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Increase your understanding about self-awareness and the use of the Johari Window structure to reveal ideas about who you are in your eyes and the eyes of others.
0:06
Say we’ve just met, and I like you, how do I find out more about you? And how do I let you know more about me? Well, that’s the process of self disclosure on both of our parts. I asked you questions to find out more about you. And I tell you things, so you know more about me. And sometimes when we interact with another person, we also find out more things about us.
0:31
Things that nobody ever told us before, or things that we just had never thought about. And switching to looking at that through analytical eyes, all of that information can be plotted. One way to plot my relationship with another person is to use something called the Joe Harry window. The what? Well, the Joe Harry window, and it’s called that because it was developed by doctors Joseph lift, and Harry Ingram, lift states in the text of human interaction, which was published in 1969, that the Joe Harry window is pronounced as if it were Joe and Harry, which is where the term comes from. So what is this window that was named for two guys named Joe and Harry, the Joe Harry window is a way to look at your relationship with one other person, and is a model that represents our level of self disclosure, and our level of receptivity to feed back in that one relationship. One way to define it is a method of charting or plotting disclose of behaviours in a relationship. The Floyd text says that the Joe Harry window is a visual representation of components of the self, that are known or unknown to the self and others. In any relationship, let’s say the one between my husband and me, I have a Joe Harry window, and so does my husband. Same with my best friend, I have a Joe Harry window. And my best friend also has a window that shows our relationship. So with any two people, there are two windows mine, and theirs. They might look the same, but they might look very different. And they can change over time.
02:23
Now, if you’re still watching, you might be saying What do you mean? Don’t all windows with four panes look alike? And the answer to that question is what makes the Joe Harry window so interesting? In Joe and Harry’s windows, the panes move, and the panes might be different sizes in different relationships. Now, let’s go back to the basics of this window to explain this. Without any pains at all, my Joe Harry window would always look like this. In this window is every single thing about me if it’s your window, and regardless of with whom it would contain every single thing about you, even things that you don’t know about yourself, and even things that are going to happen in the future. Now, what happens to all of that information is that it gets segmented into panes. In this slide, you can see that we can move all of the information about me, it’s my window, or you if it’s your window into two places, things I know, and things I don’t know. So the things I know about me are probably pretty easy to figure out. But there are also things that I don’t know about me. And we’ll get to those in a minute. We can also move all of that information that is in the big window into to other places. This slide shows that we can move all of that information about me into two panes, called things you know, and things you don’t know about me. So when you superimpose those two sets of panes into one window, we end up with four distinct window panes. Each pane contains very specific information about me. So let’s talk about each of those panes separately. In the first pane called the open pane is all the information again about me because this is my Joe Harry window, all the information that I know about me and all the information that you know about me so it’s things I know and things that you know about me for explanation purposes, let’s have the you be my husband because that pain will have different information depending on who the you is.
4:48
So I’ve been married a long time and my husband happens to know a lot about me. For my Joe Harry window with him. There would be a lot of stuff in that open pane things I know about me And things that he knows about me basic things like my height and weight, but also all sorts of other things about me how I react around his friends, what my religious and political beliefs are just too many things to mention, but lots and lots of information. How does he know that stuff that’s in this open pain? Well, Sam, he’s just observed. And some of the things I have self disclosed to him. Floyd in his text, interpersonal communication says that self disclosure is the act of giving others information about oneself that one believes they do not already have. So he knows a lot of what is in my open pain, because I’ve told him things about me. Okay, so the next pain is called the blind pain in this pain are things that you know about me, but I don’t know about myself. What kinds of things might have shifted over to that pain?
