Do you know what salience is?

The word seems to be rather unpopular in general contexts and usually produces a puzzled 'hah?'

I'm not even sure we have a proper translation — Google says it's 'заметность'. Well, kinda sorta. It's something we pay attention to.

Or, more specifically, salient stimuli call to our attention. They grip it, hijack it, they are what our brain marks as relevant and prioritizes. A baby's cry. A spider. A dark corner. Fire. The red color. Something that stands out. Your Instagram feed, if the algorithms are doing their job properly. That's what every content maker is striving to create.

We don't get to choose not to pay attention to these things, it's bottom-up and it's involuntary. For the sake of experiment, I attached a video which I don't usually do here. Let's see if it's going to affect the views.

Now, there should be some point here, but I'm not sure I have any. Maybe it's a brain fart, I'm struggling to connect the dots. But, for whatever reason, this theme was salient enough in my mind to write about it.

If you're feeling introspective, try observing what objects you brain ends up paying attention to throughout the day. Pick them out, you might discover some patterns.

PS, here's another random thought that has just emerged: the visuals that we see in our dreams seem to be always salient. All of them. A dream seems to be a concentration of symbols with high relevance. Without fillers and all the perceptual noise that the brain would normally work to filter out. Maybe that's why there's so little coherency in dreams. And, in fact, a lot of compressed meaning.

Maybe my brain fart could be a thesis. That's it for today💃🏻

Tell me about yourself..

How does hearing this make you feel? What context pops up in your head?

Is it a job interview? A networking event? Is it a stranger making small talk with you at a bar? Or perhaps a friend of a friend you were just introduced to is curious about you?

This post is an invitation to reflect a bit: what's your knee-jerk response to being exposed to people's attention?

Consider it for a second. Are you excited or anxious? Are you feeling evaluated? Invested in? Interesting? Flattered? Something else?

Anxiety is suppressed excitement.

It's an idea that my mind has put a pin in. Maybe yours will too, it can come in handy.

Here is a simplified formula: Anxiety = Excitement - Oxygen

Whenever you're anxious, there is blocked excitement behind it. The body is prepared to act, but then the energy meant for the environment is turned back upon the self. The muscles that should be used to approach the environment are instead used to fight the self, locking the body in a gridlock.

So, technically speaking, when a candidate puts a smile on their frozen face and says: 'Excited to be here' — it's not even a lie😁

This framework was proposed by Fritz Perls in the early 50s. He looked at things mostly from an organismic perspective, and, obviously, this theory has limitations.

But I find it useful nonetheless. Now whenever I catch myself feeling anxious, I try to recognize what I'm excited about and let myself feel that excitement. Sometimes it even works. Sometimes it transforms social interactions into something fun rather than something terrifying🤗

I wish that I could be like the cool kids
'Cause all the cool kids, they seem to fit in

Have you heard this song? Used to listen to it in my collage years. And here is a story from that time about anxiety and socializing.

My 21st birthday happened to be in Brazil. How awesome is that, right? It was my exchange semester...

And arguably, the loneliest months of my life. I was eating the birthday cake that my Russian friends had ordered for me for a whole fucking week... 'Cause I didn't have anyone to share it with.

It sounds comically sad, but there is a lot to learn from that story. Because come on, Brazil? Out of all places where one can feel miserable, it's the least likely option.

But Brazilian people mostly don't speak English. So I thought it would be a blocker. My European coursemates, on the other hand, were fluent. And so was I. And guess what? I couldn't talk to them at all. I was that loner weirdo who sits at a separate table in the school canteen.

And I could say that it's because they had more money and I couldn't afford to hang out in the same places. Or that everyone was talking about getting laid while I had zero romantic experience and that made me shy. But mostly... Mostly I had this feeling that they were somehow "better" than me. That we were from different social classes or something. I felt inferior. Like a kid who didn't belong at the adult table. Which, of course, resulted in me having the famous 'Slavic stare' that scares people away.

I didn't manage to break that wall. Shame and feelings of inadequacy were too overwhelming. The idealization of whatever those kids represented to me was so strong that it paralyzed me. I couldn't see the people in them. And people don't like to be neglected. They want to be seen. And it takes one hell of a cognitive effort to recognize that an aloof, cold, and indifferent person is just terrified out of their mind. People don't usually expend that effort.

