Dear Reader,
As we come to the end of 2025, it’s a time when people naturally reflect on what they’ve achieved. For many neurodivergent people, that reflection doesn’t automatically lead to celebration.
What I see consistently in organisations is this: neurodivergent employees often struggle to recognise success because rejection sensitivity, perfectionism, and impostor syndrome distort how achievement is experienced internally.
Through PegSquared’s work with organisations, I see high performers who attribute their successes to luck, set impossibly high standards as a form of self-protection, and move the goalposts every time they achieve something.
This isn’t modesty or a confidence issue. It’s neurology.
There are a few consistent patterns underneath this.
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What Organisations Miss
Research shows that many neurodivergent people experience intense rejection sensitivity – extreme emotional pain triggered by perceived criticism, failure, or exclusion – with Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD) particularly common in ADHD and also described in autistic communities. To protect themselves from this anticipated pain, many develop perfectionism as a defence mechanism: they compensate for their fear of rejection by becoming “above reproach,” constantly producing, always striving, and rarely allowing themselves to feel successful because success never feels “enough.”
The brain recruits many of the same neural systems for social rejection that it uses to process physical pain, which means exclusion or criticism can be experienced as genuinely agonising rather than merely uncomfortable. When attention and emotional regulation differences make it harder to hold onto positive feedback while negative thoughts spiral, celebration becomes neurologically harder to access – even when achievement is objectively clear.
Your highest performers may be the ones who feel least successful.
The neurodivergent employees delivering exceptional work – including those with ADHD, autism, and other profiles linked to heightened rejection sensitivity – are often the same people who experience success as fragile, temporary, or undeserved, and who therefore:
- Attribute achievements to luck rather than skill.
- Dismiss praise because "anyone could have done it."
- Feel like impostors waiting to be "found out."
- Work themselves to exhaustion pursuing impossible standards.
- Experience success as temporary relief from failure, not celebration.
- Leave roles they excel at because they don't "feel" successful.
This creates business problems leaders miss:
Talent attrition you don't see coming. People leave not because they're failing, but because they don't recognise they're succeeding. When your best performers can't process praise neurologically - not because you haven't given it - they become vulnerable to external opportunities promising they'll finally feel "good enough."
Feedback that doesn't land. You say, "Excellent work." They hear "you've temporarily met standards that were probably too low anyway." The gap is neurological. Your feedback strategy assumes typical emotional regulation, and it's systematically failing your neurodivergent talent.
Burnout masquerading as high performance. Perfectionism as a defence against rejection produces exceptional output at an unsustainable cost. You see results. They feel exhaustion. Eventually, something breaks.
Succession planning that misses obvious candidates. When you ask "who sees themselves in senior roles?" neurodivergent employees with rejection sensitivity won't raise their hands - not because they lack capability, but because they don't see themselves as successful enough to imagine the next level.
What It Actually Feels Like
You deliver a project everyone praises. Your manager says it's excellent. Colleagues say it made a difference. You nod, say thank you, and internally catalogue every tiny thing that could have been better.
You didn't celebrate. You survived.
That award? Luck. Good timing. They didn't have many applicants. That promotion? They must be desperate. Or they'll realise soon you're not capable of this level. You'll be found out.
Every success feels temporary. Every achievement is conditional. Every win feels like a narrow escape from failure rather than something worth celebrating.
It's not self-deprecation. It's how achievement is registered neurologically.
You're working from a baseline belief - reinforced by a lifetime of being "too much" or "not enough" - that you're fundamentally not good enough. When success happens, your brain has two choices: accept that your fundamental self-belief is wrong, or find a way to explain why this success doesn't count.
Most brains choose option two - it is less destabilising.
The goalposts move. Today's success becomes tomorrow's minimum standard. The work that felt impossible last month becomes "basic" now that you've achieved it. You never get to rest in accomplishment. You're constantly chasing a standard you can't define because it shifts every time you reach it.
And here's the exhausting part: you know intellectually that other people see your work as successful. You can look at the evidence. You can see the feedback. You can acknowledge, objectively, that yes, this went well.
But knowing it intellectually and feeling it emotionally are completely different things. The emotional experience determines whether you can celebrate.
I see this in myself. I've built a successful business. Trained thousands of people. Won awards. Helped create the UK's first Neuro-Diverse Centre of Excellence at EY. I know these are achievements.
But when I look at them, my first thought isn't celebration. It's "what's next?" followed by "am I doing enough?"
The success doesn't land the way it would for someone without rejection sensitivity. It registers, briefly, then it's gone - filed under "things that happened but don't change the fundamental fact that I'm still trying to prove I'm good enough."
That's what you're up against when you try to recognise neurodivergent achievement. Not ingratitude. Not false modesty. Neurology.
When organisations don’t account for this neurological gap, they misread retention risk, burn out their strongest performers, and lose talent they believe is thriving.
One Change, Immediate Action
Stop relying on verbal praise alone. Neurodivergent brains often struggle to hold onto positive feedback long enough for it to register. The words you said ten minutes ago are already being rewritten as "they were just being nice."
Instead, create tangible evidence of achievement that can't be rewritten:
Document impact specifically. Don't say "great work." Write: "This project reduced processing time by 30%, which means the team can now handle 15 additional cases per week. That's a direct result of your systems redesign." Evidence beats emotion when someone's brain is filtering praise through rejection sensitivity.
Create celebration rituals that don't require self-recognition. Instead of asking people to share their wins (many won't), build team rituals where others highlight contributions. "This week, I saw [person] solve a problem I didn't even know we had" carries more weight than "tell us your wins."
Separate feedback from identity. Frame recognition as "this specific action produced this specific outcome" rather than "you are excellent." Identity-based praise triggers impostor syndrome. Action-based recognition provides concrete evidence that's harder to dismiss.
Build proof over time. Keep a running record of achievements, contributions, positive feedback. Six months later, when someone says "I haven't really done anything significant," you can show them objective evidence. This doesn't change the feeling immediately, but it creates cognitive dissonance that eventually shifts the baseline.
Normalise the gap between achievement and feeling. Make it acceptable to say "I know intellectually this went well, but emotionally I feel like I barely scraped through." That normalisation reduces shame around not being able to celebrate, which ironically makes celebration slightly more accessible.
The goal isn't to fix rejection sensitivity. You can't - it's neurological. The goal is to create an environment where success can be recognised and remembered despite the brain's attempts to dismiss it.
And finally, THANK YOU!
This is the last newsletter of 2025, and I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for reading.
Whether you've been with me since the beginning or joined recently, I'm grateful you're here. These newsletters exist because people like you care about making workplaces work better for everyone - and that matters.
I hope you get some rest over the festive season. Take a break if you can. You've earned it, even if your brain won't let you feel like you have.
See you in 2026.
Tania
Learn more:
Cleveland Clinic (2022). Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria (RSD): Symptoms & Treatment. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/24099-rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-rsd
Dodson, W. (2017). Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria: How it impacts your life with ADHD. ADDitude Magazine. https://www.additudemag.com/rejection-sensitive-dysphoria-and-adhd/
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