Brené Brown: Hi everyone, I’m Brené Brown and this is Dare to Lead. I have a really great treat for y’all today. My new book, Strong Ground, is out in the world. And in this special episode, I’m going to share one of my favorite chapters from the audiobook. It’s called Lock-In and Lock-Through Power. And it’s about how we navigate the very tricky and difficult transition between work and home. I’m really excited to share it with you and very grateful to Random House for letting us put this in our podcast so that we could get it out in the world. All right, let’s jump in.

Chapter 18. Lock-In and Lock-Through Power. On a beautiful English spring day in March 2025, I walked onto a footbridge in Teddington, a suburb of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames in southwest London. After I reached the center of the bridge, I turned in a full circle to get my directional bearings, then I paused facing east—toward the tidal part of the river—and gave Mother Thames a slight nod. I then turned toward the west and paid the same respect to Father Thames. Having recently learned that the Thames is governed by gods, I figured small, undetectable nods were the least I could do to acknowledge their presence without freaking out the passersby. Not that the English are prone to freaking out.

Father Thames, the patriarch of large groups of travelers, and Mother Thames, a striking Nigerian woman with equally gorgeous daughters—each named after a tributary of the great river—have a contentious relationship that’s always right on the verge of erupting into a full-scale turf war. This is a dangerous proposition, given that a skirmish could create flooding for the 15 million people who live in the river’s catchment area. The Teddington Lock is where the Thames transitions from nontidal to tidal, and it’s where the two gods have agreed to draw the boundary line that determines where their territories begin and end.

As I climbed down off the bridge, I approached a young, ponytailed woman wearing coveralls and sporting Wayfarer sunglasses. I smiled at her and asked if there was really a “lock keeper” who runs the locks. For a fifth-generation Texan, finding an actual lock keeper in this storybook English setting would seem about as magical as the river gods. She smiled back at me, extended her hand, and said, “I’m Gemma, the lock keeper here. How can I help?”

This is why I believe in magic.

I introduced myself and explained that I was trying to learn how locks work so that I could use them as a metaphor in a new book I was writing on leadership. She was immediately curious. Gemma shared a knowing smile as I explained that I wanted to use the concept of the lock to illustrate the tricky work-to-home and professional-to-personal transitions that we have to navigate with our partners, children, and friends. I explained that the more I understand why, at the end of a hard day, when we finally arrive home, we stay in our cars and scroll through TikTok rather than going inside, the more I think we’ve got a lock problem. Specifically, we have a “locking-through” problem—the term used to describe the process of raising or lowering a boat to match the water level of the adjoining waterway. I told Gemma that I wasn’t sure whether my thinking accurately matched the way locks actually function.

When I was done with my clumsy metaphor explanation, she raised her eyebrows and said, “You mean when it’s bath and bedtime for your two young ones, and you know your partner has been home for fifteen minutes but he’s still not inside the house?”

Relieved that it made sense to her, I said, “That’s exactly it! We’re coming off one depth and either falling uncontrollably to a completely different level of flow, or we’re scrambling to rise and get synced with something more elevated. Either way, there’s a lot of rough water in these transition processes.”

Gemma nodded and said, “So interesting! I’ve never thought about it before, but the work-to-home transition can be turbulent for sure.”

I described to Gemma how the research participants talked about bringing their “I’m locked in” work energy into the house without even realizing it until their frustrated partner says, “Hey, I don’t work for you!” or “Leave that stress at the door!”

There’s also the overwhelm we can experience when we walk into our apartment after a long day of work and discover that home has its own tempest brewing. We’re ready to sink into the couch, only to find that our child’s soccer practice got moved up by an hour and their shin guards have gone missing again. Or, just as we change into our comfy clothes, an aging parent calls because they can’t find their new medication. Or the dog is throwing up, or the thought of pulling together dinner pushes you to your breaking point.

When we don’t make the time for the lock-through process—when we fail to take the time to transition and level up or down with our new environment—we can quickly find ourselves questioning why, just hours ago, when work seemed overwhelming, we were longing to be in the very place that we now find ourselves trying to escape.

Gemma was all in, but before we got started, she asked about my choice of the Teddington Locks, given the number of great locks in the United States. I explained that I was already in London for work and that my British murder mystery addiction had led me to the book Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch. Before I could go on, she smiled and said, “Ah, yes, Rivers of London. I understand that we’re where custody of the river changes hands between Mother and Father Thames.”