Here's what it looks like from the other side: "... I had a Russian roommate when I was on my exchange program in the US. The guy didn't want to talk to me. I tried breaking the ice at first, but he was obviously reluctant to communicate. And then once he asked late at night: 'Is your pillow hard too?' — 'Hmm.. yeah, it kinda is...' — and that was it."

So... C1 English is not a guarantee of successful communication, unfortunately.

On a positive note, my last week in Brazil was in a small village, just 2000 people or so. Not a soul spoke English. And I spent every evening talking to a 70-year-old traveler who told me the story of his life. We also discussed gender, sexuality, social challenges, and human nature in general. My Portuguese level would have been diagnosed as A1(+?), had I taken a test. But I never did😄

Not that anyone asked... but let me tell you about Vietnamese pharmacies.

For one, it's a very family-oriented business. A small pharmacy is usually a home. Typically, a seller has one or two babes around. Sometimes the dad is there too. He's holding a baby while the mother is thoughtfully writing how many pills per day I need to take. Or showing with gestures that some medicine is not meant to be put in my mouth... Just in case. I'm pretty sure she sees me as another big white baby.

Sometimes there is also a dog and a small kitchen. If you come in the afternoon, you are likely to interrupt family nap (they sleep right behind the counter, on the floor).

Nothing fancy, but the vibe is great. People seem chill and happy to see you, and since the Vietnamese culture doesn't suffer from fake politeness, they probably are.

...And for two, they proactively sell antibiotics with no prescription. Trip on codeine as much as you like. Unlike vapes, it's totally legal. Happy customers — happy business💊💃🏻

Everyone has heard about the infamous 'fight or flight' (or freeze) response — the sympathetic nervous system in action. This time, let's look at its counterpart: the parasympathetic system, with a much more appealing nickname — 'rest and digest' 😋

Here’s a quick story about digesting. I remember the first time I went to see a psychologist in my early 20s. I was terrified of talking to men and he was a man. A handsome one, for that matter, which made it worse. So the first thing he offered me was food. A smart trick to redirect the brain's resources and leave less RAM for freaking out.

Fake it till you make it, right? Smile and you'll feel happy. Square your shoulders and you'll feel confident. Start digesting and suppress the sympathetic system.

Now I'm sure there are gaps here and I'm oversimplifying. But on a nerd note, here are a couple of useful things to understand about the brain:

📌 Firstly, it operates on a cross-inhibition mechanism. For one system to dominate, its oppositional system needs to be dialed down. The brain's resources are scarce.

📌 Secondly, just like attention, systems can be activated top-down or bottom-up. If the motor cortex is executing commands associated with an 'I'm on top of my game' context, the limbic system will eventually believe it (at least if there is no real threat).

The reason I bring this up is that there are a few practical, "bottom-up" hacks that can make stressful communication less stressful.

The simplest advice is to eat something before or during speaking. You probably won't be hungry, but it takes some of the pressure off and signals a safe context to your nervous system.

Now, of course, you don't want to be chewing on your job interview call. This brings us to the second hack: find something for your hands to do. You can doodle instead, which might look like you're taking notes. Do something monotonous and clear that isn't mentally challenging but requires calm focus. It will take just enough of your attention away to suppress self-referential thinking.

As long as your brain is busy with something other than screening what others think about you (which is a very important function, by the way), it's much easier to be yourself. Precisely because you're not that aware of yourself.

In the next post, I'll share an anecdote about how this actually works in practice.

So I was staying in a co-living space for a month. My neighbour was an Italian guy. You know, a model of a perfect nomad: travelling the world, fluent in 6 languages, with a sculpted body and long hair that I was jealous of, all about mindfulness, awareness, meditation. He did contact improvisation (dancing) for a living and cooked amazing food.

An alternative version of 'Successful success'. And then he came up with another workshop: 'Kitchen and Confessions' — inspired by some TV-show.

At first I was like... wtf? Does anybody in this town have an actual job?(probably not)

I didn't want to spend 3 hours on cooking or confessions. I have my therapist to talk to and Grab delivery to bring me food. But the workshop was in my house, so there I was. Afraid of being judged for not being communal enough.

