Both Elizabeth and Daniel come to dread their work with other people (Elizabeth within her own organization, Daniel with representatives of other organizations). This fear eventually distorts all their interpersonal quadrants, and they are both left with a growing gap between the interpersonal world they control (or at least influence) and the interpersonal world they do not control (or influence very little).
Elizabeth has received some coaching assistance which has enabled her to more closely align her internal and external panes (especially in Quad One). By contrast, Daniel has received little assistance and believes that he has been left to “fend for himself” in what he perceived to be the “uncaring” and “cut-throat” business of procurement and price negotiations. Like many men and women who experience a widening gap between his internal and external panes, Daniel sees his own powers (internal locus) declining and the forces outside himself (the other parties to the price negotiations) growing in power. No wonder he wants to escape to another line of work.
Disclosure and Feedback
In addition to the challenges that people like Elizabeth and Daniel face in seeking to narrow the gap between the internal and external panes, there are additional challenges associated with the issue of personal awareness. To what extent does each of us see the internal and external forces that interplay with one another in our interpersonal relationships? How aware are we and how much control do we have over what we convey to other people? Both disclosure and feedback are helpful in this regard. Disclosure and feedback do much more than expand Quad 1 (and reduce some of Quad 4).
These two interpersonal processes also reduce the gap between internal and external panes of the window. Disclosure enables us indirectly (if not directly) to get feedback from other people about our external panes. The new double pane Johari Window adds a new level of appreciation regarding the nature and impact of feedback. Using the double pane model, we discover that feedback is meant not only to help us learn something about ourselves that we didn’t know before or knew only opaquely (feedback as information-about-self) but also helps us gain a fuller and more complex understanding of ourselves in interaction with other people and our impact on other people (feedback as source of enriched-understanding-of-self).
For example, let’s imagine that one of us has been asked to share our opinion about another person who has authority over us (let’s call him Sam).
“I view Sam in an ambivalent manner. I might be inclined initially to offer only a positive perspective about Sam, not wanting to hurt Sam’s feelings or risk my own job (if my ambivalent opinion got back to him). I also might hold back on my negative opinions because I want to appear to be a fair-minded person. My presentational self (Quad 1-I) would thus be filled with positive opinions about Sam. However, I might be sharing my more negative opinion about Sam through my nonverbal channels of communication or through my decline of an invitation to have dinner with Sam (Quad 1-E). I know that I am exhibiting these negative feelings (this is not Quad Three material), but don’t realize how aware other people are of these negative feelings.
At some point, I decide to “fess up” to my colleague, who first asked what I thought about Sam. I point out that I actually have quite mixed feelings about Sam. I admire him in some ways, but don’t trust him or like him very much when he is operating in his “official” role. At this point, my inquiring colleague might feel free to give me some feedback that is very helpful to me as I seek to enrich my own self-understanding (Quad 2-E to Quad 1-E).
My colleague might point out that the nonverbals are very clear and that my decision to turn down the dinner invitation is a clear indication that I am not fully supportive of Sam. This is very important for me to know. My colleague is not telling me something I never knew about myself (that I exhibit some negative feelings regarding Sam); rather, my colleague is telling me about the extent to which this Quad 1-E (Inadvertent Self) communication is obvious to other people.”
