As posted in My Simple Thought

heard about this term the first time when I already work for a couple of months. At that time, I just know there’s so much difference between working and school time.

In school, you are responsible for your own action. If you didn’t do the homework, you’ll get the bad mark and not other. If you choose your not to attend in school day, you take the risk of not getting enough material for final exam. The higher your school grade, the more freedom you have to act on your own. Some school did give a team assignment (which is very good in my opinion) for their students to feel and used to teamwork environment. The assignment also give the student a “sense of belonging”, where the purpose of the team is the ultimate goal above individual necessity. For those who didn’t have a chance to get this team assignment, they can still choose many extracurricular activity or being involved in organization. This whole experience will help a children to be an adult and ready to enter working environment.

The working environment is completely different. You have to cooperate with other team member to achieve company’s objective, but you also have to struggle for your own career to the top of management. If the culture of the company is good, then you’ll enjoy a healthy competition and even have a chance to push yourself to do your best. Unfortunately, the fact is always different with theory at least in my job place. This might happen because my place is a young company who still search for their own culture and identity but also happen in very grown up company with hundred years of experience. Without strong leadership, many of the employee always defend themselves and claim that it’s not their responsibility if the company suffer a loss. People tend to defense themselves and admit that the failure or error was not because of them. And this is the first time I heard about Self-Defense Mechanism from my friend. She said is natural to a person to act defensive before they analyze what really happen.

Self-Defense Mechanism or SDM is an automatically came up from our unconscious mind. Peter Lance is writing an article about this in his site. He explains many defense mechanism that commonly used by a person. Few of them are Rationalizing, Denying, and Compensating. In Rationalizing, people often build and excuse (yet a convincing one) by rationalizing the loss or failure. Often they didn’t want to see or look to themselves clearly and just trying that the loss is due to happen. Denying is an example that everyone will do at least one time in his life. It start since we’re all little children. Do you remember denying to admit that we have made something wrong? This usually happen to a child with a very strict family rules. They are too afraid to admit because they know they would get a very bad punishment. Even if we are living happily in harmony, we soon face a new society in school, college, or baseball club. And we often deny anything that would make us embarrassing. To cope our own weakness or limitation, we often use Compensating. For example, if a student has weakness to have relationship with his opposite sex, than he might compensate this by being the most clever student in a class. Please note that every type of SDM here is mostly done without the person being realized ‘why’ or even know that they did it.
This SDM often use to preventing any changes or anything that might cause us inconvinience. In some point, it help us assure that we are safe, but in other side it also prevent us to know ourself better. Let see this situation, when we know that we have weakness in sport (like most of us do), the SDM will made us deny this weakness and compensate with other ability. If this happen quite enough, we’ll someday be a man that push ourselves break the limit of our own weakness and bring us no good. From my point of view, SDM is not so much different with Habitual Error (you might want to see my writing about it here). Unaware of SDM could have the same effect with habitual error.

So, what’s wrong about admitting our own mistake? Nothing! It’s just another SDM because admitting our mistake tend to made us uncomfort with what we have now (mostly because we surely ended up with punishment). Me myself fortunately have know and experience in some organization and society, when admitting our own mistake is not rewarded with punishment, instead equally supported with other member for us not to make another same mistake in the future. We’re all keep reminding each other and see nothing but our team’s goal. For this to be happen, I believe we need one vision and mission, sense of belonging, and willing to forgive. Actually, by admitting mistake we’ll know ourselves better and help people to understand who we are.

Try to aware of our own SDM and hopefully it will make us more humble, socialize better and act wisely.