We were asked to tell STAR stories in small groups... while cooking. We had some ingredients and clear instructions on what to do: chop potatoes, roll the veggies into rice paper, etc.

"What was the craziest thing you did for love?" — and as the hands are peeling mangoes, the mouth reveals a cringy personal story to a stranger without any second thoughts.

And then my initial skepticism started turning into appreciation of how clever the whole thing was. The mechanics of it are just what I've described before: while the motor cortex is busy with repetitive manual task, it is inadvertently eating the energy that would be otherwise spent on self-referential thought.

Before we knew it, we got comfortable with each other. To the point that during dinner, when the questions got more personal, some deep traumas came up. People cried. Then felt relieved. It was good. I learned something new about human experience.

PS, the Italian guy was cool. I sometimes find it hard to talk to accomplished people because my narcissistic part feels threatened. But he wasn't doing what he was doing performatively. It was coming from a genuine wish to connect. And he managed to create a space for people to do just that.

Sticks and stones can't break my bones, but words can hurt me... or is it the other way around?

I'm tall. Like really tall for a woman, 185 cm. Inescapably, that comes with some insecurities about myself in relation to other people. Men especially.

So I'm sitting in a chair on our terrace, smoking. And my housemate suddenly tells me:

Jeez, every part of your body is freakishly long.

And then science. And I'm instantly attempting to cower and make myself smaller. It's this quiet, sickeningly familiar low-key shame, clouding the skin like mild fog. And then he says:

That's gorgeous.

And something in my mind flips. A presupposition cracks. But I can't quite accept how he sees me.

...

A couple of days ago we had dinner at the house. I was tired and overheated. My mouth felt sluggish. Out of the blue, my housemate says:

Your Russian accent seems stronger now.

And I start cowering again, admitting it like a defeated dog. The cloud of shame is back. My mind is promptly coming up with rationalizing justifications, as if to apologize for the way I speak: we have different phonetic systems, when I'm extremely tired my muscles default to their learned position...

Interrupting my thoughts, he adds:

It's beautiful.

Another flip, another crack. Still, I can't quite accept the way he hears me.

But see, the perception of you is not about you, it's about the other. The quality of the mirror, so to speak. Not to reduce Blake to a mirror, but he gives this rare gift of looking and seeing. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say.

Whether Blake did it intentionally or not I cannot tell. He might have, having paid enough attention to me and being a good human. And a good friend.

He's been helping me learn a trivial but elusive truth: facts are not scary or shameful. They are just facts. I'm tall and I have a Russian accent. Some people might find it appealing, others — not so much. For most it's irrelevant. That's it.

🙊🙊🙊
If you open your mouth at the Friday night dinner table, it is to contribute something sensible. Or you keep quiet.

Above is a family anecdote I heard from someone on YouTube. The 'good old days'.

Despite my sympathy for the speaker, I respectfully disagree.

Not that we should encourage talking nonsense... But in order to talk sense, one needs to learn to talk first. Through trial and error. Besides, we are sense making creatures. Everyone makes their own sense, because everyone has their own senses🤷🏼‍♀️

The reason I'm bringing this up is that there is a sacred connection between communicating and sharing food. Sharing a meal is the most ancient thing there is, and that's supposed to be the ultimate safe context.

If you're sharing a meal with someone, it means that at the very least you have a truce. Or maybe you are friends. Or maybe you're family.

Now, as the story in the beginning implies, family dinners are not all about love and acceptance. But, as a norm, a family still holds a safe enough space. Safe enough to practice standing your ground and wrestling with a tyrannical Father, for example.

Either way, that's where we learn to speak. The basic words come from our parents. But understanding social dynamics and hierarchy, ways of relating, learning what's socially relevant, how to navigate in a group — that seems to happen by observing what's happening at the dinner table.

No one learns to speak in a classroom. And even the stiffest language barrier eventually gets broken if you consistently dine with people.

Since I came to Hoi An, I rediscovered the pleasure of not eating alone. And even though a part of me silently complained about not being productive enough, I don't think those hundreds of hours spent talking at the table were wasted.

For one, that's how I eventually got friends. For another, I've learned so much more about the human experience. And no, there doesn't always have to be a point.

