Recently, work hosted an event designed to bring my team closer together. Using the Surepeople PRISM, we spent the morning discussing our dominant psychological traits and how we can use them to better interact as a team. I thought the exercise was brilliant, and it led me to seek out other tools to broaden my self awareness.
The first such tool I uncovered was the Johari Window.
My ultimate self awareness goal is to shrink the “Blind Spot” window as much as possible. I’m pretty sure anyone who’s met me knows that my “Arena” window is large, and probably larger than the usual person’s. My façade window is proportionately smaller.
Coincidentally, I was listening to a rather brilliant podcast lately. Jordan Peterson mentioned during this interview a tool he was developing called the Self Authoring Series. Peterson described this tool as a self-guided psychological analysis tool to help the individual deal with past thoughts or issues they may still be holding on to. The benefit of doing this, Peterson claims, is that it will free the individual’s mind up from holding onto these thoughts and issues, resulting in lowered cortisol levels and an increase in health and happiness.
I’m considering using this tool for my own purposes. I’m curious because I’d like to know if it will help me see myself the way others see me, in the same way that the PRISM tool helped me. Of course, a large portion of the benefit of PRISM was that I was talking through it with several dozen coworkers. This was performed in such a way that shrinking my Blind Spot was unavoidable.
I will continue to look for tools like PRISM and SAS, and try to separate the wheat from the chaff as I go along.