Tools for Self-Awareness and Personal Improvement

Running head: REFLECTIVE ESSAY
Reflective Essay
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1REFLECTIVE ESSAY
As an individual, it is imperative to develop self-awareness and personality, especially
when an individual is placed in a group. Self-reflection is necessary because it helps an
individual to remove the obstacles and becoming conscious about the things that are
important to us. We are more or less engaged with our daily chores of life that make us forget
about the things that make us feel worthy. Self-reflection is the process of reassessing
ourselves as reflection is all about a deeper understanding and thoughts regarding what we
want to achieve in our life. Reflection assists in understanding the course of our life more
efficiently. Self-reflection is not just about studying oneself. There are certain tools that help
us to gain an insight and reflect our own attitude and behavior through conflict and
communication. In this essay, I will be elaborating on the various tools of self-awareness,
personal improvement and developing communication skills.
The ‘Johari’ window model is a personality development tool created by two
American psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in 1955. The name ‘Johari’ is derived
by joining the letters of their first two names. The idea was obtained as a conclusion by group
dynamics in University of California and was later corrected by Joseph Luft. The Johari
window model is used as an effective tool for enhancing an individual’s perception of others.
Each individual is characterized by the Johari model through four quadrants. The four
quadrants signify personal information, motivation, feelings and whether or not that
information is known to oneself (Saxena 2015). The concept of conveying and reciprocating
is interpreted through this model. A Johari is a common quadrant that has four quadrants in it.
Two of the quadrants represent self and the other two quadrants that is unknown to self but
known to others. The info passes from one quadrant to the other on gaining mutual trust
through socializing and working on the feedback received from others.
This tool has proved to be very practical for me as well in developing self-awareness.
The tool has helped me to understand my flaws in understanding and enhancing my

2REFLECTIVE ESSAY
communication skills during my internship days when I used to face difficulties in opening
up to my colleagues. By coming across the Johari window model, I was able to assess myself
on the basis of the four quadrants of the model. I have been able to find out my areas of
dispute where I struggled to establish a proper collaboration of the delivered information.
According to Carl Jung’s conceptual theory proposed in the ‘Psychological Types’, an
individual can be categorized on the basis of their preference of general perspective,
perception and judgment abilities. The Myers-Briggs Theory was developed by Katherine
Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, which is a revised work of Carl Jung’s
theory. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is an introspective tool used for the
purpose of demonstrating psychological preferences of individuals about how an individual
perceives the world around them and take decisions accordingly (Furnham and Crump 2014).
The purpose of the MBTI tool is to identify the basic preferences of an individual in terms of
perception and judgment. According to the MBTI theory, an individual can combine his/her
preferences to arrive at a personality type.
The MBTI tool has assisted me in assessing my strengths and weaknesses to a
significant level. The concept became clearer to me when I was in the first semester of my
university. I can still recall those days when I used to struggle a lot in dealing with the people
around me. I used to face complexities in my own comfort zone and had issues generating
ideas as well. I was lagging behind in my subject of expertise and that resulted in mental
unrest. By coming across the MBTI tool, I felt the need of the tool for self-assessment as I
was having emotional stress. Through the use of this tool, I realized that I possess a
gravitation towards people and a personality trait that is inclined towards helping other
people. The tool has also helped me to gain an insight to find out my strengths and
weaknesses. The first weakness I came across was my inability to take appropriate decisions

3REFLECTIVE ESSAY
depending on the situation. I am now doing my best to develop my decision making abilities
as it is necessary to thrive in this competitive world.
The Transactional Analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic process where the interpersonal
conducts of an individual are studied. TA is basically a psychological model where personal
growth and change are studied to identify the ego states of an individual and amending them
to solve their emotional issues. The concept of TA was developed by Dr. Eric Berne, when he
observed that his patients were behaving differently as they were holding personalities of
other people inside them. This made Berne to study about the personality of the individuals in
analyzing different kinds of behavior that individual possesses in different situations. Berne
has stated that each individual possesses three stages of an ego, the parent, the child and the
adult. In other words, the parent state refers to the ‘taught’ conception of life, the adult state
refers to the ‘thought’ conception of life and the child state refers to the ‘felt’ conception of
life. The parent state represents physical expressions of being annoyed or anxious body
language. The child state represents physical expressions of being depressed or emotional.
The adult state represents physical expressions of being attentive and straight-forward
(Hargaden and Sills 2014). TA is now considered as an entrenched approach as it is widely
used in fields of organizational development, counseling and psychotherapy.
The Transactional Analysis tool has brought an impressive change in shaping my
personality. The application of the TA tool is related to my workplace life. I can relate my
behavioral aspects to three stages of Transactional Analysis that I have suffered in my
workplace. Transactional Analysis has basically worked as a therapy for me as it had helped
me in overcoming the negative effects of either being annoyed or depressed both at my
workplace and home. I have always experienced communication disintegration, as a result of
which I used to have a normal conversation with someone at one point and the next moment I
got indulged in an argument or debate. In both the cases, the communication has failed due to