Maybe it's because Hoi An is Neverland. No fathers and mothers here...

Anyways, don't turn down dinner invitations, and don't wait until you have something sensible to say🧚🏼‍♀️

By the by, speaking of conversations without a point...

I'm not sure there's such a thing. If a conversation is happening, something very important is trying to come forth. We just don't always know what it is. Spoiler — it's something about how we relate to each other. And maybe understanding what it is is the point.

On the one hand, time has a high opportunity cost. Especially if you have a high-paying job. On the other hand.. two hours of unstructured conversation is a small price to pay for one less blind spot. Blind spots cost us years, sometimes decades.

PS, if you're into linguistics, this might be worth checking out 🧠

📌Important fact📌

In Portuguese, 'Shut up' is 'Cala a boca'. Which sounds almost identical to Колобок🌝

Having made that discovery, I made my boyfriend watch the Kolobok tale on YouTube. That's some quality content there. My takeaways:

1. That shit is SCARY. The ending can compete with a good horror movie.

2. From the psychological perspective, it's a boundary tale:

I proclaim: 'I am that I am' — and then I have to run away from everyone, because it's the only way I can preserve the integrity of my self-constructed 'I'.

And then I meet someone who validates me completely and says — Yes, you are exactly what you say you are. So I'm tempted to come closer. And closer. And then this someone 'consumes' me. Fusion happens.

For there are only 2 ways to escape the friction of negotiating my identity with the world: endless running (isolation) or getting eaten (fusion).

3. Can't help but imagine people having a fight in Portuguese... Must sound truly menacing🌚

We travel to strange lands, cross paths with strange people. What part of your identity do you put forward when meeting strangers?

Here's a story. Back in the day, one of my colleagues introduced herself to the new team by sharing her name and... the fact that her first time was at 16🙃

Like, she got into a car, said 'Hi girls! My name is [], I'm from []. I've just turned 17. Lost my virginity at 16.' Then there was a story of what her mom had said when she found out.

And everyone was like... OK🙄 What the fuck just happened how do we continue this conversation??

I don't want to feed stereotypes about models; everyone has a different story. But what is universal is that for many of us, those early work trips abroad were the first time we had to present ourselves to the big, new world. It was the first time we stepped out of the safety of family confines.

So how does one introduce oneself? What are the rules? Who is the arbitrator?

What sounds like a cringy social snafu to an adult, for a 17-year-old kid was understandably important to share. Alone, away from home, navigating her emerging sexuality and questionably legal approaches of much older men. Lacking guidance, attempting to call it out. Talking to 14-year old me instead🐣

Hypothetically, it gets easier with more life experience. We get templates.

In the process of maturation, we develop multiple personas. It's like wearing clothes. Different clothes for different occasions. Once the dress-code gets too strict, we don't like it. We complain about tyranny. When there are no dress-code guidelines at all — we get anxious about how we are supposed to look.

No matter how much I'd like to say that looks don't matter — they do. They signal how we can relate to each other, help us translate our identity.

But to make things more complicated, identity is not fixed either. It's dynamic, it's negotiable, it depends on the mirror. There is no such thing as an isolated 'I'.

Kolobok's life path is dangerous. Especially if one's pursuing it in Tokyo night clubs.
...

"...So, tell me a bit about yourself"

It's good to have a framework for this one.

When we come to a job interview, we kinda know what to say. And it's taken for granted that it has little to do with the "self". We just try to mirror a job description. And we hate it because it reduces us to a function.

What about our aspirations? Our potential? Hopes and dreams? Our spirit, our essence, our soul...

Tech people are probably laughing at this point, but..

If you really think about it, the problem with these words is that so far they have been poorly translated into biological concepts. In fact, when people start putting 'soul' and 'god' and 'synapses' in the same sentence, it usually makes things worse.

And yet, it's within these imprecise, symbolic spaces where genuine self-expression lives.

Imagine introducing yourself without any structure. What would you share first?

There is an exercise I implore you to try:

✍️Write 10 answers to the question 'Who am I?'

Then see if you can push it up to 20. Then see if that matches to what you usually tell about yourself to others.

