Sometimes our whens grow bloated
And I miss the pinpricks of your upturned mouth
Popping the bulging bubblewrap balloon of minutes, countless
As atoms floating inside

And then: when our whens are
Skinny
The corners of yours and the curves of mine
Shape a helix
And time is gapteeth sealed shut and curtains
Of lips
Part to reveal pearlescent togetherness: we

Ever
So
Softly
Slink
Inch
Brinking on breaking
All these damn clocks in the house because skinny or elephantine
The whens cease to mean
Anything
Anything at all
Because time stands still

Originally published on Medium

The post Between Skinny Whens first appeared on Katya Davydova.

See, at around 8:42 each morning, give or take a million languid minutes due to the horrendous congestion, Larry greets your car’s undercarriage with a thunderous hello. His friend Margaret is farther down the road, and today graces you with a slackening of your usual steering-wheel-white-knuckling as you pass leisurely over her. That morning rush hour is really quite the opposite, both because you’re crawling and because your car has already been gasping and groaning for over 60 minutes.

At 6:53, when headlights stream in the opposite direction, you encounter Alhambro: stocky, mustachioed, surly. He’s the big nemesis, the one who makes your tires recoil so far back into their sockets that you swear that tomorrow, you’ll have to circumvent his booming salutation, if only for the sake of your car.

These potholes all begin to appear as characters in the quotidian scenes of your life.

The way you fall in love with a big city is just like you would with a face. All the scars, blemishes, bumps, growths.

The spurt of chin hair here — it’s that intrepid, dandy lion cleaving a concrete crack.

The still-pink mark above a left eyebrow in memory of a playground pole — it’s that indent in the stucco parking column where your car violently kissed it.

It’s all the pockmarks, the pores, filled in or hollowed out, pressure squeezing out the inner gunk from the plumbing below.

It’s the congestion you get as a head cold descends and the smog of the grimy streets doesn’t help. The congestion of your nasal cavities mirroring the ones on the city’s freeways, every human particle trying to move, to get out, but all are collectively stuck. We’re all stuck in traffic’s mucous membrane.

And so, as you get to know a face, waking up next to it cradled in the pillow each morning, a routine builds. You get to — and you joyously do — take in all the scars, and blemishes, and bumps, and growths. You see his face, her face, their faces, day in and day out. You look at all the people you love and all the people you miss, and you smile to yourself at how beautiful they are.

It’s the way Margo leaves you a few banana pancakes for breakfast because she was listening to that Jack Johnson tune this morning while you slumbered. The way Daniel’s eyes crinkle when he welcomes you into his circle with arms wide, enclosing you into warmth and friendship as laugh lines deepen on your faces. The way that Arielle and Jake, whom you’ve only met tonight, thread their limbs through yours stumbling home from the bar, singing We’re off to see the Wizard! on the yellow brick road that doesn’t seem so far-fetched in this bewitching hour.

You look at all these resplendent humans and at unsuspecting moments of gazing and memory, you see their own potholes. All the scars that wove the histories that are coursing through their veins. The stories. Their stories.

Through the routines of seeing these people — your people — you remember to be awake. When it’s a jungle in your apartment and the air outside is so polluted that the mountains hide, you go for a drive to escape for a little while.

You drive to go see Daniel, you drive to check in on Margo, and you’re once again stuck in the mucous membrane of city traffic. But as you trundle along, the Larrys and the Margarets and the Alhambros jostle you on the freeway, reminding you you’re still moving. Still going. Mental congestion dissipates as you get closer to your people.

These people. These potholes. They shake you awake. They get you unstuck.

And as you to fall in and fall in love with the scarred, beautiful faces around you, you fall in and fall in love with the scarred city streets. This is how you fall in love with a city. This is how you call it home.

The post Potholes and Falling In first appeared on Katya Davydova.

Everyone realizes why a new common language would be desirable: one could refuse to pay expensive translators. To achieve this, it would be necessary to have uniform grammar, pronunciation and more common words. If several languages coalesce, the grammar of the resulting language is more simple and regular than that of the individual languages.

The new common language will be more simple and regular than the existing European languages. It will be as simple as Occidental; in fact, it will be Occidental. To an English person, it will seem like simplified English, as a skeptical Cambridge friend of mine told me what Occidental is. The European languages are members of the same family.

Their separate existence is a myth. For science, music, sport, etc, Europe uses the same vocabulary. The languages only differ in their grammar, their pronunciation and their most common words. Everyone realizes why a new common language would be desirable: one could refuse to pay expensive translators.

