A window onto who you are

TRUTH TOOL The Johari Window helps increase self-awareness and the ability to communicate our true selves to others.

Johari’s Window is a tool used in counselling training, self-development courses and business development. A diagram or a grid, it’s a useful way of thinking about how we can communicate a truer picture of ourselves, both to ourselves and to others.

If you know yourself well enough, you can share information to improve communication and connection with others. Showing people who you are requires self-awareness and self-disclosure and the Johari’s Window can help with both.

The window works like a grid. It goes from the obvious and more-conscious areas of your life to those less-obvious areas that you may not be aware of. Johari’s Window can be looked at from many angles and provides four basic representations of the Self: Public, Private, Blind and Undiscovered.

The Public Self is what you and what others see in you. You usually do not mind discussing this part of yourself with others. Most of the time you agree with this view you have and others have of you.

The Private Self is what you see in yourself but others don’t. In this part you hide things that are very private about yourself. You do not want this information to be disclosed because you don’t want what you see as your faults, weaknesses and dysfunctions to be exposed. This area also applies to your good qualities that you don’t want to show to the world due to modesty.

The Blind Self is what you do not see in yourself but others see in you. Sometimes those around you might not tell you what they see because they are scared to do so, may fear offending you or might consider it a waste of time.

The Undiscovered Self is the self that you cannot see nor others around you. In this category there might be good and bad things that are out of your conscious awareness.

The goal of the Johari’s Window is to maximize your awareness, so you want the Open (Public) Area to be as big as possible. The boundaries of each of the squares are flexible, they can enlarge or reduce depending on the amount of self-awareness and feedback you give or receive. In relation to the Open Area, sharing information about yourself moves the horizontal line down and getting honest feedback from others lets you learn about yourself and moves the perpendicular line to the right.

I encourage you to create your own Johari window. Though you will not be able to fill in the right two quadrants by yourself, take time to reflect on what things about yourself are known and what remains unknown to you and to others. You could ask some trusted people in your life for feedback. And finally, take the risk to disclose more about yourself to people you can trust. You may find the Johari’s Window useful in the discovery of who you are.

Oh, and if you’re wondering where the name came from, ‘Johari’s Window’ is named after the two trainers who created it, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham – Joe and Harry.

Jannah Walshe is a counsellor and psychotherapist based in Castlebar and Westport. A fully accredited member of The Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, she can be contacted via www.jannahwalshe.ie, or at [email protected] or 085 1372528.