The Way We Communicate And Respond Philosophy
According to A.DeVito, the first area is the open self. The open self signifies all things about us such as attitudes, behaviours, feelings and motivations that we and others know. The examples are our names, heights, education's backgrounds or occupations. Each person has different size of open self. The size of area depends on the individuals with whom we are communicating. Some people tend to tell about themselves and some other people keep them as their secret. The closer that the person to us, the more we open ourselves. The smaller size of open self will affect our communication with others. A good communication happens when we know each other well. Therefore, we should open ourselves wider to improve our communication. A.DeVito(2009) explains the blind self is all knowledge about us that others know but unknown by us. For instance, our habits or certain characteristic like tapping our pen in class, twisting our hair when we speak or walking like a supermodel. Another example is we might see ourselves is slow but people around us will consider us as attractive persons. People will not tell us about ourselves because they think it is not important for us to know it. If we have a larger size of blind self, it will affect our self awareness. As a step to reduce our blind selves, we should investigate other people's perception about us and try to improve ourselves to become better persons.
The third area is the hidden self. A.DeVito(1994) pointed out, the hidden self signifies all things that we know but unknown by others. We keep certain information and decide not to share it with others such as our fantasies, experiences and emotions. There are two types of extremes which are over discloser and under discloser. The over discloser is a person who can tell us everything about themselves such as their sexual problems, failures and successes. The under discloser means people who tend to keep hidden from others and they will only talk about other persons than themselves. A.DeVito (2009) explains the hidden self is we probably keep a certain secret from some people and we will share it to other people. For example we might not tell our parents that we are dating with their best friend but we might share it to our close friends. Another example is we try to keep our emotions like sad or angry from others' view. We keep the information because we fear that if people will know our feeling, they might hurt and reject us. The last area is unknown area. A.DeVito (2009) pointed out, unknown area is nobody knows about us and only God know. Examples of unknown area are our future, career or destination. We will discover all of these one day.
The Johari Window may have a different shape of quadrants with different situations and the shape can be large or small. For example, if one area becomes large, another area will become small. According to Pearson, Nelson, Titsworth and Harter (2011) in a relationship between best friends, we will have a large open area. Our open area becomes smaller when we meet someone new because we have only limited knowledge about him or her. A person who has large open area accepts all honest views and shares all information about her or him. Billy Jury (2011) explains "The process of enlarging the open quadrant horizontally is one of feedback. Here the individual learns things about him- or her-self that others can see, but he or she can't." Then, a person who has a large blind self can harm herself or himself because they cannot see what others think about them. He or she tends to keep information and not communicate with others. So, a change in certain area will affect other area and all the areas are depending on each other.
What is significance of Johari Window in our personal development? Achieving self awareness is one of the most important aspects in personal development. We will increase our self awareness by using Johari Window as a tool to estimate who we are. What is self awareness? Joseph A.Devito (2011) pointed out, self awareness is when we clearly understand our personality, strength, weakness and all about us. The more we understand our characters, the more we know who we are. Self awareness also allows us to understand people, how they see and think about us. When our self awareness increases, we will able to change and control our thoughts, emotions and perceptions. We cannot learn self awareness from the book or internet. Self awareness is developed in many different ways such as dialogue with ourselves, listen to others, see us different selves and increase our open self. First, we should ask ourselves who we are. We know ourselves better than others, so we need to list all our strengths and weaknesses that we have. We also should listen to other point of views and accept what others think about us. Then, see our in different selves can increase our self awareness. Different person will have different views or perception about us. For examples our parents, teachers, or the strangers around us see and judge us in different ways. It is important for us to know all of these because we will find out why we are different. So, to increase ourselves awareness, we need to increase our open self.
"As you discuss yourself, you may see connection that you had previously missed, and with the aid of feedback from others you may gain still more insight. Also, by increasing the open self, you increase the likelihood that a meaningful and intimate dialogue will develop and which will enable you to get know yourself better" (p47).
( A. Devito ,1994)
Besides, the significance of Johari Window in personal development is individual can build trust between himself or herself and with others. According to Vikram Karve (2012), the questions that always arise in our mind are "Should I share about my last experience and why I react like this?" or "Should I tell him or her about my weakness?" Trust is one of the most important things in a relationship especially between husband and wife, best friend and family. How we can build a long time relationship with no trust to each other? Vikram Karve (2012) explains "You will forever live under the fear of being found out, and the "fear of being found out" is a terrible fear which causes great internal stress which can be detrimental to your health, both physical and mental."It will become more danger for our relationship if we keep secret from our partners. We will become more stress and harm our physical and mental health. When we use Johari Window, we can build trust in ourselves and others. We should increase our open self area and decrease the hidden self by telling and asking people about us. The unknown area also starts to decrease if we trust people around us and start to know each other better. Try to be more honest about ourselves and trust people around us. When we trust each other, we will achieve a good relationship in life. A good relationship vital in our personal development because it helps us to live in better life. The secret of good relationship is effective communication with others. Ahmed Sita (2012) pointed out, effective communication can reduce chances of a misunderstanding in relationship. Different people have different of understanding and the way they solve their problems. We should learn how to communicate with people effectively, so we will able to solve our problem and keep our relationship. The Johari Window model can helps us how to improve our communication with people, understand how people think about us, solve our relationship problems and build our personal development.
In the nutshell, to search and accept the truth in our life is the greatest give that we have. The Johari Window model can be seen and understood in many different areas such as open self, blind self, hidden self and unknown self. People will learn the way how to improve ourselves and interact with people better. In personal development, it helps people to increase self awareness, build trust and good relationship with others. We should be thankful of what we have today and try our best to improve ourselves. We should increase our open self, reduce the hidden and blind self in order to have a great communication and relationship with others.
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