Johari Window

Hey! Sorry have been AWOL recently - was really busy with college, it was the week before summer vacations and a couple of other things were on my mind. The last course we had was quite fascinating really - it was called 'Sustaining Superior Performance', I know it sounds like a title out of a self-help book and the course was a lot like that, but it was great fun. The teacher was good and the classes quite unique, a mixture of practical exercises, games and just a little bit of lecture. I learnt a lot about myself, for example I learnt that I am really very critical about myself - my own harshest judge.

There was this exercise in which we had a questionnaire of around 40 questions and we had to fill it out, then we chose a partner and had a talk with them for 10 minutes, of course since we have been together for almost two years now we knew each other quite well. After that we had to fill the same questionnaire for our partners. In the end we had the two sets of questionnaire with us one in which we had assessed ourselves and one in which our partner had assessed us.

Almost all the class realized the point that I have been making for a long time i.e. 'What I think of me is not necessarily what others see me as'. I got proof in class

The concept of Johari Window is basically an exploration of the different personalities we have, the ones that others see and the one that is private to us.

Johari Window, named after the first names of its inventors, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, is a communication model that illustrates human interaction - it is a way of looking at how our personality expresses itself.

A four paned "window," divides personal awareness into four different types, as represented by its four quadrants: open, hidden, blind, and unknown. Each quadrant represents different kind of personal information. The Johari Window is called window because the lines dividing the four panes are like window shades, which can move as interaction progresses.

The quadrant that is called ‘Open’ is our public personality, this is the face we portray to people and we know about it. The obvious things like ‘extrovert’, ‘talkative’, etc things that are obvious to everyone, including of course the physical aspect of it all 'fat', 'thin', 'pretty' and so on. All information that is open – things I know about myself, and that you know about me. For example things about me that you can siphon of reading my blog, the comments I leave, and of course all that I reveal about my feelings and my likes and dislikes. As we get to know each other better this ‘Open’ personality becomes more accentuated.

Known to self, unknown to others is the ‘Hidden’ quadrant; this contains things that are known to only me, the stuff that I don’t reveal to anybody. All of us while writing in our blogs decide how much we want to share and what we don’t want others to know. Things that we might be ashamed of, things we might want others to never know about ourselves. This quadrant we share with very few if any and even then there are things that we keep only to ourselves. The process in which I shift things from this quadrant to the ‘Open’ quadrant is called Self-disclosure, the process of opening the window wider, which to many of us is a very scary process.

For me the most fascinating quadrant is the ‘Blind Spot’, because this is where others know things about me that I don’t know myself, thus the name, 'blind spot'. I might think I am very introverted or socially challenged or whatever but others might think the opposite. I might think I am not a very good listener or I am lazy but others may have a totally different opinion. This is the quadrant that made me realize that I am just too hard on myself. And since this is knowledge or information that we don’t know about ourselves it’s not something we are putting on as a show for others, its knowledge about ourselves that genuinely shocks us.

The last quadrant titled Unknown also called Grey Areas’ quite frankly doesn’t make any sense to me, as it is knowledge that I don’t have of myself and neither do you. Maybe this is the root of all our psychoses the secret behind our actions – the unconscious.

If you want to see an interactive model and practice it a partner check out this website interactive johari