TABLE OF CONTENTS What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing.
C.S. Lewis
The previous chapter looked at how to unearth and challenge assumptions. By doing so, the ground may now be prepared to start working towards solutions, or there may still be a niggling doubt in your mind. You have helped your staff member describe their tangibles by your use of quantum questions. In listening to their replies you recognize that there is more to this than they have told you. While perception is their reality, there are other realities that it would be useful to bring to their attention. It is here that the R, of Reality Bites, comes into play.
Back in the 1950s two men, Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham, working at the Western Training Laboratory in the USA, developed a way of looking at how people reveal themselves. The framework they designed was named the Johari Window, [1] and it has been a mainstay of interpersonal skills training programmes for the last forty years (Figure 8.1). It has survived because it highlights how partial our realities are, and that becoming more skilful in our relationships comes from gaining more information about ourselves. This happens through bringing into the open things that previously have been hidden from view both to ourselves and others.
Coaching is a fast-track way of opening up the Johari window, because it encourages individuals to reveal more about themselves and provides a...
