4/5-week 2

Lucy discusses her relationship with her four sisters and how it has evolved over the years through the lens of interpersonal communication. She introduces the Johari window, a model that represents the self, which consists of self-concept, self-awareness, and self-esteem. She explains the four aspects of self-concept: other images, interpretations and evaluations, cultural teachings, and social comparisons. She then delves into self-awareness, which includes the open self, blind self, hidden self, and unknown self. Lucy mentions how her relationship with her sisters affects her Johari window, with certain aspects growing or decreasing depending on who she is closest to. She also notes that the unknown self is more influenced by personal changes rather than sibling dynamics. The Johari window helps improve self-awareness by understanding how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. Lucy concludes by emphasizing the importance of considering the other person's perspective in re Hi, this is Lucy and this is week two of looking at my relationship between my four sisters and myself and how that's grown and changed throughout the years through the lens of interpersonal communication. The focus of this episode this week is going to be on the Johari window and what the Johari window is, is it's a model that represents the self. So in order to explain that, we're going to have to first explain what the self is. The self, according to the interpersonal communication book by Joseph DeVito, has three main components to it, self-concept, self-awareness, and self-esteem. The first being self-concept has four parts to it. The first is other images, which is just supposed to be how those close to you view you. So basically that's just looking at the people who are most influential and most important in your own life and looking at the way that they see you. The second is your interpretations and evaluations, which is just how you evaluate your own feelings and behaviors. And the third is cultural teachings, which is just asking how you fulfill the teachings from your culture. And those cultural teachings can come from media, family, friends, religion, just a few. And then the fourth one is social comparisons. And that's just how you compare to your peers. So looking at yourself in comparison to those around you and seeing where you lie. So that's self-concept. The second part of the self is self-awareness. And that one is going to be most intertwined with the Jahari window. Under self-awareness, there are four selves. These four selves that I'm going to list are also four aspects of the Jahari window. The first is open self, which is anything that is known to both you and the people who know you. And it can be behaviors, attitudes, feelings, desires, motivations, ideas, your name, your age, your appearance. The second is the blind self. This is things that others may know about you, but you don't know about yourself. Examples of this could be maybe you don't smell that great, or you talk too fast, or you laugh too loud, things like that, that you don't seem to notice by yourself, but those who know you know about you. The third is the hidden self. These are things that you know about yourself, but others don't know about you, and maybe you don't want them to know about you. And the fourth and final one is the unknown self. This is things that neither you nor those that know you know about you. That's self-awareness. And then the third and final component of the self is self-esteem. That is pretty self-explanatory. It's just how much you value yourself. Something worth noting about self-esteem that was mentioned in the Interpersonal Communication book is just that he wrote, if you see yourself as more successful, you're more likely to be successful, and vice versa, if you see yourself as a failure, you're more likely to fail. That's everything on the self. So now that we've laid the foundation, just explaining what the self is, we can get into the Jahari Window and how that model is meant to represent the self and how that relates to our relationship with my sisters. The Jahari Window, it's a model, like I said before, and a good way to picture it is just like the name itself, a window, and just think of a square divided in four, and each of those four pieces is titled a name. The name of each four piece is what I mentioned before about your four selves being the open self, blind self, hidden self, and unknown self. That's the Jahari Window. The thing about this model is that it wasn't designed to stay equal between those four pieces. It was actually meant to change, and the four pieces of it can grow or decrease as a relationship changes. A good quote to simplify this was by Positive Psychology, written by Christy Gardner. She wrote, Change is a key principle of the Jahari Window, particularly as relationships and groups do not remain static, but rather evolve and shift over time. When thinking about this in relation to my relationship with my siblings, it reminded me of how when your family is big enough, like my family is with four sisters, you kind of swap in and out of who you're closest to in the family, and that just kind of changes through the years. When I was really little, I was closest with my oldest sister, Sabrina, and we did everything together. And then when I got to about, I want to say, 15 or so, I was closest to my second oldest sister. When I was a little bit older than that, it was my sister that's right above me, Katie. And as of right now, I'm really close to my little sister, Caroline. Not to say that I don't love all my sisters. I do. I love them all equally. They're all amazing. But it's just natural that depending on what phase of life you're in or who you're around the most will change who you're closest to at that time. And thinking about that with the Johari window in mind, I thought it was really interesting to see how when those relationships change, as they change constantly, my Johari window, if you would, with my siblings also changes. Whenever I'm closest, whoever I'm closest to in my family at the time, my open self always seems to grow as well as my hidden self. And my blind self seems to decrease just because as I spend more time with my siblings, we talk about everything and they get to know more about me and because I'm talking to them and they're going to know more about me, I also can learn more about myself from what they tell me. But in the same way, as I get closer with my siblings, those things tend to change. I also noticed that when I get some distance between a sibling, certain aspects of Johari window decrease. The open self decreases because there's not as much information being exchanged between the two of us. The blind self can grow if I'm not talking to them. Maybe I'm not as aware of things that they would have called me out on if I had talked to them. The hidden self also grows because there's information about me that I'm not sharing. But something I noted was that the unknown self, that fourth part of the Johari window, it never really seems to be affected by whether I'm close or not close to a certain sibling at a given time. The unknown self I noticed changed for me when I went through dramatic emotional changes. The first thing that came to my mind was just going to school, going to college just because I was leaving behind home and family and everything. That big change kind of allowed me to learn things about myself that I didn't know and that the people closest to me didn't know either. But I think the biggest takeaway I got from learning about the Johari window was just how much it can help improve your self-awareness. And the World of Works project explains that when it says, it works by helping us understand the differences between how we see ourselves and how others see us. The premise behind the Johari window is that our interactions with others are shaped by how we see ourselves and how the person we're interacting with sees us. Starting off that, I just feel like the Johari window really helped me change the way that I look at the interactions I have with my siblings, where when I'm going into my conversations with them, the way that I interact with them, I'm coming at it from my perspective and not so much thinking about the way that they're taking what I'm saying, the way that they're taking the interaction that we're having. And when you get to kind of break down what makes you you into those four components, the open self, blind self, hidden self, and unknown self, you can see how those things change as a relationship changes. It helps you put yourself in the other person's shoes and not so much think about everything from your own perspective and start to think about it from the other person's perspective because that's what alters your relationship. And in any relationship, but especially in a family with sisters, that can either make you be a lot closer or bring you farther apart. So, in conclusion, I found the Johari window really interesting because I think it's a great tool to use to work on your self-awareness when looking at the interactions you have with those closest to you, especially family. So yeah, that's all I've got for this week, but I'll be back next week, and thank you so much for listening. Bye!