The Happy and Prosperous Blog

Yesterday we looked at some of the theory behind the idea of the Johari Window for increasing our self-knowledge. Today let’s get into some more practical material. Before we do that, however, please do read yesterday’s post if you haven’t already done so.Self-knowledge, in this context, means moving items out of the Blind Spot and into the Arena, i.e. discovering more about ourselves. We cannot do this by alone. As the name says, it’s our blind spot so we need to ask others for help - we need feedback.

Getting Feedback

The question then is how do we get clear, honest feedback. Simply asking people you know to tell you what they think about you is unlikely to work. My guess is that people would avoid the question and give bland, positive feedback which would be too vague to be useful.

Here’s an alternative. Gavin at The Reluctant Presenter found a web site which gives a list of 55 adjectives describing a person. You are asked to choose 5 or 6 that you think best describe you. In other words you are populating the 2 boxes under the column ‘Things I know about myself’. Then you are asked to save this and email the link to as many people as you like. When they connect to your page they are presented with the same 55 adjectives and asked to choose 5 or 6 which describe you. They can save their choices under a name or they can do it anonymously. In this way you are likely to get better quality feedback.

The Developing Johari Window

When you next go to the site it will present you with your Johari window.

As more a more of your friends choose the words that best describe you, your Johari Window starts to develop. You can see how many people chose the same characteristics that you chose. They will be in the Arena box. Characteristics that other people chose that you did not, will be in Blind Spot. Adjectives you chose that none of your friends chose will be in Façade. Finally words that no one chose will be in Unknown.

This is the web site name http://kevan.org/johari

I hope that by doing this it will help you get more idea about parts of your personality that you were not aware of. I do have some reservations about this tool in that some of the adjectives are quite similar but please don’t get too caught up in analysing the words. Look for themes. The way I am using this is just looking at the words in Blind Spot that are in bold type, i.e. ones where 3 or more people have selected a particular characteristic. It’s also interesting (and maybe a bit humbling) to look in the Façade box. These are characteristics that I believe I demonstrate but no one else agrees. So, for instance, 2 of the words I chose for myself were Happy and Quiet. Nobody else has said that about me. If you want to take a look at my Johari Window (still in progress as I write this) you can find it at http://kevan.org/johari?view=rogerk.

Do let me know if this has been helpful for you. Thanks for reading.

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