Understanding Johari Window

The Johari Window, named after the first names of its inventors Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, explains our inner world by dividing personal awareness into four areas, like four panes of a window:

• Open: Known to yourself and others
• Blind: Known by others but not to yourself
• Secret: Known to yourself but not others
• Undiscovered: Unknown to yourself or others.

As a listening helper, you need to increase your open area by decreasing the other areas and becoming more self-accepting. Always use openness with discretion for the help-seeker’s benefit – not to take attention away from them and onto your own concerns. People who have a lot of blind spots lack awareness of how they affect others. Such people are likely to give or receive much feedback or disclose much about themselves.

hose who have a big secret area similarly withhold themselves. Beneath both of these behaviours lie fears about being hurt, rejected, or ‘found out’. People with large undiscovered areas have little understanding of how they tick. They may not have learned or taken time to reflect on why they think, feel, and behave as they do. To some extent everyone has elements of each of these characteristics – some blind spots, some unknown parts, and some withheld aspects. Indeed, to survive in the real world, you often have to protect yourself by not opening up these areas and keep defences in place. When helping others, you need to decide if you’re willing to take the risk of opening up your self-awareness and make changes in how you relate to others. My own experience is that it is worth it, partly because doing so has made me increasingly comfortable with myself and because it has improved my relationships with others. Self-discovery and self-acceptance are lifelong endeavours.
The way to increase your open area is by one, or all, of the following routes:

• Disclose more about yourself so that you keep less of yourself secret. This doesn’t mean telling anyone and everyone all about yourself, especially when the other person is trying to tell you about her difficulties. It also may not be appropriate to disclose aspects of yourself in certain situations – others can make judgements. Self-revelation about an experience or feeling of your own can help the other person to feel more normal in relation to her experiences and model to them the importance of being aware of and expressing emotions. You can practise self-disclosure in everyday life within relationships of trust. Notice what happens both inside yourself and in the other person when you take this risk of showing or describing your feelings and thoughts.
  
• Take time to reflect on experience, to develop self-insight and discover more about yourself. Keeping a diary or journal is a good way to increase self-awareness. You may find it difficult at first, if writing doesn’t come naturally to you. Set a time limit of 6 minutes and keeping the pen on the page, keep writing, even if it is gibberish. Doing this, I became better at letting my writing, thoughts and feelings flow. You can take a theme from that 6 minutes of writing and do another 6 minutes focusing on the theme, which can take the exploration deeper. It helps knowing that what you write is personal and for no one else to see. Some people cut and paste poems and pictures, do doodles and sketches in their personal journals. Both the writing itself and reviewing what you’ve committed to paper straight away, and from time to time, increase your self-knowledge through noticing patterns and repeating reactions.
  
• Seek out feedback wherever you can so that you understand more about how you come over to, and affect, others – challenge your blind spots. The prospect of getting feedback can be very scary, especially if you lack confidence. And yet it isn’t usually as bad as you expect and certainly better than your imagination! We are often our own harshest critics. Take time to really listen to any positive feedback – many of us play down the praise we receive, or simply don’t hear it – and encourage feedback about how you come over from anyone seeking your help.

Developing Your Self-Awareness

An important aspect of your qualities and skills as a listening helper is our underpinning self-awareness. The Johari Window model of human interaction suggests that we all have an open area, a blind spot, a secret part, and an undiscovered area representing parts of our internal world. Often our fears and defences get in the way of having a satisfying life and may lead to seeking help. When we block self-knowledge, we tend to make bad decisions for ourselves. When we use energy in maintaining defences, we’re distracted from listening well (to ourselves and others).
Being self-aware applies to ‘clients’ and their helpers. For anyone using counselling skills, the aim is to be more aware and less afraid of your internal world, for these three reasons:

• So that you become free to concentrate on the speaker without your own baggage getting in the way
• Because the more you understand and accept yourself, the more likely you are to understand and accept others
  
• So that you model the ability to be in touch with your inner self, which provides valuable information, known as emotional intelligence

Blocked listening

You may be good at problem-solving. This useful skill is potentially of great benefit to others and it gives you a good feeling to help someone by using this skill. If, though, you decide what the other person’s problem is and rush to solve it, that person could be left feeling useless, learning nothing from the process. What seems to be the problem may not be the real issue after all so she ends up not feeling heard. Remember that the help-seeker needs to find her own solutions.
Rushing to offer solutions is a common mistake made by people new to counselling skills. This tendency gets in the way of listening and is a trait you need to overcome.
To illustrate, a person may ask you about a decision she needs to make on whether to change her child’s school. You might draw up a list of pros and cons of changing or staying put, suggesting sources of information and other specific advice. All of this could be helpful. However, it could be that the problem in making the decision relates to an underlying issue – the difference between this person and her partner about what’s important for their child’s future; a clash of expectations and values. If you rush to be helpful with your problem-solving skills, you may never get to this underlying issue. If you recognise within yourself this tendency to rush in, take time to reflect upon what lies beneath. It could be lack of experience and skill, but it may also be that

• You lack awareness of the depth of emotion in the other person.
• You’re uncomfortable with probing because of what might emerge.
• You feel good about your role and yourself when you offer a solution.

