The Johari Window - What You Don't Know that You Don't Know About Yourself...

The Johari Window model was developed by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in 1955, and is still a useful and insightful self-awareness tool today. "Jo-Hari" is an amalgamation of the names Joseph and Harrington. The tool as pictured above is used both in psychology and business and as a business postgraduate I have come across it often and find its a helpful concept to keep in mind particularly concerning self awareness and business viability.

The grid as you can see contains four sections as follows:

The Open Self (also known as the Arena) - information known to both you and others ( your external self).
The Blind Self - information that others know and can see about you that you don't know about yourself. For example a humble person who is very good looking/ attractive, but does not know this about themselves but others can see. Or if you have a tendency to whine and complain about everything, but do not realise how much you do it, or indeed that you are doing it at all.
The Hidden Self (Facade) - information personal to you that you know, but have not shared with others. For example past trauma's, your private life or secret dreams, goals and ambitions ( your internal self).
The Unknown Self - information that neither yourself or others know about you. For example an undiscovered talent, or how much you will love and be good at an activity you have not tried yet.

The goal of the Johari Window Model is to increase self-awareness and we do this by expanding the Open Self section and making this as BIG as possible, while at the same time shrinking the other windows/sections and making those as small as possible. So in other words for heightened self awareness you want to discover and uncover as much about your blind self as possible and you do this by seeking feedback from others.

Obviously seeking feedback from a wide variety of people will increase the range, quantity and quality of feedback and useful information and knowledge you receive which is why networking, and a large network is powerful. Not only does a large network teach you about yourself, it teaches you about the world around you and lets the world around you know of your presence and value. So in uncovering this blind self through feedback and interaction, we make it smaller. So there is less information that others know about us that we don't know.

Our reaction to this feedback, how we process it and what we feedback to those feeding back and the world around us reveals and uncovers the unknown self - things we didn't know that we didn't know and reveals things to others about us that they did not know either.

The hidden self is revealed as others gain our trust and we reveal more and more about our hidden self, and then they can provide feedback on that hidden self and again expand the Open Self window/section.

For example, Friend A may observe that friend B is good with words. To Friend B they did not realise this about themselves as it comes naturally (Blind self). Using Friend A's feedback, Friend B decides to try Spoken Word and both friend A and B observe Friend B's unknown self come to life as they realise that they are quite good at it. Then Friend B reveals that they always wanted to get on stage but did not know they would be any good at it, revealing more of their hidden self to Friend A. Friend A, now knowing Friend B's ambitions, tells them about people in the industry or field that they know can help and coach them. With each action comes more self awareness, growth, possibilities and opportunities.

In increasing self awareness we are also more likely to discover our true purpose in life, as demonstrated in the diagram below: