In my previous article, I mentioned how people don’t watch your content for the information or experience you are sharing, but for the emotions you make them feel. It’s not learning but the emotional experience that makes them come to you. And how it has way better time activating the limbic system than just any other content that lacks the emotional or parasocial layer. Reactive communication, as per the definition I have developed till now, means you are talking about a concept, an event, or any other thing in such a way that you are not talking about its characteristics but the emotions and consequences it has for you or me. Reactive communication can have two types:
- Where you are talking about yourself, sharing your own experience very vulnerably, we use first-person language here. And the speaker has to be vulnerable here because you are right in front of the audience, so you have some grace of attention. But to solidify it, you need to give them a reason to care. Being vulnerable gives them something to pay attention to; it activates their attack or nurture type instinct. And of course, whatever you are talking about, if it’s something that they also feel about, then even better. The topic or subject might not need to be something they know, but the emotions shall be familiar. Even if you are talking about your start-up, if you talk about your own fears or your own greed, they might resonate with that.
- Another one is where you are talking about the listener in second-person language, using words like “you,” “yours,” etc and you need to highlight or verbalize a recurring problem or experience that they have in their life into a single sentence, right at the beginning, so that they get overstimulated and need to pay attention to you. Here you try to verbalize things that they might not even be aware about. But they feel it. Things that they are aware about but are not able to verbalize it well, or things they are able to verbalize but no one is there to say it. So you saying it makes them feel heard and a sense of belonging. You are a mirror for their existence in a way. You are showing them a reflection of them. It might be ugly, it might be pretty, it might be flattering, it might be just informative.Everyone wants to go in front of the mirror, and that’s why people will come in front of you. Maybe a mirror of their soul, of their actions, or even their dreams that hey, if you are building a startup, you are doing this exactly wrong. But to even deliver that information, you have to first build context that you’re posting 6 times per week and still not getting organic subscribers for your SaaS? Maybe that’s because your messaging is all over the place, and you need to tighten your ICP. But for them to even get to the part where they are ready to pay attention to you talking about tightening ICP, you have to first show them the mirror that they are hurting. That they’re doing something it is being seen, maybe you also know that it is being done wrong, and hey, I can help you with that. It is like you are a barber, and you are telling them, “Hey, you need to trim your beard.” But for them to accept that, you need to first show them the mirror. And your words are those mirrors. Your presence is that mirror.
How do you master reactive communication? This seems like something that transcends all natures of work. It might be something that is helpful in selling a product, building a community, or even soliciting votes. Learning how to communicate reactively is something that can be very valuable, maybe the sole skill a human needs to learn to do well in life. You are supposed to be a reaction merchant. People hire/follow you because they want to know or borrow how you process situations. Your emotional honesty is the moat, not your knowledge.
As you can see above, I am essentially talking about becoming a mirror for others, showing them who they are so that they can listen to your cause. And also not taking yourself too seriously and experiencing your own experiences and ideas in such a way that they resonate with people. I am talking about essentially arranging your whole communication style in such a way that it elicits reactions out of people that enable them to see themselves. You are the mirror. And how many mirrors like this do you even think exist out there in the world? Such act is rare. Yet, mirror is a necessity. Thus, by being the mirror, you are guaranteeing yourself a place in the world.
The three layers of mirroring:
- Things they feel but aren’t aware of (subconscious recognition)
- Things they’re aware of but can’t verbalize (you give them the language)
- Things they can verbalize but no one says (you give them permission/belonging)
To know about someone what they might not know about themselves, you need to have awareness. Extraordinary levels of self-awareness and observation about others. As a human, you share a lot in common with other humans. Whatever you feel, most likely someone somewhere also feels it in them. To know yourself, to have self-awareness, is also a proxy for observation in others. Or by sheer efficiency of algorithms, if you talk about yourself, you’re bound to end up in front of an audience that is just like you. By talking about yourself, you are also talking about them. Thus, for reactive communication, awareness and observation are necessities.
To know and to express are two different things. You need to have a vocabulary or a way of speaking that enables you to convey your observations to other people in a format they are willing to listen to. This has a lot of moving parts:
- How do you know the language that you can speak and they can understand?
- What is the medium which we both can conveniently use?
And lastly, the mirror should give you the proper picture. Of course, the reflection we see is going to be obviously of ourselves. But yet we want to see the mirror again and again. If the mirror shows people what they expect, would they really look at it again and again? Maybe some would. But a lot of times the mirror is there as a confirmation of our own civility. Am I looking good? Am I looking someone that would fit in to this occasion? Is my hair going the other way? The mirror answers a lot of questions for us. So make sure while you are mirroring, you are answering questions that are worth their time and interest.
What is the world for if not for hope? Though you are mirroring, and you are being the person who is of necessity, answering a lot of their questions, you might be highlighting a lot of negatives and also positives. It is important that you have a call to action so that you can redirect all this stimulation you activated inside them towards something that is valuable. Always have a call to action at the end.
