Know Yourself – Your Big Awakening

To know yourself is the first grand step towards building relationships with others that will sustain you in good times and the tough times. Since the global pandemic hit us at the start of last year, the focus on relationships, and particularly those with whom we work (whether virtually or in-person) has never been higher on the list of important topics. 

How we treat others and how they treat us is of critical importance in psychologically healthy workplaces.   

The JOHARI Window and Your Relationships

The JOHARI Window is a concept created by psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham. 

The model is straightforward and useful to help us understand and train self-awareness.  Using the tool we can work on our personal development, communications, relationship building, and group and team dynamics.

The Johari Window emphasizes “soft skills”. Soft skills are considered to be: personal behavior, empathy, co-operation, and interpersonal development.  You can apply these lessons in your personal life as well as your career and community involvement.

The model works using four areas or quadrants. They are called the OPEN, HIDDEN, BLIND and UNKNOWN areas. 

Open, Hidden, Blind, and Unknown

Someone once said that the ability to see yourself as others see you is a gift.  When the JOHARI WINDOW refers to the blind, that is a good way to interpret it – how others see you. 

Now, there are many exercises that you can access online connected with the JOHARI WINDOW to help you see yourself as others see you. Here is a quick list to get you thinking. It is part of a more comprehensive tool called the RESPECT MEASURE SURVEY. 

For each of the following statements, decide how often the people you work with would say that you act in the way described.  

Decide whether your answer would be Hardly Ever (1 point), Seldom (2 points), Sometimes (3 points), Often (4 points), or Very Often (5 points). Keep a tally as we will need to add them up at the end. 

Respect Measure Survey Questions

Think of your relationships of work when you answer:

  1. You are open to the ideas of others, even though they are very different from your own. 
  2. You are a good listener. 
  3. When others tell you their problems, you show empathy and concern. 
  4. You often give compliments to the people you work with. 
  5. You refuse to participate in gossip about co-workers. 
  6. You go out of your way to help others. 
  7. You enjoy working with people of different ethnic and national backgrounds. 
  8. You are quick to apologize when you are wrong. 
  9. You don’t hold a grudge. 
  10. Others at work come to talk to you about things that bother them. 
  11. You never say something behind a person’s back that you wouldn’t say to their face. 
  12. You are seen by your co-workers as a positive, optimistic person. 
  13. You tell jokes about other people you work with. 
  14. You tend to be overbearing. 
  15. When you lose your temper, you say hurtful or insulting things. 
  16. You believe that some people deserve to have their feelings hurt. 
  17. You believe e people like quick advice to help solve problems, not sympathy. 
  18. You believe saying ‘sorry’ is a sign of weakness. 
  19. You have difficulty forming relationships with people who have different beliefs and values (political, ethnic, social etc) 
  20. You think sarcasm can effectively put people in their place. 
  21. When you hear rumours, you readily pass them on. 
  22. You think that if people at work can’t take a practical joke, then they should develop thicker skin. 
  23. If someone is saying something you disagree with, you will interrupt them to tell them so.
  24. You believe that you don’t have to show respect to others until they have earned it. 

Understanding Your Results

As you went through these questions, you would have noticed a very distinct change between the first 12 questions and the last 12.  

The first part of the Respect Measure Survey focuses on a person’s level of RESPECT whereas the second part deals with a person’s level of DISRESPECT. 

To determine your level of respect in terms of your relationship with your coworkers, we must do some arithmetic, so get your calculator out. There are 3 stages to calculate your RESPECT MEASURE. 

  1. Firstly, add up all of the points that you gave yourself for questions 1 to 12. This represents the RESPECT element of your score. The minimum score will be 12 and the maximum will be 60. Those who score 30 points or higher tend to be those who show respect for those that they work with.   
  1. Next, add up all of the points that you gave yourself for questions 13 – 24. This represents the DISRESPECT element of your score. The minimum score will be 12 and the maximum will be 60. Those who score 24 points or higher tend to be those who show disrespect to those that they work with.   
  1. Lastly, subtract your DISRESPECT score from the RESPECT score. This becomes your RESPECT MEASURE. 

These scores can range anywhere between minus 48 to plus 48. 

Those people who score below 15, find themselves with lots of opportunities to improve. 

If the score falls between 16 and 35, they are doing nicely and clearly contribute to a positive working environment. 

Those with scores above 35 stand out very clearly as a result of the fact that they treat others so well and receive the same in return. If that is your score, my hat is off to you – congratulations. 

Can I Do Better?

The point of this article was to talk about our BLIND area within the JOHARI Window – which all of us have. None of us see ourselves as other people do and this simple exercise was just shared with you as a simple way to explore ourselves and how we show up in our workplace relationships and ask the question, “Can I do better?” 

Your answer is likely to be yes. Here are some tips to help you do that from our MINI SIZE Leadership Development program:  Tips For  Having Difficult Conversations.