Blocked listening manifests itself as a problem in other ways beyond problem solving. If someone talks to you about her relationship with her sister (or brother, mother, or whoever) and you have a similar problematic relationship, you may assume that her relationship is like your own. You could unconsciously try to influence the person to behave in the way that you would like to behave, or manage the situation as you do, or would like to.

If you’re angry or disappointed in yourself because you can’t manage your own relationship as well as you want, these feelings may interfere with your capacity to listen or even make you angry and disappointed with the speaker. Maybe you don’t have a sister but nevertheless have values about the role of a sister and therefore judgement about how this person should behave in the situation. As you can imagine, the help-seeker may notice any of these attitudes even if you try to conceal them.
On a more mundane level, if you’re too hot, cold, hungry, remember that you forgot to lock your front door, need the toilet, have an appointment somewhere else, are concerned that your privacy may be invaded, and so on –any of these situations are likely to distract you from the task of attending and listening. You need to be aware of such distractions and be able to do something about them, which often requires confidence and assertiveness. Being more self-aware is a step towards developing confidence.

Assessing your counseling motivations

When starting out as a listening helper, you may only be aware of your surface reasons for becoming one. Perhaps you find that others think you easy to talk to, or maybe they seek you out to ask your advice. Being helpful can be personally rewarding, giving you an internal glow. Below this, however, you may have some other powerful motivations that can distract you from careful listening. The factors that drive you to be a listening helper can be double-edged – positive or negative, dependent on the particular circumstances and also on your own self-awareness.
Take a little time to consider as honestly as you can the following questions to help you start to focus on some of the issues that may get in the way of listening, including what makes you want to take on this role:

• How did you decide to be a listening helper?
• Why do you want to be a listening helper?
• What is it that you want to give?
• What do you want to receive from people you help?
• What do you think you’ll get from being a listening helper?
• What are your expectations of anyone you might help?
• With what emotions are you comfortable?
• What emotions in yourself or in others give you trouble?
• How will you deal with the speaker’s feelings towards you?
• How will you handle your feelings towards those you help?

Revisit these questions when you finish this chapter, and later when you’ve found out more about the processes involved in using counselling skills. One theory about why people want to be listening helpers (and also to engage in intimate relationships) is to heal their own emotional wounds. The eminent American psychologist Carl Rogers suggested that we’re all, to a greater or lesser extent, prevented from being fully ourselves by conditions of worth that others impose on us: We conform to the expectations of others, rather than being truly ourselves, in order to feel of worth. However, we also have an actualising tendency, or drive towards growth. Becoming more able to be yourself through this growth enables you to be a better listener because you’re more able to accept others when you’re better able to accept yourself.

Obstacles in Helping Relationship

Someone seeking help with a problem needs to trust you before she can open up to you. You must pay full attention to her without judging her – let her direct her own path and decisions.
In order for you to be a non-judging, reliable, and attentive listener, you must develop an increasing awareness of yourself and what you’re bringing to the helping relationship. Aspects of yourself to bear in mind include:

• Your values, prejudices, assumptions, and internal ‘rules’
• Your need to be regarded by the speaker in a certain way (for example, to be liked, needed, or viewed as a capable expert)
• Your own emotional triggers or blind spots
• Your ways of defending yourself against difficult feelings.

All of the aspects in the preceding list can be a source of internal distractions to you. Do you get distracted by thinking about what to say next? If the other person behaves in a way you find difficult (being aggressive, or needy, for example), does it get under your skin and keep you from listening? If she tells you a disturbing or shocking tale, will it be too hard for you to hear? As a listening helper, you sometimes need to challenge the person who is speaking to you, or you may need to discuss the possibility of breaking confidentiality. All these examples require a level of assertiveness and confidence to carry out actions sensitively without being hung up on your own worries and concerns. You’ll be a better listening helper if you’re secure in yourself and have a reasonable level of self-esteem. However, everyone has insecurities and ways of protecting themselves against difficult feelings. These self-protective defence mechanisms can sometimes be of help, more often a hindrance, depending on the particular situation. They often (but certainly not always) date back to your upbringing and early experiences and are learned patterns of relating to others. Part of your personal development may be to expose yourself to things that are difficult issues for you and challenge any outdated defences. Undertaking some personal counselling can significantly help with this.