Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:07 Welcome to today's builds church mental health. Today, we're going to be talking about feedback systems and how we create different opportunities for us to understand how we are both perceived in the world around us and how we are coming across the people. And also if what we're thinking and what we're feeling, actually,
Speaker 1 00:00:25 Isn't in line with the truth, because you see
Speaker 0 00:00:28 So many times we have, as part of our stories, things that we can think, things that we can feel very intensely and the people around us are actually saying to us,
Speaker 1 00:00:40 That's not true.
Speaker 0 00:00:42 The way you see yourself, the way you perceive yourself, the way that you are coming across. Sometimes whether for the good or whether for the bad, that's not the way that the community actually experiences you or that thought about yourself
Speaker 1 00:00:56 Is not actually true. And we
Speaker 0 00:00:58 Are seeing that, that thought is continuing to breed your anxiety, to breed your depression and to lead you on a path that is not where you were created to go. So I wanted to introduce you today to one of the systems of feedback that has been extremely helpful for me in my own story. And that is called the Johari
Speaker 1 00:01:18 Window model.
Speaker 0 00:01:20 This was created sometime in the mid 1950s, but I left an Ingram as a personal feedback model. How do I get feedback in my life? Because feedback is so essential. If I'm trying to produce a certain thing, let's say we were in a machine factory and we were trying to create Teddy bears. And we built a big elaborate system as to how we could great Teddy bears. But the final product that was coming out had an arm that was growing out of the forehead and had an eye that was attached to the knee. We would know something is actually not working back in the entire system that we've created, because this is not the product that we wanted. And you see so many times in our lives, whether it's our attitude, whether it's our emotions, whether it's our thought patterns, whether it's the way we're coming across other people, the final product that we're producing is actually not what we want it to be like.
Speaker 0 00:02:12 We don't know how to go back and fix it. If we went back to our Teddy bear model, we would go back to the parts where the arm was attached and where the eye was attached. And we'd begin looking at the system to try to understand what is going wrong at this part, because you see the rest of the Teddy bear. It's all stuffed. The legs are in the right place. We got some good things going on, right? But it's not actually the entire product of what we want that to end up looking like. So what if we, in our own stories built the same kind of feedback process to be able to understand what is not going the way we want it to be, to celebrate the things that are going the way we want them to be. And then we create an opportunity for us to find that little niche of where we needed to fix what needed to be fixed. So today I'm going to draw for you a little sketch of what the Johari window
Speaker 1 00:03:02 Looks like. I'm a very visual
Speaker 0 00:03:04 Learner. And so this is something that helps me greatly be able to understand and what this is looking like, the Johari window was four panes. You can see here, we've numbered
Speaker 2 00:03:12 Them 1, 2, 3, and four. And I want to fill in what this looks like. So if we start in windowpane number one, this is the one where we know that this is kind of the open area. This is the area that is known by ourselves. And it is also known by others in our lives. These are the, the facts about
Speaker 0 00:03:35 Us that maybe you can even see as you meet me for the first time, or did you get to know what my personality, he was like a little bit.
Speaker 2 00:03:42 These are the things that are just out in the open. Then we get to the second pain. And these are the things that are unknown by ourselves, but they are known by other people. And
Speaker 0 00:03:56 This is an area that we all have, whether we want admitted or not, that we call blind spots. And you see, in order to understand what is in this second area in our life,
Speaker 1 00:04:09 We have to ask other people,
Speaker 2 00:04:11 We have to solicit feedback in order to understand what
Speaker 1 00:04:14 Are these blind spots like?
Speaker 0 00:04:17 I'll tell you that one of the greatest blind spots that people bring up in my life, there are two things we're going to get really real here for a second.
Speaker 1 00:04:24 First one is that my
Speaker 0 00:04:26 Tone does not always match my message. Second one is that I'm not always as approachable as I feel like I am inside of my heart. And somehow the face that I can carry around on day-to-day basis, doesn't make me as approachable as I actually feel like I am. And as a one on the Instagram, sometimes I live in this world of like, but that wasn't my intention. And so the feedback I've received from friends and from family and from my husband, it has been sometimes hurtful, sometimes painful. Sometimes the pride in me has not wanted to understand that, but at the end of the day, it has been invaluable to try to understand that my motivations and my intentions can begin to match up with the experience that people have for me, because there's no other way that I would know that there's no other way that I'd be able to get that information. Then
Speaker 2 00:05:15 If other people were telling me, and if I had solicited sometimes unsolicited feedback as to what this looked like in this area of blind spots, the third area of the Johari window is an area that is known by myself, but I'm known by others. And these greatly are the hidden areas of our lives. The areas that we
Speaker 0 00:05:39 Know, maybe we don't say them out loud, or we try to keep them very quiet inside of ourselves, but other people do not know and understand what's going on. I bet in this area, actually more of our friends and family can actually tell that there's something in this area that we would like to admit, but this is area of the hidden
Speaker 2 00:05:58 Area. And really the biggest way that we grow in this is that we grow through self-disclosure.
