Monday, Monday -

[kyburg]

37 out right now. HUH?

The condensation from the damp carpets is fogging all the windows up on top of it - they're gorgeous, by the way. Yes, I messed up my weekend so I could get everything clean enough to eat off of.

Oh, wait.

No, that wasn't a pattern. It was that bad.

Johari, Nohari - feh. I give all of you an opportunity to say exactly what you think of me every day - the posts are there, anonymous commenting in enabled and I don't screen...I do log IP addresses. Heh.

But to give anyone a chance to take pot shots at will, with no recourse - and use someone else's system to do it? Nah.

The point of this exercise is to get me to sit down and put words down...every day. Attention is nice, bitchslaps not so nice, but it comes with the territory.

And it's a record, for whatever that's worth.

Comments

[snobahr.livejournal.com]

I admit that on longer posts, I scan through it, and if key words grab my attention, I'll go back and read the whole thing. This isn't just for you - this is for all of my friends.

I don't often not go back and re-read your posts, Kyburg.

Thank you for being you.

And good luck with the adoptions! :)

[foogod.livejournal.com]

The Johari Window isn't intended to be a feedback tool. It's really for a completely different purpose. It is intended as a way to compare the person you believe yourself to be against the type of person other people perceive you to be. It's not about validation or criticism. It's about understanding the inherent differences between perception of onesself and the perceptions of others (and can be quite enlightening, I think).

Not that you have to do it or anything, that's entirely up to you. But it really is a very different tool from LJ comments, with the ability to show different things than they can, and should be considered in a separate light, IMHO.

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

One of the things I was taught some years ago - and consider it freeing in ways that can't be counted - is that what you think of yourself, and what other people of think of you - are two completely separate issues.

Behaving in a fashion to convince others that you are a specific thing - or trying to modify your behavior to get other's approval of it?

My stuff. Their stuff. And you can't do a thing about their stuff. It's either you like apple pie or you prefer cherry. I don't have anything to do with your preference. I may think I'm apple pie - and you consider it mince - but that's two completely different things.

The last thing I'm going to do is insist I'm apple - and you'd better agree with me.

You may not even like apple.

Doing character assessment by committee again. Verifying that you are what you think people *should* think you are. Not gonna. I really really don't think hearing about what good points I have is very useful. It can give you a warm feeling to hear that you have them; but still, if I'm not happy with what I'm up to, going outside myself for approval is pretty dangerous stuff. VERY dangerous stuff, to be honest.

Do your best.
Clean up your own messes.
Be aware of your impact on others.

I can't do much more than that.

[foogod.livejournal.com]

See, once again, you're missing the point. This isn't a tool for "character assessment", or "approval". It isn't about "what I am" or "what I should be", or anything like that. For some reason you have assigned these values to it and leapt to the conclusion that it has to be used only one way, but that's really just your own preconceptions. The johari window is a tool for evaluating differences in perception. It's not for evaluating self-worth in any way, only for investigating the differences in how different people view and understand the world. The tool allows you to see the differences between what you know about yourself and what other people think they know about you. It doesn't try to say somebody's "right" and somebody else is "wrong". It doesn't even say that there is a "right" or "wrong". It doesn't even say what you should do with the information you get, or even that you should do anything with it at all. That's entirely up to you, and there are a lot of other ways that it can be used than the narrow view you seem to be taking of it.

Really, when you get down to it, what this tool tells you isn't actually about you at all. It provides a way for you to learn something about the other people around you which you might or might not already know about them. Now, if you find yourself unable to even let yourself know how other people perceive you without feeling a compulsion to change yourself as a result, then that's a personal issue that you probably need to address, but not something that really has anything to do with this tool.

Personally, I find it enlightening to understand how other people perceive me and how that differs from what I know about myself, because it gives me useful insight into differences which can affect communication and my relationships with other people. It also gives me a better understanding of wrong ideas or misunderstandings which other people may have about me which might be getting in the way of them really understanding who I am and where I'm coming from (a lot of this really falls under your point of "Be aware of your impact on others". Part of your impact is how they perceive you and how that affects their views of what you say and do, and if you're not aware of that, you're not aware of the full picture). It also potentially gives other people an opportunity to see what I think of myself and possibly better understand me as a result. Plus it's always intriguing just to look at an example of how different human beings perceive the same subject, and see how much someone's point of view can affect and color their understanding of the world around them.

Do I intend to change myself because of what I see here? Of course not. This isn't about me, and anyway, I'm confident enough in who I am that I don't need to shape myself based on how other people see me anyway. That doesn't mean that knowing a bit more about how they perceive me isn't useful in other ways, though.

You also seem rather convinced that the results you'll get back will be really negative. I have to wonder a bit why this is. I suspect if you actually tried it you might be surprised at the results...

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

"Good, bad - I'm the one with the gun."

Most of the impact I've noted with those two tools hasn't been positive. "Think think I'm what?!" leading the pack -

And then the second-guessing begins.

Considering the source doesn't even enter into it.

Initially.

I'd put this under the same category I'd put fortune-telling under; an interesting exercise, but one you might reconsider due to the power of suggestion it has.

Frankly, if anyone or anything walked up and said I was a outgoing, effervescent personality, I'd drop back and step and wonder what they were smoking. But thank them anyway, yanno?