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 of 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), whereas 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.
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 am I and how much control do I have over what I 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 to 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).