Speaker 0 00:06:03 We grow in a way that we are trying to share this area with the people around us who have proved them, proven themselves to love us and to be safe. And I will say that for me, one of my most intentional goals in living an
Speaker 2 00:06:18 Authentic life is to try to make this area as small as possible. Trying very
Speaker 0 00:06:23 Intentionally to reveal my thoughts, my emotions, the ugly, the good and the bad to the people around me, who I know are my people and can have this part of my story and can hold this weight. Because if this area trades a grit bigger and bigger, like it is in so many people's stories, the weight of holding a gigantic hidden area is too heavy. And that eventually begins to breed such a burden on our souls and on our bodies, that it is too much. The fourth area of the Johari window, largely by left
Speaker 2 00:07:02 And Ingram, especially has been known as the unknown. This is the area of the great unknown and Elsa would sing us right into there.
Speaker 0 00:07:11 I believe as a work with people. And as I look at the gospel and how that informs
Speaker 2 00:07:16 How we operate here, that this is the area of the revelation of the holy spirit.
Speaker 0 00:07:22 This is where we have an opportunity to kneel before the Lord and be constantly asking him, Lord, what is it about myself? What is it about my sin? What is it about the way I come across? What is it about the things that I have kind of even hidden sometimes from myself that you want to reveal that therefore I can their take and I can disclose other people and I can share what that looks like. The other way we grow in this fourth kind of section is through
Speaker 2 00:07:52 Honestly self discovery through
Speaker 0 00:07:54 Growing in our self-awareness through intentionally pursuing to understand ourselves more, which I can tell you, even from the last, probably 18 months of my own story, there's been certain little parts where I've just for a long time, not understood. Why does this happen? What is happening when my body is reacting in panic, when my kids won't put their shoes on, what is this extreme reaction to this very
Speaker 1 00:08:20 Small circumstance? So as I've tried to grow
Speaker 0 00:08:23 In understanding that and gathering information and talking with people, right, that is also the work of the holy spirit showing me what that is, but it is also my intentional pursuit of self-awareness and self
Speaker 2 00:08:35 Discovery. This is also a way that we grow from other's observations. And so basically all three of these begin to fall into this category. Other people share these things. We are on self
Speaker 0 00:08:47 Discovery, and we begin to share these areas with other people.
Speaker 2 00:08:51 And so in general, there's two great
Speaker 0 00:08:54 Tools that we can have to take in our hands. As we look at the Johari window,
Speaker 2 00:09:00 The first one is that we can begin to ask questions because you see if we are going to know what is unknown
Speaker 1 00:09:10 About ourselves. We have to take the time to ask other people questions
Speaker 0 00:09:15 In my life. I've done this in many different awkward ways. At times. Sometimes I've made a survey about myself or my friends to fill out so they can tell me no, tell me for real. I want to know what are the hardest things that I need to hear? Will you please say them in love? What are the hardest things that I need to hear? And I asked them, I asked them both in person and I asked them on paper. So if people need to take time to gather their thoughts about it, if they need to take time to own what the Lord is wanting and prompting them to tell me about the way I come across, the way I care for other people, the way I interact with them, that they will maybe even build up their own courage to speak those things into my story.
