Find your Blind Spots with Johari Window

I wrote 3 adjectives on a whiteboard which I reckon the most relevant ones to depict myself. Then, I asked 2 of my colleagues to describe me in 3 adjectives on a blank sheet. Guess what… none of those adjectives — mine and theirs-overlapped although we spend 40 hours together every week. I played the same game with some of my friends a couple of times, but the result is the same.

Why does it happen?

There is a fundamental difference between who I think I am, who I am in fact, and who others think I am. Despite the fact that these questions usually yield different answers we tend to neglect what others think and stick to the “who I think I am” while subconsciously selling it to ourselves in quality of “who I am”.

Skipping all the complex psychological, and philosophical definitions, in my opinion, self-awareness lies somewhere in between those aforementioned 3 questions. But how to understand the relationships between self-awareness and the perception of others on us? For me, the best tool by far is Johari Window.

What is Johari Window?

Johari Window was developed by two American psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955, in order to study group dynamics. According to this concept, trust can be acquired by revealing information about you to others and learning yourselves from their feedback.

Jumping into the essence of the concept, the Johari Window proposes 56 adjectives as possible descriptions of the participant. They are called Johari Adjectives and can be considered as personality traits, attitudes, behaviours, emotions, skills, etc. You can find the full list of adjectives at the end of the article.

What you are expected to do is to mark all the relevant adjectives from the given list which you think are the best ones to describe yourself. Right after your selection, ask the same thing to others who you think know you well and might have an opinion about you.

Then, just fill the following boxes accordingly. For example, things that chosen by both you and your peers go to ARENA, or things that you didn’t choose but were chosen by others go to BLINDSPOT.