To achieve this, it would be necessary to have uniform grammar, pronunciation and more common words. If several languages coalesce, the grammar of the resulting language is more simple and regular than that of the individual languages. The new common language will be more simple and regular than the existing European languages. It will be as simple as Occidental; in fact, it will be Occidental. To an English person, it will seem like simplified English, as a skeptical Cambridge friend of mine told me what Occidental is.

The post How to write a Book Blog first appeared on Katya Davydova.

Everyone realizes why a new common language would be desirable: one could refuse to pay expensive translators. To achieve this, it would be necessary to have uniform grammar, pronunciation and more common words. If several languages coalesce, the grammar of the resulting language is more simple and regular than that of the individual languages.

The new common language will be more simple and regular than the existing European languages. It will be as simple as Occidental; in fact, it will be Occidental. To an English person, it will seem like simplified English, as a skeptical Cambridge friend of mine told me what Occidental is. The European languages are members of the same family.

Their separate existence is a myth. For science, music, sport, etc, Europe uses the same vocabulary. The languages only differ in their grammar, their pronunciation and their most common words. Everyone realizes why a new common language would be desirable: one could refuse to pay expensive translators.

To achieve this, it would be necessary to have uniform grammar, pronunciation and more common words. If several languages coalesce, the grammar of the resulting language is more simple and regular than that of the individual languages. The new common language will be more simple and regular than the existing European languages. It will be as simple as Occidental; in fact, it will be Occidental. To an English person, it will seem like simplified English, as a skeptical Cambridge friend of mine told me what Occidental is.

The post Quotes for the Ultimate Book Lover first appeared on Katya Davydova.

Everyone realizes why a new common language would be desirable: one could refuse to pay expensive translators. To achieve this, it would be necessary to have uniform grammar, pronunciation and more common words. If several languages coalesce, the grammar of the resulting language is more simple and regular than that of the individual languages.

The new common language will be more simple and regular than the existing European languages. It will be as simple as Occidental; in fact, it will be Occidental. To an English person, it will seem like simplified English, as a skeptical Cambridge friend of mine told me what Occidental is. The European languages are members of the same family.

Their separate existence is a myth. For science, music, sport, etc, Europe uses the same vocabulary. The languages only differ in their grammar, their pronunciation and their most common words. Everyone realizes why a new common language would be desirable: one could refuse to pay expensive translators.

To achieve this, it would be necessary to have uniform grammar, pronunciation and more common words. If several languages coalesce, the grammar of the resulting language is more simple and regular than that of the individual languages. The new common language will be more simple and regular than the existing European languages. It will be as simple as Occidental; in fact, it will be Occidental. To an English person, it will seem like simplified English, as a skeptical Cambridge friend of mine told me what Occidental is.

The post The Most Anticipated Books of 2020 first appeared on Katya Davydova.

Previously I had written about completing monthly challenges of picking a new set of habits and executing them daily for a month each. Since the idea’s inception in August 2017, I’ve completed roughly 22 monthly challenges, ranging from trying intermittent fasting to meeting a new person every day. 

For the month of June, one of my challenges was to post on LinkedIn every weekday. My impetus was to see if I could a) be more engaged with the content from my field of organizational development, and b) learn about the posts’ impact on my network and efficacy to connections. 

The types of content I created or shared can be broken up into two main categories:

➡️ Personalized article shares, either with or without some sort of audience ask.

(I found these articles while browsing websites like behavioralscientist.org or Google’s Discover feature.)

➡️ Personal posts, with pictures (like about my graduation or a mural I’d seen), or text-only posts (like a quote from a book I was reading). I tried to frame these posts as ones that would make people in the feed stop and just savor an idea for a moment. 

(Some of the text-only posts just asked the audience a question–I wanted to experiment with soliciting feedback.)

Now, I want to pull back the curtain on my results to show you how simple it is to drive engagement on your own posts and profile.

Here are the metrics and their implications:

1️⃣ Overall, my profile views skyrocketed for those four weeks. Three of the four weeks I saw increases in views, which we can partially attribute to a potential positive correlation between post views and profile views. 

Implication: People saw my posts in their feed, and subsequently clicked to see my profile. (See graph).

2️⃣ On average, my posts garnered about 350 views each. Let’s break down details. Fewest views: I reshared a post of an emotional intelligence expert sharing an article he wrote (45 views). My reshare post was published on a Monday, and had no hashtags.

Implication: The timing (early in the week) and lack of hashtags may make a post less visible, according to Hubspot and Oberlo. 