5:56
Well, let’s think about the window of, say another student who’s in your class. Let’s say it’s her. It’s Sally’s window. What might you know about Sally that she doesn’t know about herself? What might she be blind to? Maybe that you think Sally’s taking way too much class time asking questions. Or maybe that you think she wears inappropriate clothes, or she talks too quietly to be understood, or all sorts of other possibilities. So my blind pain represents things that I don’t know about me, but you do know. So if you’re my boss, maybe you know that I’m going to be fired next week, and I have no clue of that. I am blind to it. That’s information that’s in the blind pane of my Joe Harry window. Okay, now, the third pane contains things that I know about myself, but that you don’t know about me, which is why it’s called the hidden pain. Now, these might be things that we keep hidden intentionally, maybe I have a conviction. And I just want don’t want you to know that, that would be in my hidden pain. Or maybe I just don’t really talk much about myself. In that case, there might be a lot of information that is in that hidden pain. And, and not only because I don’t want you to know it, just because I haven’t shared it or I’m a private sort of person. Okay, the final pain now is called the unknown pain, because in in it is everything that I don’t know about myself, and that you don’t know about me. So what kinds of things might be in that unknown pain? Well, maybe how I tolerate high stress situations, because I’ve never been in one. And I’ve never thought about how I might behave. Or maybe things that are going to happen to me in the future, how I will behave, let’s say if one of my children gets into serious trouble, for example. Okay, so what we have now with the Joe Harry window are four panes, each containing different types of information about me. Now, the most interesting part about the Joe Harry window, is that it looks different for different relationships. And here’s how, let’s say that I just met you, we just met. So my window with you would look like the first extreme have a Joe Harry window, which is called the turtle, for obvious reasons. Because you don’t really know me, all that you would know about me would be things like my height, my weight, my hair colour, etc. So those those things would be in the open pain would be a teeny tiny open pain. And I wouldn’t know anything about what you know of me Why? Well, in this instance, because I haven’t shared anything with you. And I haven’t gotten any feedback from you about me because you don’t know me. Now, once I start self disclosing to you my name, my values, my view on things, my interests, the horizontal line in the window, moves a little bit closer to the bottom of the window. Let’s say I tell you that I love dogs, the line moves just a little bit to the south, because I’ve moved something that I know about me to something that we now both know about me. So I’ve moved that information from the hidden pane to the open pane. Now, similarly, the vertical line will also move to the right side of the window. As I ask you or listen to you tell me things that you know about me. If you say to me, Hey, I hear you grade really hard. Or hey, did you know that Jasper is telling people whatever about you?
9:44
Each time that happens, the vertical line moves to the right, which takes information that was in my blind pane and moves it to the open pane, moves it to the place where you know it and I know it so I’m no longer blind. It because you’ve told me that information about me and I’ve listened to it. So the more I share with you and listen to information from you about me, the further to the right, that line moves. Okay. So back to the extremes. The turtle extreme shows an OK relationship, if I don’t know someone very well, if I’ve known them for a long time, and I still have a turtle window with them, I would want to ask myself, if that’s good for our relationship, odds are, it really won’t be if it’s a relationship that I want to continue. But say it’s with my boss. And I know that she doesn’t want to hear anything about me. And she never tells me anything about my performance. And that’s okay with both of us. Well, then maybe that turtle window is okay, the way it is. Another extreme is called the interviewer. In this window, I’m in a relationship again, if it’s my window with someone, and I don’t tell them much about me. But I want to know what their views are about me. If it’s my boss, maybe I asked them tonnes of questions about how they think I’m doing in my job. But I don’t self disclose much about me. That’s why in this window, my blind area is so small, which is good. The downside of that extreme, though, is that my hidden area in my relationship with my boss would be very, very large. Now, why is that a downside? Well, if I have something going on in my life, that is hurting my productivity at work, my boss might be more supportive, if I would have shared that information. The third extreme that is often mentioned in a discussion about the Joe Harry window is called the bull in the china shop. Now if you get that image of in your head, you might see a bowl just charging through oblivious to his surroundings, breaking a lot of China as he goes. And that’s a bit similar to this window. If this is my Joe Harry window with you, let’s say the horizontal line shows that I have told you lots and lots about me. So that line is way close to the bottom of the window. But the vertical line shows that I don’t ask what your views are about me. And even if you offer your views, I don’t really listen to what you have to offer. So that line still hasn’t moved, that vertical line stays really close to the left side of the window. Now there is an upside to this bull in the china shop window. And that is that the hidden pain is very small. Because I’ve told you a lot about me there’s not much hidden. The downside, though, is that the blind pain is very large, because I don’t want to know what you think about me. Okay, so that’s the bull in the china shop extreme. Now, what would it look like? What would the window look like when I self disclose a lot to you about me. And I ask and listen to your views and thoughts about me. That is what is often called the ideal window extreme. And when both parties are aboveboard and trustworthy, this really is the window to strive for. With this window, there’s a lot of open communication and feedback going on. There are some instruments that you might be able to find on the internet that would allow you to plot your Joe Harry window, or you can just think about how is my relationship with this other person? Do I tell them a lot about me? And do I ask them for their feedback so I can make that open pane more open? Or is it appropriate the way it is? It’s not only a fun thing to try to plot your Joe Harry window, but it can give you some really good insights about the appropriate levels of self disclosure, and receptivity to feedback in your relationship with someone else. Look at your window and look at what you think their window might look like. Are the pain similar in size? If not, if your window is really different from their window in your relationship, is there a message there? Is my window with you one of those extremes? And if so, what does that mean? Should I be telling you more about me? Or have I already told you too much already? And am I really listening to the feedback that you are offering me? All of those questions can be answered by looking carefully at the Joe Harry window.