Speaker 1 00:10:00 And I can tell you
Speaker 0 00:10:01 Sometimes it's been a very painful process. Occasionally there's been people who have written things out in haste, and I have felt there's no love in their answers to what they were telling me. And so in my personal assessment, I've kind of made a rule. And my rule is that in order for me to really hold this with a lot of intention to look and change this area of my life, I'm looking for two or more people to agree on the same thing. Obviously they're not going to say it in the same way. Obviously they're going to have different ways that they're described that that's going on in my life, but I am looking for two or more people to kind of come to a consensus of, okay. They don't even know necessarily that the other person is saying that, right. But as I gather the data and I gather the feedback I'm looking at, okay,
Speaker 1 00:10:46 This is a theme. This is a theme
Speaker 0 00:10:48 That many people are saying. And so that's where I'm going to start. There's that one kind of off the cuff comment. I don't discount it, but I do kind of put it on the table for later to be able to say, okay, we're not going to start there. Cause that actually feels more hurtful and kind of off base a little bit. We'll come back and revisit that later. So that is the skill of asking whether that's on paper or sending out a mass email or sitting down with friends. One-to-one face-to-face, you are asking them to tell me
Speaker 1 00:11:18 Where I'm off. Tell me
Speaker 0 00:11:20 Where, you know, I am not coming across to people the way that you know,
Speaker 1 00:11:24 My heart wants to come across.
Speaker 0 00:11:27 And the second tool that we have
Speaker 2 00:11:30 Is we have this opportunity to tell,
Speaker 0 00:11:35 I work with many people who feel unknown, they feel isolated, they feel, um, not seen, not heard. And these are all, some of the greatest aches
Speaker 1 00:11:47 Of our hearts that we can experience our entire lives. One of the things love
Speaker 0 00:11:53 About the Lord is that, especially in the old Testament, he's constantly telling us about himself. And he's telling us that he is the God who these
Speaker 1 00:12:01 Ellroy. He is the God who knows. And he is the guy who is with us.
Speaker 0 00:12:09 And that those three fundamental principles about the character and the names of God. They actually informed
Speaker 1 00:12:15 This process so much because there's actually never a space that we are unknown. There's never space that we're actually unseen, but in
Speaker 0 00:12:24 Our day to day community experience, whether that's with our family or with our friends, it can feel very
Speaker 1 00:12:31 Dark and very hard to feel unknown. And that's
Speaker 0 00:12:36 Why we have this skill that we can develop of telling other people who we are, what's going on. What is so hard in this hidden spots and the moon. More that we tell people, the more that we let them into our stories, the more that we disclose, what is going on in whether it's our anxiety or depression or our mind that seems to be running around like a pinball machine,
Speaker 1 00:13:03 The more that these things, they lose their power because you see whatever we keep
Speaker 0 00:13:09 In that hidden spot of oftentimes compared it in counseling. So we're shoving it under the rug, right? And I don't know about you, but I've yet to find anything that is truly valuable or beautiful or anything I really want in my house that grows in the company. Darkness. Usually things get moly, they get full mildew. Everything goes towards destruction and deterioration. If we just keep it in the dark. And it's the same thing with our hearts, it's the same thing with our minds. And it's the same thing here. As
Speaker 1 00:13:41 We look at the Johari window, one of
Speaker 0 00:13:44 The greatest tools we have for growing is to tell other people what is going
Speaker 1 00:13:50 On. Even if it's ugly, even if you're not
Speaker 0 00:13:54 Really good at telling them what's going on, cause you don't even know how to articulate it yourself. We don't have to have things packaged and perfectly ready to deliver people with 0.1 and 0.1 a we can tell them in the middle and tell them, I don't know, I don't know what's going on, but right now I feel so overwhelmed. I can't even make a decision.
Speaker 1 00:14:13 We
Speaker 0 00:14:14 Can tell, we can share. We can disclose that information with
Speaker 1 00:14:17 People.
Speaker 0 00:14:19 And I know that many of you possibly watching this are thinking to yourself, I don't actually know who I would tell
Speaker 1 00:14:29 My encouragement for you is
Speaker 0 00:14:32 To not stop pursuing people until you find that person.
Speaker 1 00:14:37 And obviously I'm completely biased towards counseling,
Speaker 0 00:14:41 But that's, it's a great place that we can start because sometimes we do, we look around us in our lives and we're like, I'm not sure who could carry this burden with me. I'm not sure anyone is equipped. I'm not sure anyone is ready. No, this about me. And yes, it's about myself. But sometimes actually we're looking at that in assessing the people in our lives and it's actually compassionate, right? And that is when we are having the opportunity to turn towards people who do this for living who carry other people's burdens and their stories and we're equipped and retrained. And sometimes it's so very hard for us to carry other people's stories, but we love it. And it's our passion. It's our passion to know you and to help invite you to these opportunities and equip you for how to tell people how to ask people, how to call upon the Lord and ask him to reveal these things to yourself, into your own heart.