You're welcome to write your list in the comment section😊

If anyone here reads what I post consistently… well, you guys can see I have a problem with consistency🙃

Grow the fuck up — some inner voice is saying… Adults are able to respond to challenges instead of just reacting, that’s why it’s called responsibility…

Unfortunately, that voice is only good for making us feel worse about ourselves; it’s not good for achieving results. And, I guess, it’s a sign that discipline remains something external.

On the other hand, I hear the word ‘adulting’ more and more. Not from psychology lectures, but from real people saying ‘Wow, look at me! I’m adulting today!’

And maybe it’s not such a bad thing? Whatever works, as they say…

Psychology and morals apart, motivation is about dopamine. Unless your brain is producing enough, you are not going to move. Literally.

How do you get more dopamine? Drugs, sex, cigarettes, alcohol, expectation of a reward. It’s an anticipatory neurotransmitter. Some years ago I learned about the magic of ‘maybe’ from Dr Sapolsky.

That’s how casinos operate. You anticipate a reward AND there is a ‘maybe’. And if you believe it’s a 50/50 maybe, it motivates you to engage like crazy. That’s how addiction is induced.

It got me thinking.. In the context of learning, it might be easier to maintain a daily routine of engaging with a language if you introduce a bit of maybe. Just to keep it interesting. Rather than force yourself to stick to the same activity every day.

I want to give it a try. And you can too, here’s a demo bot for picking your daily English activity🙂

What do you guys think? Is it easier for you to stick to the same routine, or would you be more motivated if it was less predictable?

Any feedback on this tool would be very much appreciated🤍

I’m looking at the crying emoji reaction to the previous post (that’s 33% of the engagement by the way!😂) — and thinking — wow, I wanted to create something fun for people... Goes to show, the old saying is true: assuming makes an ass out of you and me.

And it’s not that I’m not familiar with the concept that discovery should come before delivery. Otherwise — it's the picture above.

It’s that at some level, I’m still afraid of talking to people and asking questions. Especially when it’s a group of people. That’s my communication bottleneck. Relational bottleneck, really.

But I’m genuinely curious to know what difficulties you come across when speaking a second language (or a third).

A list of my assumptions is below, but if those are off the mark for you, please share what you’re actually experiencing😊

I appreciate your responses, still hoping to collect a bit more😇🙏🏻 In the meantime, here's a question.

Does it get easier to break a language barrier once it’s your third / fourth / language?

It would seem that learning them is cognitively easier. Especially if there are semantic overlaps, like in the Romance languages. Actually speaking them, on the other hand…

My brain, generally, wants to stick to English. And no wonder, the brain likes familiarity. But it seems there are a few variable involved.

Partly it’s about convenience. Partly it’s a self-image and identity thing. Partly it’s fear — what happens if I say something wrong (i.e., not what someone expects to hear)?

And by the way, the last point is the reason I preferred speaking English over Russian for years. So it’s not just about speaking a foreign language. It’s about tracking people’s reactions — in any language.

How is it for you, if you speak / know more than 2 languages?

Is the IT vocabulary bubble enough to work in English?

I see that everyone who voted here checked the box for lacking vocabulary.

On that note, I've been thinking... If you take any IT English course, it typically follows the lexical approach. I.e., learning context-specific collocations — what do you say at a stand-up meeting? How do you give feedback?

It's a good approach. Very practical, helps you with exactly what you need. No irrelevant textbook topics. And it sells well too — you can boost your English in just a few months.

On second thought, however... Have you heard about the curse of knowledge? — We tend to take our knowledge for granted. And I assume (based on my experience, of course) that IT English courses are designed by people for whom English is not a foreign language anymore. They've been fluent in it for years, and it is, for all intents and purposes, their way of experiencing the world.

In this scenario, learning 'IT English' is just adding one more interface to the existing architecture. That's how it worked for me, when I joined the US startup. Getting to know the language for SCRUM rituals was indeed very helpful. But since I had been lucky with my previous educators, my brain already had an extended associative network in English.

So when I would hear some phrase — say, 'I'm swamped with work' — it wasn't just some abstraction. It would evoke a bunch of associations (Shrek, childhood camping trips, wet feet, lost shoes, frogs, a monster from The Witcher, moss — the list goes on), a visualization of what's happening, maybe even a visceral sensation of muscle tension / suffocation.