Implication: Conversely, using hashtags is good! Someone reached out to me saying they found me because they follow the #organizationaldevelopment tag, which I had appended to one of my posts. Use them wisely!

3️⃣ Most views: I shared a graduation picture from my Master’s program which garnered 2,513 views, 44 likes, and 10 comments (as of June 30). 

Implication: Personal posts with pictures of authentic human faces do really well, especially if announcing an accomplishment. I’ve seen that for other LinkedIn users, too. 

4️⃣ Of the ~16 posts I made during the month, only a handful were of just text, and tended to have only 100-200 post views. 

Implication: Varied media, like photos, videos, and articles, tend to have more views than just text alone. Humans are visual creatures, and this is strong corroboration. 

5️⃣ I did not post on the last two Fridays of June because there was not a huge number of views for my first two Friday posts. (Of course, there may have been other confounding factors at play, such as post and content relevance to the LinkedIn audience or algorithm.) Additionally, I either posted between the lunch hour or between 4-5pm EST. 

Implication: Best days to post were Tuesday and Wednesday (confirmed by, again, Hubspot and Oberlo). I chose those lunch-hour and end-of-workday times to catch folks on LinkedIn during their downtime or commute. 

6️⃣ My favorite moment? I reshared an article that came up on my feed by a non-connection who’d written about an interview he conducted with Laszlo Bock. Laszlo was and is an inspiration to me in the organizational development field (ex-SVP of Google, Humu founder, author of Work Rules), and I tagged him in my post about the interview. It was a Russian nesting doll post of sorts (I posted about an article written by someone who’d interviewed Laszlo)–and Laszlo ended up liking my post (and then we ended up exchanging messages)! Cue huge fangirl moment for me. 

Implication: It’s okay to judiciously tag folks in your posts to help spread someone else’s ideas or writing. You never know who may interact with your posts. 

In sum, because I’d never been a consistent poster on any social media platforms, I wanted to challenge myself to see what could work on LinkedIn, a platform I frequently use and evangelize. 

Beyond the six lessons learned and reinforced above, the whole monthly experiment made me pay more attention to topics in organizational development that I found fascinating and wanted to share, hoping others would plug into the conversation, too. I learned that it was very difficult to get users’ written interaction with my posts; only about half of them garnered any comments. This is a point of growth for me: producing content that not only makes users stop and ponder, but also leave their own two cents. I see short video clips and other interactive media being the next step. 

And perhaps that is a challenge for another month!

I’m curious: what has helped you engage with an online audience of yours? Do you have any tips or best practices? 👇

The post Driving LinkedIn Engagement: An Experiment first appeared on Katya Davydova.

Every birthday, I have a tradition of posting shop at this coffee chain, writing a quarterly and yearly review of myself, and ordering the largest, most ludicrous hot beverage.

As someone who normally goes for a plain medium coffee, cream no sugar, a drink with as many names as a descendant of a royal family is a real treat.

It’s 9:30 a.m. I walk in, find my spot in a cozy chair, go up to the zoo-like counter, people clamoring for their morning caffeine much like myself, and order a “Coconutmilk Mocha Macchiato.”

Now, before I had driven to Starbucks, I checked the menu and painstakingly compared all the ingredients, nutrition facts, and pros and cons of each fancified drink I was considering. This sugar-bombed modern twist on coffee-with-milk stood out. I even had to Google what a macchiato was–and found it to be the perfect combination.

I walk up to the counter, trying to pronounce all the zigzaggy syllables to the poor barista. “May I please get a Coconutmilk Mocha Macchiato?” She asks to clarify my order, and I even whip out my Starbucks app and point to the drink. That one.

I scan my phone app, paying nothing since Starbucks is phenomenal and gives you a free drink on your birthday, and head back to my chair.

A few minutes go by, and I am so impressed with two things.

One, the baristas’ sanity in controlling the crowd and getting the right drink to the right lips and the sheer speed of processing; and two, the barista saying my name correctly.

This was already going to be a terrific day.

I grab my drink, ready to enjoy the once-a-year concoction, and sit down to write.

Almost two hours pass and I fling my head back to enjoy the last drops of the creamy creation, and check the label.

Two things stand out to me.

One, they had gotten the size wrong. (As a birthday glutton, I’d ordered a Venti–24 ounces of coffee and syrup.) No worries, I didn’t need those calories anyway.

And two, they’d gotten the order totally wrong! I didn’t realize what I’d been drinking (though, to be fair, I’d probably not have known the difference were it not for the printed label slapped on the side of my cup).