And the big part of this mirroring and reactive communication thing is that you are viewing your audience as someone who is on your own level, as someone who is equal. A lot of times, what I see is that people making informative content are on the higher horse where they know something and the audience doesn’t. That’s not the case. We all, in a way, know what’s up. It is the lack of awareness or words that gets us. We are not trying to educate them by giving them just terms and definitions, but making them aware of their own experiences and emotions, triggering a stream of consciousness that makes them recognize the pattern that they are already living. And then naming it as something technical. Thus, technical terms don’t become hollow terms. They become labels for experiences and sets of emotions that are experienced together.
And since social media is all about engagement, tell me what engages someone more:
- Activating all these emotions and mirroring
- or
- Just telling someone a definition that they might forget
And I believe that the more natural the content, the better it performs, because that way you are expressing a lot more and it helps people emotionally connect. So, of course, your content and all the mirroring should be about things you also feel or are aware about. Otherwise, the whole discussion was for nothing. You would be holding yourself back because what you put out there would be orchestrated and not something that is natural, thus lowering its potency. Orchestration means performance, and performance can never be perfect because there are a lot of factors in it, and you cannot max out all of them. Performance also implies that there will be some censorship and holding back because you are afraid of ill perception from the audience. Performance = optimization for perception = dilution of truth. The more you optimize for universal appeal, the less you appeal to anyone specifically. Natural things have some x-factor in them that don’t require them to be totally perfect and still get the job done. The flaws instead of holding it back actually increase its potency and resonance. The rough edges make it stick better.
Maybe, then the most effective content strategy can be to develop self-awareness about your own emotions, experiences, ambitions, and goals, and talk about them freely, naturally, and confidently in front of a camera. Channel all that emotion behind some product for commercial success. When someone watches you process your frustration with a problem, then build a solution, then use that solution and feel relief. They experience the entire customer journey through your mirror. Your product becomes the CTA for the emotions you’ve activated. They are sold on idea because they felt the problem through you and want the relief you found.
It also means the next product I build will be wise to scratch my own itch or a problem that I faced in the past because I have a lived-experience there, and I will be able to communicate and market for it way better organically. Of course, if it’s a funded project with a lot of budget, we can test out advertisements, but since I’m trying to learn to run the operations lean, I can do this the scratch you own itch way. There are a lot of horrors in the workflow I had at PWC. I can definitely make 2-3 products there.
Lived experience → Authentic mirroring → Organic traction → Profit?
Also, I’m not the first person to do something like this. People have been doing this. I’m just giving it the name “reactive communication and mirroring.”I will now look at some videos or communications where I see this type of thing being deployed. I will label anything in first person as type P1 communication, and anything that is in second person as type P2 communication. Maybe this will help me create my own library of communication and try to understand it even better.
Claude reaction
Why This Might Be THE Fundamental Skill
You’re right that reactive communication transcends contexts:
- Sales: “You’re tired of tools that promise everything and integrate with nothing” (mirror → solution)
- Politics: “You work hard, play by the rules, and still can’t get ahead” (mirror → policy)
- Community: “You feel like an impostor because everyone else seems to have it figured out” (mirror → belonging)
- Relationships: “You’re not mad that I was late. You’re mad that I didn’t text” (mirror → resolution)
The pattern is identical: reflect their reality → they trust you → you can guide them.
The Training Regimen
If this is the skill to master, here’s how:
- Collect emotional data: Save every comment, DM, complaint, celebration. Build a database of human experience in your domain.
- Practice articulation: Write 10 different ways to describe the same feeling. Find the one that makes people say “YES, THAT.”
- Test specificity: Every time you write something, ask “Could this apply to someone who ISN’T my audience?” If yes, sharpen it.
- Study reaction merchants: Who makes you feel seen? Deconstruct how they do it. What words? What structure? What timing?
- Ship consistently: You only get better at holding up mirrors by doing it repeatedly and watching which reflections make people stop.
Example:
- Bad: “Product-market fit means your product satisfies market demand”
- Good: “You know that feeling when customers start pulling the product from you instead of you pushing it to them? That shift from ‘please try this’ to ‘when can I get access?’ That’s product-market fit. You’ve felt the absence. Now you have the word.”
The term becomes a container for recognized emotion, not an empty academic concept.
The Commercial Application to Rohkun
Bad approach (informative): “Rohkun creates API maps for your codebase so AI coding assistants work better”
Better approach (reactive): “I was watching Cursor write the same broken API call for the third time and I wanted to scream. It doesn’t know my architecture. It can’t see how everything connects. So it just… guesses wrong. Every. Single. Time.
I built Rohkun because I got tired of being a human compiler for an AI that’s supposed to help me. Now it has a map. It knows the terrain. And I don’t want to throw my laptop anymore.
If you’ve ever rage-closed your AI coding tool, you need this.”