Uniquely Yours Craft Journal

Dear Fellow Journalers,

Do you remember the soundtrack from the movie “The Thomas Crown Affair”? The title is, appropriately enough, “The Windmills of your mind.” The last rather lengthy line is as follows:

“Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning

On a ever- spinning reel

As the images unwind

Like the circles that you find

In the windmills of your mind.”

Back in 1950 two men Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham invented the Johari Window as a model for mapping personality awareness. The idea was to take a fixed list of positive adjectives describing oneself and put them in a grid. To get started the person would make copies of the grid and then pick 5 or 6 of the adjectives that they thought best described themselves. They would then send their friends and co-workers the same list and ask them to describe him. In a similar way, a negative grid of adjectives could be drawn and the whole window of oneself  would be revealed.

Much later in the 1990’s, I was working in corporate America and the idea of this interactive personality “quiz” was presented in a workshop. Back then it wasn’t in the form of a grid but a circle much like the one below:

We were each given a piece of white paper with two circles drawn on it. The outer ring was for co-workers and the inner ring was for us. Our instructions were to make copies o the circle and give them to friends and co-workers and in private fill in the open circle with our strengths and traits. After about a week we were to collect the circles and we would be revealed. Of course, the exercise was voluntary and confidential and most of us agreed that it was certainly eye-opening!

Some of the comments I received then we’re thoughtful, leader, cheerful, reliable, dedicated, well-organized. I wonder what people would write now?

~Sallie