Part 2: Feedback, RSD, and the Stories We Carry

The Mask

By Dale Smith, Cultural and Behavioural Realist | Creative Director, Bridge  |  insidebridge.com

On what people are protecting, why they’re protecting it, and what it actually takes for it to slip

We all wear one. I don’t mean that as a criticism — I mean it as a straightforward observation about what it means to be human. We develop masks, professional composure, deflection, expertise, humour, relentless busyness, because at some point in our lives we learned that showing certain things carried a cost. That vulnerability, in the wrong environment or with the wrong person, wasn’t safe. That authenticity could mean loss of standing, or belonging, or approval. The mask is intelligent. It knows exactly what it’s doing.

The question leaders rarely ask isn’t “why is this person being defensive?” — it’s something far more useful: what have they learned to protect, and what would it actually take for them to feel safe enough to set it down?

I recognise several of my own masks clearly now, in a way I couldn’t always have done. One of them is professional expertise — the genuine ability to discuss ideas fluently and analytically, which is real, but which I have also, at various points in my life, used as a very effective shield. When feedback arrived and that internal switch flipped that I described in the first piece, I didn’t shut down visibly. I engaged. I explained, I reframed, I brought incontext and nuance until the original point had been carefully, professionally, thoroughly buried. It looked like thoughtful engagement. It wasn’t. This is one of the things that makes rejection sensitivity so easy to miss in high-functioning professionals — the responses don’t always look like defensiveness. Sometimes they look like thoroughness, or rigour, or simply a very comprehensive analysis of why the feedback, while interesting, may not fully account for all the relevant variables.

Dr. Ned Hallowell, who has both studied and lived with ADHD across decades of clinical practice, describes the emotional responses associated with RSD as arriving with a speed and magnitude that bypasses conscious thought entirely. The emotion fires before the thinking catches up. Which means that by the time a person with a sensitised threat response is cognitively engaging with feedback, their nervous system has already made a decision about it — and everything that follows is, at some level, working around that decision rather than genuinely responding to the content.

The mask, in most cases, was never consciously chosen. It was built incrementally, one small experience at a time, often by well-meaning people who had no idea what they were constructing. Brené Brown’s research on vulnerability and shame points to something that I find genuinely important here: shame, unlike guilt, isn’t about what we did. It’s about what we are. And for people who grew up absorbing messages that they were too much, too sensitive, too slow, too different, too loud, not enough — those messages didn’t stay as memories. They became architecture. They became the lens through which subsequent experiences, including feedback, get filtered. What looks like oversensitivity from the outside is, from the inside, a very well-calibrated survival system doing precisely what it learned to do.

This has particular relevance in workplaces that have been built around evaluation, and most of them have. Performance reviews, development conversations, 360-degree feedback processes — all entirely legitimate tools, often delivered with genuine good intent. But for someone whose nervous system has learned to equate evaluation with the risk of rejection, those same structures can activate something much older and more visceral than the current conversation warrants. A manager delivers carefully considered feedback, and what the nervous system hears is not the words but the pattern those words most closely resemble in its stored history. This is why skilled communication alone, however refined, is rarely sufficient. You can word something perfectly and still have it land in entirely the wrong place — not because of what you said, but because of what the nervous system was already primed to hear.

What changes things isn’t technique. It’s conditions. Amy Edmondson’s decades of research on psychological safety show that what determines whether people can genuinely receive, process, and act on feedback is not primarily the quality of the feedback itself. It’s whether the environment feels safe enough for honest engagement — safe enough to beseen, to acknowledge difficulty, to not have the answer, to let the professional composure drop for a moment without it costing you something. And here is the distinction I want to be precise about, because I think it’s one of the most important in leadership: creating the conditions for the mask to slip is not the same as asking someone to drop it. Asking someone to be vulnerable before the conditions for vulnerability genuinely exist doesn’t build trust. It confirms what the nervous system already suspected — that this environment isn’t safe, and the mask was right to stay firmly in place.

What the best leaders I’ve worked with actually do is build the environment so carefully, so consistently, and so genuinely over time that the mask eventually becomes unnecessary. Not by demanding openness or scheduling a courageous conversation. By earning it. That’s a slower process. It requires showing up consistently rather than performing a single well- executed feedback session. But it’s the only approach that produces something real and lasting rather than compliance dressed up as engagement.

I came back from a period of time spent caring for my mother through her final illness with a different relationship to my own mask. Experiences like that have a way of clarifying things — of showing you what’s actually worth protecting, and what you’ve been carrying that you didn’t need to anymore. I became more aware of when my own mask was in place and why, and more genuinely curious about what other people are protecting when theirs is firmly up. That curiosity — not the kind that’s a coaching technique, but the kind that’s actually interested — has turned out to be one of the most valuable things I bring into any leadership conversation. In the final piece of this series, I want to bring everything we’ve covered into something practical. Because the question I hear most often from the leaders, HR professionals, coaches and managers I work with is simply: so what do I do with this? And the answer begins with something that sounds almost too straightforward to be useful. Build the foundation first.

This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 3 explores what leaders can actually do — and why psychological safety isn’t the soft part of the work. It’s the whole point.