So we had ourselves a delicious little dilemma.

By hour two of writing, I’d been jonesing for another cuppa joe, because I am a coffee addict. But did I really want to rile up the wonderful Starbucks workers, when: one, I didn’t need more saccharine liquid coursing through my veins; and two, I didn’t want to be that woman who’d sipped her entire beverage and decided it was completely wrong?

I did not! Surely!

However, since it was my birthday and since I’d been pushing myself to speak out when things could or should be improved, I decided to try it out.

I waited for a lull in the customer line, walked up to a 20-something, curly-haired Nate, and explained the situation.

“So I realized I received the wrong order, and of course realized it after I’d drank it. Here’s what I had ordered [showed him my Starbucks app] and I got a caramel macchiato. It’s no worries since it was yummy, but I thought I’d…[mumble mumble].” Cue a trailing silence on my part.

At this point, I’d expected Nate to say, “WELL TOUGH LUCK, WOMAN. You already had your fancypants drink! Who do you think you are?!”

He probably had to deal with enough grumpy people already during his crack-of-dawn shift.

But instead, here’s what he did. He glanced at my phone, confirmed the order, and said, “No problem!” in the kindest, cheeriest voice I’d heard all morning.

And that completely made my day.

This type of no-questions-asked customer service blew me away–even in the age of the controversial “customer-is-always-right” mentality (to which I don’t necessarily subscribe; there are some pretty nasty customers out there who treat service people like dirt, and that makes my blood boil). The fact that Nate represented not only the Starbucks brand but also his personal brand of being a good human made me feel stellar–as both a customer and as a person. Now, as I sit here finishing my true Coconutmilk Mocha Macchiato, hopped up on too many grams of sugar and caffeine, I feel grateful.

Say what you want about the coffee giant. The people who work there, in my experience, tend to be just the right amount of sweet.

The post Quality Over Quality: A Starbucks Story first appeared on Katya Davydova.

I was running through suburbia — you know the kind: strip malls, traffic, cookie-cutter houses whose walls almost kiss, and a lot of pavement.

As my feet pounded on an overpass across a major highway, the river of cars below roared over the music in my headphones, an engulfing onslaught. Meanwhile, beneath me, the individuals in their hermetically-sealed plastic-metal boxes could just barely drown out the noise of the traffic surrounding them.

All these people, cars kiss-distance apart, yet no connection. It struck me as melancholic.

Running along, I was nearing the end of the overpass and stopped suddenly, mid-stride. Backpedaling, I retraced my steps back to the middle of the overpass, gazing at the rushing cars below, and began making rainbows with my hands. Back and forth, back and forth I waved.

How do we connect with strangers?

We do it with whimsy, with slightly breaking social norms we may feel confined to, with breaking the monotony of an afternoon commute.

As I stood there on that bridge, helicoptering my arms, a delicious joy bubbled up and out through my body. While 90% of the drivers and passengers below didn’t see me or didn’t wave, the few who did absolutely made my day. Here were two people, unknowingly thrust into the same space and time of existence by sheer chance, connecting over a universal symbol of ‘Hello.’

Hello, new friend. It’s nice to meet you, if only for a split second.

As worlds intersected over and over for mere moments, I couldn’t help but smile wider and wider. Grinning turned into laughter turned into pure, unadulterated joy. I was floating, effervescent, lifted by the smiles of strangers below. The suburbs suddenly didn’t feel so lonely.

How many times do we pass up an opportunity to connect with another human being? To look into their eyes as they pass by, instead of at the ground?

When our initial, ingrained impulse is to ‘stay in our lanes,’ perhaps it’s time to look up, and wave.

The post Waving Through Traffic first appeared on Katya Davydova.

Something that gives you the giggles, something that catches your eye and induces this radiant, wonder-like feeling?

Take a moment to pause and remember: Think back to when you were a kid and immerse yourself in the laughter of jumping amidst hundreds of bubbles you blew with your friends, or when you spiked that colorful beach ball so high up to the clouds, or when you were driving through the tail-end of a rainstorm and looked up to see the most magnificent rainbow.

That is joy.

While making my weekly sunset drive from DC to Charlottesville after a grad school weekend, I was introduced to the concept of the study of joy through a podcast. Based on Ingrid Fetell Lee’s research, I learned why we are so drawn to circular objects like beach balls and bubbles (since spheres are “safe shapes”), and why we like collections of tiny things so much (since the sum of parts is greater than the whole).

