Look through any window yeah, what do you see? Smiling faces all around rushin' through the busy town (The Hollies)

Photo by Nicolas Solerieu on Unsplash

Recently, I was involved in some professional development that used something called the Johari Window. I was asked to discover who I was based on selecting six adjectives from a list. 

Hmmm, I may have reservations about this, however, I can reveal to you my chosen six were: adaptable; calm; cheerful; friendly; dependable; reflective. These go into my Open window.

Others then gave their version of me and while some went for similar adjectives, a few selected 'bold'. This went into my Blind window. Now, I'm not sure what 'bold' means to different people, but maybe I am. It's not how I see myself and that is the point.

Apart from that, Johari's (four pane) Window (the other two are Façade and Unknown) was interesting, but I'm still keen to know where I take it from here.

Something I've known for a looooong time is that I'm a relationships/narrative guy. I'm not a data driven guy, in that, while I can analyse data and produce theses to test, I tend to be suspicious of it all.

When I'm presented with a long succession of statistical tables my eyes tend to glaze over. I'm better with the pictorial graphs of trends. They glaze over because tables/graphs don't tend to include the narrative, nor reveal the relationships, and so, I find myself getting frustrated.

Another thing I know is that I like systems, but they need to have a purpose and for me that means serving people. For that reason I belong in a job like teaching - serving others. I could never run my own business.

Which all serves to point to a fundamental bias - I'm an English teacher. I have a Master's degree in that area and a few post-graduate diplomas and degrees in Educational Management that focused on qualitative research, not quantitative.

Basically, I prefer words to numbers. I'm just built that way.