Use the Johari Window to Foster Self Awareness_Final

>> Hey there. I'm back to teach you about one of my favorites awareness raising exercises. Have you heard of the Johari window? This exercise is a great way to shake things up with your clients while increasing their awareness about how they perceive themselves versus how others view them. The Johari window is a tool to help increase one's level of self-awareness and understand personal relationships with self and others. It's a great exercise to use in groups where clients have come to know one another. To maximize the potential of this great resource, I've also adapted it to use with your clients one-on-one. The Johari window was created in 1955 by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, hence the name Johari. Get it? In this lecture, I'll explain to you what exactly the Johari window is and how it works. First, I'll describe how to complete the exercise in the traditional group format it was designed for. Afterwards, I'll show you how I've personally adapted this model to use one-on-one in private sessions. The Johari window is a square with four quadrants. Starting with the top left and moving clockwise, these represent the public self, the blind self, the undiscovered self, and the secret self. These are also sometimes referred to as the arena, blind spot, unknown, and facade. The public self refers to the aspects of ourselves that are known to both ourselves and others. The blind self represents the parts of ourselves that others are aware of but we ourselves are not. The secret self is what we know to be true about ourselves but we hide from others. And the undiscovered self refers to the parts of us that are completely unrecognized or undeveloped. For example, I know that I'm intelligent, and I publicly demonstrate this in my interactions with others. This is an aspect of my public self. As my secret self, I know that I'm self-conscious, but I hide this from others. I see myself this way but I don't allow others to. My blind self would be things that I don't identify with or notice as qualities in myself but other people do. These are things I've learned about myself from receiving feedback. Like, for example, I don't see myself as brave, but other people have told me that I am. My undiscovered self is made up of those qualities that neither myself or others identify me as either because they don't currently resonate with who I am or they just haven't been developed yet. For example, I've never identified myself as a sensible person, and others have never used that label to describe me either as far as I'm aware. But it's possible that this is a layer of myself I just haven't exposed or developed yet. As I mentioned, this tool was originally designed to be used in a group setting where participants are familiar with each other. Luft and Ingham created a list of 57 adjectives to use along with the diagram. These are included in the corresponding handout The Johari Window along with a blank diagram for you to use with your own clients. To adapt this exercise for your own use, you may choose to tweak the original word list. If you want to do this, go for it. But if you do, I strongly urge you to take caution not to populate the list with negative qualities, especially if you're using it with a group. Let me tell you why. While it might be insightful for a client to reflect upon how they view and express themselves, it can be harmful for them to learn that people in the group view them in negative ways. For example, if a client discovers through this exercise that half of her fellow group members view her as bossy, she might get defensive and shut down both verbally and emotionally for the rest of the session and perhaps even for the rest of the program. You always want your clients to feel safe and free of judgments when they're working with you. Keep it positive, and if you think there's any chance that a word might bring up feelings of judgment, just leave it out. So moving forward, to do this in a group format, start by explaining that you'll be leading the group through an exercise that's designed to raise their awareness of how they see and present themselves versus how others observe them. Pass out a word list to each group member and instruct them to circle all the adjectives on the list they believe to apply to themselves. Next, have them make a list of the adjectives that apply to each of the other people in the group. Give them about 5 to 10 minutes to do so depending on the size of the group. If the group is large, you may choose to break your clients down into smaller groups of four or five. When everyone's done with their answers, hand out the Johari window diagram to all group members and explain what each quadrant means and how to fill in the diagram. You can even work off of the transcript from this lecture as a guide. So adjectives that both individual and others identify go under the public self. Those words you used to label yourself but no one else used to label you go into the secret self quadrant. The adjectives that other people identified you as but you didn't label yourself with should be recorded under the blind self. And the remaining adjectives go in the undiscovered self. Notice that adjectives in the undiscovered self category may end up there because they simply don't apply. For example, if someone's public self is outgoing, shy likely ended up in the undiscovered self category. Adjectives that feel wholly irrelevant can be crossed out. However, other adjectives end up in that category because maybe, for example, you want to be a loving person but you just haven't cultivated that part of yourself yet. Once everyone is clear on what to do, have your clients go around the circle to share their answers. Each participant should pay close attention so that they can take the answers that apply to themselves and plot them into their diagram accordingly. When everyone's answers are plotted and their windows are complete, instruct your clients to take a critical look at their chart and pay attention to what stands out most for them. Guide them to pay attention to both the answers themselves and the amount of answers in each box, or in other words, the size of each of these personas. Have them share their findings and reflections either in small groups, paired shared discussions, or as large group share. Now I'll walk you through how to adapt this exercise to use one-on-one with your clients. Only do this activity with clients who you've established a good rapport with and have gotten to know well. You can introduce the activity similarly as you were to a group by asking if they would like to do an exercise with you that'll better help them understand how they view themselves versus how they present themselves to and are seen by the world. Give your client a word list and instruct them to circle all of the qualities they believe to be true about themselves. Tell them that you'll do the same, that you'll be circling all of the qualities that you observe to be true for them. Be sure to make clear that you're only going to be selecting things based on your observations, not based on judgments or assumptions. When you're both done, take out the diagram and explain to your client what each quadrant of the window is called and what it represents just like the way I explained it you earlier. Share your answers with your client and have them share their own. Instruct your client to write the words you both identified in the public self quadrant, then have them write the words that only they identified under the secret self. Next, they should write the qualities that you identified but they didn't in the bind self, and the remaining adjectives should be written in the undiscovered self. When you're all done, spend some time discussing the outcome of this exercise. This resource leaves you in a position to ask so many great high-mileage questions that your clients are now primed to explore. For example, you could ask, "What stood out for you? Were you surprised by anything I noticed about you? What? Why? Tell me about the parts of yourself you hide from the world and why you choose to do so? Are there aspects of your public self you wish you could make secret or get rid of altogether? What are they? Are there any qualities of your undiscovered self that you'd like to cultivate?" It can also be really challenging for clients to see how full or empty each of the quadrants are on their diagrams. Are they relatively transparent as a person or are they more masked in their identity? Is the way they see themselves congruent with how others see them or are they primarily masked showing a different facade to the world no matter what's going on for them internally? Guiding your clients to notice and discuss this can help trigger insight around how much they know themselves and how much they let others see who they truly are. Overall, whether done individually or in a group, the aim of this exercise is to help your clients see how they perceive themselves in relation to how others perceive them. The ultimate goal of the process is for clients to use this information to become more self-aware and increase the scope of their public self. Sewing this, in fact, will shrink the other areas or in other words, they'll become more congruent on the inside and the outside. Are you ready to go check out the Johari window now for yourself? As I mentioned earlier, the Johari window handout provides you with a blank template for this exercise along with the traditional list of 57 adjectives which you can opt to you use or tweak to your liking. This week, try out the exercise with a client or pair up with a classmate, friend, or family member, and test it out. Let us know how it goes by commenting in the Facebook group. Thanks for watching. See you next time.