Have you ever seen or cuddled in a pile of puppies or kittens? Or run through a field of flowers?

That is joy.

And here is where joy is different from the oft-sought-after “happiness.” The podcast states that while many chase happiness, it is a long-term and often elusive concept. Joy, on the other hand, is tiny and immediate. It has nothing to do with acquiring things, or traveling to exotic places, or any other grandiose ideas, since joy is the act of noticing the here and now. It is simply being awake and open to letting the quotidian world amaze you.

For example, as I’m typing this at my favorite coffee shop, I just noticed the barista is wearing the same exact socks as I am! Why this is such a joy for me is because I chose those socks purposefully this morning, and because the barista and I had a lovely conversation when I was ordering my coffee earlier. Now, our worlds intersected once more with our shared affinity for a certain kind of sock, and that, to me, is joy. As soon as I noticed this little serendipity, I smiled deeply to myself.

So why should we care about joy?

Joy is additive, which means that the more of it you have in your life, the more it compounds and the more joyful you feel. I tried this on myself: after I listened to the podcast, I actually went looking for joy during my mundane drive. For example, I noticed how the drab winter tree branches made a curious hot-air-balloon shape against the orange sunset sky, or how the lights of the incoming traffic looked like a glowing yellow river in the distance. Keep in mind that this is a 2.5 hour drive I’ve made hundreds of times–yet I still noticed something new that time.

These teeny-tiny details of everyday life made me smile, which spread positive emotion, which made me happier, and which is also backed by science.

That night after I got home, I took a second to observe the droplets of water on my steamy bathroom mirror and follow their rivulets down the glass, and seeing myself in the reflection, wondered why I didn’t look for joy more often.

There, I learned that, just like daily practices and mediation, looking for joy makes one more prone to finding it, and that in turns adds a dollop of color to an otherwise busy, hectic life. It is the sheer benefit of noticing that helps me to slow down and revel in just how joyous a day–and lifetime–can be.

So, what is your daily joy?

It really is right there if you stop and pay attention.

The post Oh, Joy! first appeared on Katya Davydova.

As part of a capstone for the MS in Organization Development and Knowledge Management, my team and I led a full-day workshop to help participants discover how they see themselves and how the world mirrors them back.

So what is personal brand, exactly? The way we termed it, based on an amalgamation of research from authors like Dorie Clark and Hubert Rampersand, is this:

Personal branding is about taking the time to understand our internal and external influences and then living strategically and authentically so that the world sees you in your best light. It’s what other people say about you when you leave the room.

To satisfy some of the math-inclined folks, we created the following equation hone to it in:

Internal Exploration + External Feedback = Personal Brand

With each of our six team members dressed in each color of the rainbow, representing the six subsections of personal branding, this was truly a colorful journey. The first part of the day focused on exploring our internal influences, understanding our values learning how to show up authentically, and how to discover our purpose in life. This portion culminated in drawing individual and group vision boards (which research posits offer a 42% greater likelihood in completing goals), as well as crafting personal brand statements.

After a refreshing catered lunch, we invited participants to seek feedback from their crafted “feedback communities.” Clarifying how others see us helps to shape our personal brand so that we can portray a consistent and powerful image. We equipped them with tools of how to ask the appropriate questions in order to extract feedback, and how to navigate the information they would collect from their circle of confidants. Since feedback is difficult to ask for and even harder to internalize, we encouraged participants to make a commitment to themselves to step outside their comfort zones. After all, our primary goal was to host a space for learning, reflection, and ultimately action.

A beautiful and novel addition to our workshop was the immensely talented Lauren Green’s graphic facilitation. Throughout the course of the workshop, Lauren visually documented key points that culminated in a stunning spread.

By the end of the 8-hour workshop, participants came away with their completed workbook, action steps to further propagate their self-discovery, and an understanding of how to color their personal brand.

Seven months of diligent work of blood, sweat, and tears later (definitely the last two!), and my team felt immense pride as the final round of applause boomed in the presentation hall. It truly was job well done, and we were grateful for our participants’ feedback:

• “[This workshop helped me] become more aware and mindful of others and how I interact with people. Sometimes we do things without thinking, so getting feedback from others is helpful, as is being aware of how to get feedback from others.” – Participant
• “Healing for me was able to take place, and for that I am grateful.” – Participant
• “[This workshop] allowed us to dive deep into our being and share with other people. [The] activities showed many different elements, even contradicting qualities, that make up who I am.” – Program Professor and Participant

The post Color Your Personal Brand: Helping others understand themselves first appeared on Katya Davydova.