The Johari Window is a framework for understanding our relationship with self and relationships with others. It is the creation of two psychologists, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, who named the model by combining their first names. Each person is represented as a window with four panes containing our attitudes, behaviour, experiences, feelings, beliefs, qualities and motivations. This useful tool can help in improving our self-awareness and our interpersonal skills.

The Open Area is the pane that contains information that is known by ourselves and known by others.
It is the information that we are conscious of, and we make known to people. In different environments this pane increases and decreases. With new acquaintances the open area starts out very small. In a family setting this will generally be the largest pane as we tend to reveal more of ourselves (whether intentionally or not) with those we spend the most time with.
Facade is information that is known to ourselves but is kept hidden from others. In the past three years we’ve all experienced what it feels like to wear a mask in public. For many of us it was uncomfortable, difficult to breathe and felt isolating. A facade requires you to wear a mask that is not authentic to how you actually feel or think.
Social media has made it all too easy to adopt a facade. Our online personas are not reality. They are merely caricatures of who we want others to think we are. We tend to elevate the notion of authenticity, yet when it comes to our virtual identities, we are rarely authentic with who we are. Maintaining a facade in the context of relationships requires significant effort. It might be easy to do for a couple of hours with an acquaintance but maintaining it with someone you spend a lot of your time with is exhausting. Sooner or later the facade cracks or the relationship becomes too draining and we end it.
Blind spots are traits about yourself that you don’t notice but others do. These could be favourable qualities or, alternatively, behaviour that negatively impacts yourself or others. Our unconscious mind makes the majority of our decisions. It also creates blind spots, unconscious biases that can narrow our vision and potentially influence our behaviours. Blind spots develop when we believe that our perspective and interpretations are accurate. We detect bias in others but fail to notice our own bias.
The Unknown pane can literally become a pain! This highly influential area is one that we fail to access. Like a forgotten shed, it stores a mix of treasures and junk. Gathered from a lifetime of experiences, this area harbours undesirables such as abandonment, fear, insecurity, shame. It also has treasures such as unrealised talents, hopes we dare not dream, unnoticed opportunities, unmet longings.
The ideal Johari window is one where the Unknown is the smallest pane and the Open Area is the largest.
Next issue, we’ll look at ways to achieve this.
Linda Gray
linda@relationshipsanctuary.com.au
0401 517 243