Use the “Johari Window Model” to improve your conversations

It’s hard to know what other people know. But it’s not impossible.

Excerpt: "The problem is that when we go into conversation with someone, we each have certain assumptions about what the other speaker knows. A conversation — especially in its early stages — involves a kind of mutual weighing up. We test and probe to see how much the other person knows and how much we should assume.

Sometimes, we get this wrong. As with my overly informative builder, we misjudge someone’s base knowledge.

But what if there was a good way to avoid this kind of miscommunication? What if there was more of a rulebook to the assumptions?

Well, that’s called the Johari Window Model, and learning about it can change how we approach every aspect of our interpersonal lives."