Speaker 0 00:15:35 So as we talk about feedback systems today, I hope that you are having your mind kind of begin to reel around is what would be my next step for me, as I gather that feedback information, as I began to look at the comment parts, the things that overlap in those sets of two, my next step often is to try to investigate, okay, what would it take to learn this skill? Can I learn this from a book? Can I learn this from reading about it? Can I learn this from Pinterest? Can I learn this from who can I learn this from? The other thing is sometimes we can't learn these things from a book. We can't learn these things from a paper. We have to watch someone live these things out. And that is when I've asked certain people to be a mentor in my life.
Speaker 0 00:16:17 Or I've just noticed that this person's really good at that. So I want to hang around them more because they're going to model for me what that looks like. And I can gain great insight in watching someone model, whatever this characteristic is that I need to grow in. Additionally, as I begin to grow in awareness of what this is, so let's take my tone. For example, my tone still has a long way to go because it's very ingrained in me to come across critical at times, or to just spit things out of my mouth, as I'm thinking about them and processing them and not deliver them in a package that is actually as Ephesians talks about going to build that person up. So as I continue to work on that, right, sometimes I just need to be quiet. And sometimes I'm trying my hand at what it is to have a tone that isn't going to be something that builds someone up consistently. And in that I know that my journey, yeah, and this is not going to be perfect. The first time I opened my mouth the next time. But if I can grow in awareness, sometimes that awareness is just knowing that after I already did the same thing again, that I can apologize for
Speaker 1 00:17:21 It. And I can own that mistake. I can own that. That's not the point product
Speaker 0 00:17:26 I was looking for. If that, if that hand is sticking out of the barriers, forehead I can own, right. But that's not what I'm going for. And I can apologize and I can repent and I can try to make that right with the other person. And then hopefully slowly over time, I began to grow. And that steps in earlier and earlier into the process where maybe the next time I'm in the middle of saying something that's coming across critical. And I stop. And I say, you know what? I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1 00:17:51 I can hear, and I can see
Speaker 0 00:17:53 On your face, this is not coming across the way that I want this. I come across. My intention is this. And I want my words to match up with that. And I can just stop in the middle because awkward is awesome. Sometimes, especially if it is part of our growing process to be able to see,
Speaker 1 00:18:09 Okay, Nope, Nope. I want to be something different than this. And then
Speaker 0 00:18:14 Eventually over time as I grow in self-awareness it does move to the beginning of the process where I am able to say, okay, my heart, I want it to match my words. And from the very beginning of me opening my mouth and sharing with someone, both of these things are aligned that they can both be true. And so I hope that that's a little bit encouraging for you as to what the next steps would be, how we take the space of being confused or seeming like things don't line up, or is this the truth about myself? Or how do people perceive me or what am I like in the workplace, whatever it may be. There's so many different anxieties or sad thoughts that can bring us to this place. But if you and I can begin to build these feedback systems into our story, I can't begin to tell you how encouraging it is to have someone who, you know, loves you, look at you and tell you how it is that you get to grow. Because all of us have in our story, these spaces and these places where we need to become more like Jesus. And if we close our eyes and we pretend like we're not there,
Speaker 1 00:19:23 They're just going to get bigger and they're going to get uglier. And honestly, the gospel is at stake in those places.
Speaker 0 00:19:30 And if we know that they're there and we look at them and then we get so overwhelmed that we don't know what the next step is. So then we just tuck it under the rug, or we turned the other way. The gospel is at stake there also. So I hope that we can continue to be a people who are growing to be okay with the fact that we are not perfect to be okay with the fact that we love the gospel and that sometimes that does not come across in everything we do. In fact,
Speaker 1 00:20:04 Most of the time it does not come across.
Speaker 0 00:20:08 And the nuances of everything we do do that we could be growing as a people who desire to understand
Speaker 1 00:20:17 That the voices
Speaker 0 00:20:18 Of the people around us can have a beautiful impact in pushing us to be more like Jesus. And that this community has this opportunity to gather these voices, to understand what they have to say.
Speaker 1 00:20:34 It's a beautiful process. It's a humbling process, but it's a beautiful process.
Speaker 0 00:20:40 So I hope that you will begin to consider it what your next step is at building a feedback system. And until then I encourage you to press on.
