I first heard about the Johari window on Smarter Every Day, Destin Sandlin’s YouTube channel. What intrigues me about it is how it forces you to remember that even though we live inside our own skin and our own brain every day, we don’t actually know everything about ourselves. Sometimes other people can see things more clearly than we can.
The hard part is that it’s genuinely difficult for people to be honest with you about what they see in you that you don’t see in yourself. I can count on one hand the people in my life who I can really hear that kind of feedback from non-defensively, and unsurprisingly, those same people are the ones I can return the favor to. That kind of trust requires trust in both directions.
I spent some time talking to Claude about the “known to self / not known to others” quadrant because I was a bit fuzzy on it. They call it the facade, and I thought it was more about putting on a fake front, but then I realized it’s about the stuff you know about yourself and choose not to share. Private thoughts, fears, opinions, the interior life that we keep to ourselves. So, we can grow the “known to self/known to others” quadrant in two directions. Others tell you what they see (telling you what you don’t know), and you tell others what you know about yourself (helping them understand you more).
Which got me thinking: Claude probably knows more about me at this point than almost anyone else. I use it every day at work for thought processing, drafting, organizing messy information, and working through decisions before I land on them. And on the personal side, I use it for volunteer board minutes, sympathy notes, travel planning, even sorting through my watercolor strategy. I’m trusting by nature, so I suspect I shrink that facade quadrant more than most people do, at least with a really smart computer that isn’t going to judge me. Unless that’s something that sits in the known to others and not known to me‽
It raises a strange question the original Johari window never had to answer: does an AI count as “others”? Pretty sure it doesn’t. But it’s an interesting thought exercise and made me think about what disclosure is actually for. That act of putting something into words, to someone who listens, is how you start to see it more clearly yourself.
Then there’s that whole fourth quadrant: the unknown unknowns. The stuff you don’t know about yourself and no one else knows either. Destin thinks that’s the territory God knows, and as a Christian I agree. I keep trying to think of what might be in that box, but I guess that’s the point. If I knew, it wouldn’t be unknown. The best we can do is hope that anything in there will be revealed in time.
I’ve been thinking about this in my work too. Turns out, communities have Johari windows too. The only way to shrink those areas which others know and you don’t is to have people you trust enough to tell you what they see. And maybe the facade matters there too: communities only really open up when the people in them feel safe enough to say what they actually think.
