The buddy system

In my first post I featured the buddy system, in this post I want to explain it. If you are running into a situation where you are exhausted, most likely you won’t recognize until it is too late. It often starts with too many things you need or want to do, but you don’t realize that this is more than you have capacity for. If this happens once or sporadically, the chances are high that you don’t run into any exhaustion. However, doing this without taking a breath, it will drain your energy over time. Most times it is a slow process, which doesn’t hurt while it is happening and at the same time, these are the moments where you need to change habits/behaviours to not get drowned.

How to change behaviour if you are not aware? Thankfully, we are not the first ones trying to understand how to do this. We could use parts of a technique called Johari window. Wikipedia describes the Johari window like this: “[it] is a technique designed to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others.” I don’t want to go into full detail, and just can recommend learning more about the Johari window and how it can help you in general. For this post, I concentrate on two rooms of the Johari window, the unknown and the blind spot.

The unknown describes the room which is not known by yourself, but also not known by others (about you). This room is hard to tackle, as nobody can directly help you. On the other hand, we have some possibilities to change the unknown into the blind spot. The blind spot describes the room not known by yourself but known by others. To change the room from unknown to blind spot, you need to talk to others. While you talk about yourself and what you do, the other person might recognize behaviours which you are not aware of and can mirror it to you.

How does this help us, not getting into exhaustion? You can peer up with someone, a buddy, with whom you check in from time to time. This person can be your partner, it can be a friend, a co-worker, a neighbour, someone out of a community you are in, … it should be a person you like to talk to, and you feel safe to talk to. I know this might be easier for some than others, as not everybody likes to talk to people. You don’t need to open up your complete life to this person, it is enough to start describing how many tasks you have in front of you and/or you are willing to take up on. Doing this, you bring your task level from the unknown room into the blind spot. You perhaps still see that it is too much work for you, but the other person hopefully gets the sense and can mirror, e.g.: “Seeing what you are already handling, I don’t know if I would be capable of. How do you do?”

It may take some time to feel comfortable accepting others giving you feed back on your workload, nonetheless if you keep doing this, your blind spot room will shrink and become hopefully more and more an arena room. This buddy system will not just work for workload but many areas in live, where you might have blind spots and what to get rid of those. And I am sure I am not the first one thinking about this, and it might even be a standard process in some psychology frameworks. I just never read about it and wanted to share the idea because it were two buddies checking in with me and reducing my blind spot.

By the way, you can use the Johari window to check in with your team, how they perceive you from a set of standardized attributes and how this is different to how you perceive yourself. There is an easy to use online tool for it: https://kevan.org/johari. If you want to take this even a step further, you can do the opposite and use a nohari, where people describe your failings from a set of fixed attributes: https://kevan.org/nohari. I have done both with team members and also leadership colleagues, and it was always a win for me perceive me.