Now, I'm not sure that's the case for someone who hasn't had a chance to get immersed into the English-speaking environment before having to look for a job.

Do we really need all those 'irrelevant' words?

Arguably. If you think about how a language is formed, the core vocabulary is always grounded in something physical. Simply put, we have objects (nouns), their qualities (adjectives), what we do to those objects (verbs) and how we do it (adverbs). Prepositions show us how things relate to each other — spatially and otherwise.

A language describes our relationship with the environment. Take, for instance, phrasal verbs — they are all very physical, the context of movement is embedded in them. Much like the system of prefixes in the Russian language.

A logical assumption here would be that general vocabulary, not necessarily related to the work context, is actually very useful to integrate. So that you map the language to your sensory experience. That's when it starts making sense and becomes intuitive, rather than abstract code you need to remember.

Does any of it resonate with your experience?

How to expand your vocabulary (following up on the previous post)

I'm referring to general English, not the IT bubble. So it's tricky. The English language has at least 600k words. In comparison, Russian has 150-500k.

Gemini says, an average English speaking adult knows ~20-35k words. But since we've been talking about the concrete, physical world, a child's level is already not so bad. That's around 10k. By the way, here's a tool to estimate your vocabulary.

So how do you learn 10 thousand words? In addition to Agile English, that is?

I'm afraid there are no short-term solutions here, sprints only work in Scrum. One of my clients had been learning new words in an app for years. That's very admirable and had produced a result — he would recognize the words he had learned when he saw them. Their meaning — not so much. Not until he used them in some personally meaningful context.

Targeted learning combined with activation is one way to go about it. If you have the stamina for it. And here are some more options you can try:

📖Reading

Truth be told, that's how I gained most of my passive vocabulary. At first it was reading and translating; then, as soon as I had enough vocabulary to somehow follow the plot — just reading.

The result was — an intuitive feel of the language at the expense of clarity. The syntax part was good. But my thoughts had been foggy for years. Contextual understanding is a natural way to learn, but it strips away the comfort of precision.

Still, the number of words you gradually adopt when you read 50 pages is much larger than if you read 5 pages, translating every new word.

It's also about which word goes with what. E.g., I might not tell you the translation of the word 'ajar'. But I know it's a quality of a door, and my brain provides a picture where it's open. I'm not sure I can explain the verb 'wield', but I know that it's what you do with a sword (a specific object) or power (a broad abstraction), and I have a Game-of-Thrones-like clip playing in my mind when I hear / read it.

That's how you build your associative networks. They say that the unconscious exists within a language. Arguably, that's where thinking actually happens.

✍🏼Writing

It's an effective way to force your brain into precision. Try describing what you sense and feel. How your body is doing. It's like a verbal savasana — check in on yourself limb by limb. If you don't know the words to describe that — anatomy and animal biology is one vocabulary bubble I highly recommend exploring. As well as the verbs associated with it — what can happen to your body, and what your body can do.

The better you get at describing your visceral sensations, the more real the language becomes.

🫂Relating

This one is probably the most effective — not in terms of quantity, but in terms of salience (how prominent a word / phrase is in your mind).

When we hear something from people who are important to us — especially in some emotional context — it sticks. Song lyrics / something your professor said / a line from a relatable movie character.

And, of course, the people that you talk to. It's much easier to start using an expression if you hear it first-hand, in a real interaction.

As my dear friend said — 15 years of pillow talk. That's all it takes😁
...

Of course, all of the above takes a lot of effort and dedication. It can only work if you find the process rewarding. And it's OK if it takes a while, it's not supposed to be a quick fix.


PS, if you need a quick fix because you've signed an offer, here I described what helped me🪄

One more PS:
I opened a book I read years ago. Chillingly relatable.
Chuck Palahniuk is really good at describing physical and visceral stuff. Maybe too good.

Ennui (pronounced ahn-WEE) — a noun that means a deep feeling of weariness, listlessness, and dissatisfaction caused by a lack of excitement, purpose, or through having too much ease. It goes beyond ordinary boredom into a dull, heavy state where life feels uninspiring or meaningless.