Finding Myself
Introduction
In all my life endeavors, I have always wanted to invest a lot of time to know who I am, as well
as establish who I will become in the near future. It is true that am always sensitive about what
defines people and what drives their identity. I am always interested to learn why people with the
same background and upbringing can different personalities and perceptions about life. Since I
always perceive people in a certain way too such that I can be able to write a page or two about
them, I am also interested to determine what people would say about me. I also like to be aware
of my behavior, character traits, and personality.
One of the tools that help someone to know more about themselves is the Johari window. This
window has been recommended by numerous researchers. The Johari window is comprised of
four panels which include: the open self, the blind self, the hidden self, and the unknown self. In
the following paragraphs, I am going to going to make a connection between these panels and
my life.
Self-Awareness and Self-Concept: Johari Window
Window 1: The Open Self
Open self encompasses all behaviors, emotions, and attitudes that we hold to ourselves. All these
behaviors, emotions, and attitudes are known both to you and other people. For my case, my
open safe is more pronounced when dealing with members of my nuclear family as well as close
relatives. I am always free to share everything with my close family members, and I feel
comfortable to open up to them and share sensitive information. However, I do not feel the same
freedom sharing the same information to strangers or to family members whom I am not close to.
Again, my open self is easily larger when I am interacting with my best friends. I always feel
free to share information, speak freely, and interact freely with my close friends. We can always
play the most comic and hilarious jokes. However, this is contrary to my behavior when I am
around people I do not know; the conversation is too shallow and I do not make jokes with
strangers.
This can be better expressed based on my behavior in a recent family meeting. This
gathering involved all members from our extended family, with some of the family members
coming from different states. I had never met some of them, but I had previously interacted with
a handful. I always found myself talking to and making jokes to the family members whom I was
familiar to. From this event, I realized that I am funny, curious, interactive, and I always take
care of other people’s needs.
Window 2: The Blind Self
The blind self refers to the knowledge about me that is not known to myself but other people are
aware of these facts or traits. Other people who I associate with know these things but I do not
know them. In an interaction with my close friend, I learned that there are numerous things that I
do not know about myself but he knows them. He told me that I sweat around my nose when I
am nervous about something, and I like using the phrase “you see” when I am trying to drive a
point.
I also discovered that I like making real-life references when talking about various topics. Mt
friend told me that I like using statistics to support my statistics when trying to persuade people
to support my idea. I was not aware that I like using examples when communicating with other
people.
Window 3: The Hidden Self
This window represents the thing about myself that I know but I always keep them hidden from
everyone. These may include things that one needs to keep secret for various reasons. For my
case, I like keeping my life uncertainties to myself. One of such uncertainties is the failure to
develop good relations with my close friends and close family members. I always insecure that
something might happen to ruin the good relationship between me my friends and relatives.
I am always concerned and cautious about what to say in the presence of my friends and family.
Although this has helped me to reduce the chances of conflict, I have come to realize that
holding my words may translate to being antisocial to my friends and family. Again, I always
limit what jokes to say in the presence of my friends and family. Although this might have its
positive side, it may also be mistaken for pride or dissociation.
Window 4: The Unknown Self
This window represents the segment of one’s life that is neither to you nor to other people. These
are things that one discovers later through dreams, visions, or interaction with similar
occurrences. My unknown self lies in the having constructive friendships. I realized that most of
my dreams and thoughts I am always doing something good to a friend or with a friend. After
such dreams, I always wake up having developed a go relationship with my friends.
Self-Esteem Test and Discussion
The self-esteem of a person has a lot to describe about the person. One’s self esteem shows how
they think about themselves. Someone with a high self esteem hold a high regard towards
themselves. People with high self esteem think positively about themselves. People with low
self-esteem think negatively about themselves. Self esteem can be used as a scale to determine
how someone values themselves. After taking the Sorensen’s self-esteem test, the test results
came as mild to low self-esteem (score of 5-10). This was contrary to my expectations because I
have always considered myself to have a very high self-esteem. This is because I am always very
confident in what I do, I do not fear criticism from other people, and I do not depend on the
opinion of other people when I want to make decisions about my life.
