Survival.

It's a defense mechanism. When we realize that things are unlikely to go our way, we raise our defenses. The instant reaction is to conserve ourselves for later. After all, we do not want adverse conditions to take away our ability to do something more.

What if what we are doing is going the way we expected. It does not mean we cannot put a pause or even a stop to it and do something else. However, we can do something else if we come out of the present crisis unscathed. Protecting ourselves from damages to reputation, financial overcommitments, and lost relationships goes a long way in having a runaway even though the present one is not looking great.

Protecting ourselves does not mean we do that for personal benefit. It does not mean staying out of harm's way at any cost.

Protecting ourselves means doing the right thing when things are not going our way. Doing so even when what we focused on dearly is seemingly falling apart. There is recognition that, along the way, our assumptions of what would happen did not come true. It also means that we did not lead appropriately, made premature decisions about the matters, or our efforts were not assembled to provide us required outcome. The surprise about our progress is often due to missteps on multiple things.

Whatever the reasons, we need to own the responsibility for what transpired. It's easy to blame someone else rather than own failure.  It takes courage, humility, and honesty. Survival means escaping the ills of failure through complete acceptance of the outcome. Making sense of the reasons that caused it. Importantly, it means owning the undesired result and finding a way out.

Survival means we have learned to put satisfactory closures to the matters, have learned from the past, and have kept our energy to create new pursuits intact!