When I enrolled in a seminary course to learn about the art of pastoral care, the professors began by telling us the most important tool we’d need would be to learn more about ourselves. I was offended by this announcement. “I know myself! No one knows me better than I know me. I’m not going to learn a darn thing from this program. What a waste of my time!” I thought. I folded my arms in disgust. My body language and my facial expressions demonstrated to the professors that I was disinterested in what they were about to tell me. I know me. They don’t know me. They’re not going to teach me something about myself that I didn’t know. I was ready to prove them wrong. “Tim, I notice you’re pursing your lips and folding your arms,” one of the professors told me. “I can tell based on your reaction that you don’t like what you just heard us say.” She got that one right! I sure didn’t like it. But what I didn’t realize immediately was that by saying that, she was essentially proving her point. As a general rule, humans simply don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do.
Back in the 50s, two psychologists with the United States Air Force, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, set out to develop a tool that would help service members to discover deeper self-awareness. This would help enlisted members and officers alike, they believed. Higher-ranking service members would have better leadership tools, and lower-ranking members would develop a better understanding of how to grow their skills. They used imagery of a window with four quadrants to illustrate different areas of self-awareness. They blended their first names together to create a portmanteau to name their window. They called it the Johari window.
The Johari window has four quadrants. The two quadrants on the left represent pieces of ourselves that are known to us. The two quadrants on the right represent pieces of ourselves that are not known to us. The top two represent details that are known to others, while the bottom represents details that are not known to others. The most emotionally healthy people, they hypothesized, have a very large top-left quadrant. The idea is to shrink the other three quadrants as much as possible, even though we will likely never eliminate them completely. As the lesson continued, I discovered that I had a pretty small top-left quadrant on my own window. There were a few things in my life that I understood about myself that were also known by others. There were a lot of things that I knew about myself that I did not let others know. At the same time, my blind spots were pretty big. There were things that people knew about me that I didn’t know and there were plenty of things that I didn’t know and other people didn’t see.
But how is it possible for someone to know something about us that we don’t know about ourselves? It happens a lot, actually. If you’re involved in any human relationship, you know people see things about you that you don’t see for yourself. Other people see your body language and your facial expressions. You can’t possibly see these unless you’re looking in a mirror or a television monitor nonstop. Do you scrunch your nose when someone says something unpleasant? Do you roll your eyes when you think you’re being conned? Do you look to the side when you’re saying something untruthful? All of these tells give others information about you that you may not know about yourself. What’s truly remarkable is that you may not even be aware that you’re having any kind of reaction at all! What is helpful here is to engage in conversations with safe people. People we can trust. People who will tell it to us straight, with love. People who are willing to say things like, “did you ever notice that whenever you take your socks off, you leave them on the floor?” People who bring things to our attention without shaming us or making us feel bad. This way, these traits make their way into our upper-left quadrant instead of our upper-right quadrant. And then we get to decide how we want to behave going forward. If I want to leave my socks on the floor, I still might. But now I’m at least aware that I’m doing it.
We’ve talked a lot lately about secrets being unhealthy. This isn’t to suggest there are not things in our lives that ought to be kept private. Some things are best left undiscussed. It’s good to be in control of our own private information. If I have a health condition, for instance, and it isn’t something you need to know about, then it’s a good idea for me to keep the information private. But secrets are not good. By keeping secrets, we keep the bottom left quadrant larger than it ought to be. Why is this unhealthy? Well, because at some point we’re liable to crack. It’s a tremendous burden to keep secrets! When people keep secrets, they have to continue to adjust their behavior to protect the secrets. When they do this, they end up creating even more secrets they then have to protect. It also is dishonest. Keeping secrets from people we love can damage our relationships. Think of things like extra-marital affairs, reckless spending or financial record keeping, or committing crimes and misdemeanors. We probably all have kept secrets from time to time. But the reason we want to be aware of this is because there’s probably a reason we’re keeping secrets. That reason is usually because we’ll be in trouble if someone finds out. And if it’s something that would get us into trouble, that that ought to alert us that it’s probably something we want to avoid doing. If my wife is not going to be happy about finding out that I take another woman out on a date (and of course she won’t be!), then it’s probably a really good idea for me to avoid the situation all together and not take another woman on a date. If a romantic relationship is not working out, then we owe it to our partner to have a conversation with them about it. If we’re spending someone else’s money recklessly, then we owe it to that person to communicate about it. If we’re contemplating using our home for something illegal and it will affect the people with whom we live, then we owe it to those people to communicate with them about it. They deserve their free agency and we need to keep ourselves in check. It is clearly a healthy choice (although sometimes uncomfortable) to move that information from our lower-left quadrant to our upper-left quadrant.
What about things that we don’t know about ourselves and other people also don’t know? Well, we are always learning about ourselves. Sometimes things change. Maybe someone was a distance runner in high school and now realizes that distance running is simply no longer possible. Well, until that person discovered it, that new information was unknown to everyone. Maybe I’ve never tried something before and I didn’t realize I could do it. Maybe I’ve seen other people around me do an activity and I assumed I could do it, too. Only when I tried, I found out I couldn’t actually do it. See? New information. We’re getting new information all the time. Sometimes we don’t like what we notice and sometimes it’s uncomfortable. But if we’re open to learning, we’ll shrink that lower-right quadrant.
As you can see, a large upper-left quadrant on our Johari windows is really a goal we should all have. Appropriate self-disclosure, avoiding secrets, avoiding unhealthy behaviors, openness to curiosity and healthy constructive criticism are helpful ways to expand our top-left quadrants. It is only when we know better that we can do better. If I don’t realize I’m heading down the wrong path until someone brings it to my attention, then how can I correct my course? I need to receive that information and learn from it. Maybe I will, in fact, change my course. Maybe I’ll decide to keep heading down that path anyway. But with the awareness that I now have, at least I have the opportunity to make an informed decision. And information is always good to have.