I think there is a great potential to improve my self-esteem. In think the best approach to reach
this improvement will be acknowledging my negative behavior and working towards thinking
positively. I also need to improve how I believe my opinions with respect to the opinions of
others. I need to trust more on my opinions as opposed to how people feel about me. I also need
to work on personal development such reading materials that will improve my knowledge and
improve how I feel about myself. I will also learn to take positive criticism from friends and
relatives.
Impression Formation
Impression formation refers to the process followed by someone when they make an impression
towards another person. This new impression may be positive(good) or negative(bad). It is true
that many people work hard to positively impress people around them. Most people would like to
form a good impression around other people, especially those who are senior them.
One way in which an impression can be formed is by through stereotypes. I remember recently
went for an interview for industrial attachment. One of then requirements to get the spot was to
score well in an aptitude test. One of the components of the aptitude test was numerous
arithmetic problems. One of the interviewers acknowledged that the arithmetic problems were
challenging to previous interviewees. However, he noted that I can score well in the arithmetic
test because I am Asian. According to him, Asians are good with numbers. This is a common
stereotype as many people believe that Asians are generally good in mathematics. This stenotype
created a good impression of me.
Impression can also be formed through self-fulfilling prophesies. At the beginning of my first
year in campus, I was very poor in essay writing. As an international student and English not
being by first language, I needed to work very hard to improve my English. I wanted to created a
good impression to my parents and friends. I started learning about essay writing and did a lot of
practice. I would spend many hours in the library practicing and writing essays. I would send
these essays to a tutor to mark them. I would use his feedback to improve on my writing. I
passed well in my writing classes in that year as well as the following years.
Attribution of control is another way that impression can be formed. I think most people around
me tend to be judgmental towards me based of a few of my attributes. As an international
student, I always get the reaction from my friends saying I perform fairly good in class because I
won a scholarship. They do not consider other factors such as the effort I put in studies and so
on.
Impression Management
Impression management refers to the procedure one has to follow to let others know the
impression he/she wants to have of him/her.
When I want to communicate my impression to anyone, I always use the politeness strategy of
impression management. This strategy makes me use polite words when addressing people. I
always filter the jokes I make around people especially if they are senior than me or they are
strangers. I also filter the signs and gestures that I use, because I understand some gesture may be
impolite to some people.
Again, I always use the positive face strategy for my impression management. Having a positive
mind instils confidence and optimism among those around me. A positive face makes me create
a good impression among those I associate with.
I am also fond of using the credibility strategy to show people what impression they need to have
of me. I use my aptitude, charm, and appeal to give other people a perceptive of me. I have used
this strategy several times especially during class presentations when I shoe my charisma on how
to organize and present my PowerPoint slides.
Social Media Identity
Since the emergence and the internet towards the end of the 20th century, most people have
changed the way they communicate and interact with other people. The early 21st century saw
the emergence and growth and emergence of social media sites. Instead of using the traditional
methods of sharing information, social media users would use these platforms to share
information and connect with friends.
My first experience with social media was during my high school. I would use my brother’s
Facebook account to see what is happening around the world. Although Facebook was not very
advanced then, it served its purpose of connecting people. After finishing my high school and
getting my first phone, Facebook was my first social media application to install. The application
allowed me to have 5,000 Facebook friend. Although I only a handful of my friend list, most of
these friends were those who we shared similar social characteristics such as living within the
same state, attending the same school, and so on. I remember I would spend most of the time
scrolling through the application to determine to follow what happening to my friends. Some of
these friends were from other continents. I made friends from all parts of the world, and we
would talk as if we had known each other for years. The application also allows users to use
video and voice call to communicate with others.
Although Facebook provides the opportunity to interact with numerous users, my interest in the
application continued to decline. Now, I spend most of my time on YouTube and Twitter.
YouTube has millions of videos which keep me busy. I have a good number of channels which I
have subscribed to. By subscribing to these channels, I get notified when the channel users post
new content. I am subscribed to channels in different categories such as motivation, music,
movies, preaching, podcasts, sports, and so on.
I am also a renowned user of Twitter. Twitter keeps me updated on local and international news.
The application has a “Trends for you” page to follow what is trending around you or around the
world. With this application I am always updated on political, healthcare, business, political,
celebrity, and all other classification of news.