretty bad, to be honest. It can be an awful closed loop; you’re oversensitive to inputs; you overreact, that causes people to treat you with a bit more real or imagined side-eye, you notice, the loop tightens. I’m very aware of it and yet I still let it get me. Just recently I put off following up on a job because I had managed to imagine a very detailed scenario where the recipients of my email hated me (reasons unclear). I did eventually follow up, reasoning that if the world blew up then it wouldn’t matter if they were pissed, and it turned out they were busy and hadn’t seen my email. Because of course.
Things like this make it all the more important for people who suffer from RSD to have an offset. Some kind of collection of all the nice things people have said about you which you can turn to when you’re feeling the RSD pinch. Which, naturally, I have never really had.
A pivot to business: I am forever telling my clients that it’s vital to capture customer feedback in the form of testimonials and case studies. Why? Because your biggest single selling point what other people say about you.
I suspect the reason many shy away from this is because we almost all get some amount of RSD. Reaching out for feedback can be nerve-racking.
But if you don’t do it, people don’t say things like this:
We’ve been delighted with our Marketing support from Two Ruru.
Josh hit the ground running. He understood our business, the terminology we use, the customers we serve. We’re able to provide rough inputs to Josh and he turns them into well crafted and relevant outputs, suited to the various modes of communication we use.
Our transition to HubSpot CRM has also been assisted by Josh as a by-product of his engagement. He created our new website using HubSpot as the underlying platform, got us up & running with direct email messaging from HubSpot, which also required us to get our data in order and segment customers. We’re streets ahead of where we were with our HubSpot evolution.
There’s also a bit of icing on the cake. Josh is the Master of Case Studies. We’ve done our first one with him, and it will be used for many any different purposes and shared with several key stakeholders.
And a cherry on top – Josh is great to work with!
So there you have it. Apparently everyone isn’t annoyed at me all the time, which is a bit of a narcissistic the-world-revolves-around-me thought, now I think about it. I am going to ask a few more folks for things like this, which will help me build up my business (and when the feedback isn’t so good, it will help me improve, which is the point of all this!) And it’ll help with the RSD too.
Oh, and if you’re in business and you need someone to do stuff, check out my About page, where I have a non-exhaustive list of all the stuff I can do.
If you’re not in business, consider flinging me a few dollarydoos here and there. It all helps.
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