We laughed again, and I told her I was already on the fifth book in the series. And, P.S., if you’re listening to the audiobook, I have finished the entire series, and the audiobook is so good. All right, let’s get into lock lessons.

A navigation lock, or boat lock, works by creating a contained, watertight chamber with gates at both ends, allowing vessels to navigate between different water levels by raising or lowering the water within the chamber using gravity.

When the ship enters the lock chamber, the gates behind it close, and a sealed environment is created. The water level in the chamber is raised or lowered, depending on whether the ship is going upstream or downstream, by opening the sluices that allow water to flow into or out of the chamber. Once the water level in the lock chamber matches the level of the waterway beyond the gates, the gates are opened, and the boat or ship can continue smoothly on its journey. A weir, which is often a part of the lock system, is a barrier that is built across the river to control water levels and flow and to help with flood management.

For two wonderful hours that day at the Teddington Locks, I watched Gemma let a narrowboat and a working barge through the locks. I learned the mechanics of how the sluices work, and I got a fascinating lesson on the various sources of the river. The actual history of the tributaries is as interesting as Ben Aaronovitch’s fictional portrayal of Mother Thames’s daughters. In the books, each daughter is named after the tributary she oversees. For example, Aaronovitch explains that Tyburn, or Lady Ty, is pompous, lives in Mayfair, and goes to posh people’s parties, and that Effra Thames is not only the goddess of the River Effra but also the goddess of Brixton Market and the Peckham branch of the Black Beauticians Society.

After a short lesson in fluid dynamics, Gemma’s shift ended, and my magical afternoon came to a close. Gemma the lock keeper liked the fact that I was planning to use an actual lock in my metaphor. And Gemma the mother, partner, and leader, who faces the same stressors that most of us face at the end of a hard day, seemed pleased to have helped with a metaphor that illuminates how hard it is to transition from work to home.

Gemma is the first female Lead Lock and Weir Keeper at Teddington since it was built in 1810. On the drive back to the hotel, I thought about how complex, serious, and sometimes deadly her job can be. When your work is connected to a waterway that serves 15 million people, there are accidents and tragedies all the time. That night as I was going to sleep, I thought, If being the lead lock and weir keeper at a lock built in 1810 is not plumbing and poetry—I’m not sure what is.Let’s go to the next section called Locking In.

Most of us know what it means to lock in. We may think of it as that moment when we take a deep breath and choose to focus intensely on one thing. Or maybe it’s when we summon all of our available internal resources to achieve a specific outcome or to go “all-in” on a specific task.

Locking in is about paying full attention, going “heads down” to get it done, and making a commitment to limiting distractions. My pickleball partners and I probably say it at least two or three times in an hour of playing: “C’mon! Lock in. Let’s go!”

At work, someone may knock on my door and ask if I’m available. If I’m writing, reading, or coding data, it’s not unusual for me to say, “I’m locked in. Give me fifteen minutes.”

To better understand locking in, mental toughness, and related constructs, I ran focus groups and conducted interviews with a wide variety of folks, from fighter pilots and military rescue teams—including casualty assistance officers (the courageous and compassionate people who make next-of-kin notifications and provide support to families)—to professional athletes, coaches, trauma-focused medical professionals, hostage negotiators, intelligence community members, and high-level organization leaders. I also watched about forty hours of videos of coaches reviewing game and practice tapes and player performances from competitive sports.

The focus groups and interviews were with such diverse groups and individuals, they allowed me to find patterns that transcended industries and specialties. The tapes were deeply helpful because, as I talked about in Chapter 3, we can observe locked-in moments more easily in athletes than in leaders.

As a grounded theory researcher, when I find myself surrounded by an overwhelming amount of data—which was the case here—I immediately start mentally creating different-sized baskets so I can sort the information into categories and supporting properties—baskets inside baskets.

I’m always asking myself, What is the relationship between these concepts? How are they related? What’s the hierarchy?I was once called an “unrelenting taxonomist” by a journalist, but I heard it as taxidermist and I didn’t like it, so I developed an enduring aversion to the term taxonomist. I guess this is a linguistic sensitivity for a Texan who was raised in deer blinds.

My original hypothesis was that locking in is a function of mental toughness. In other words, I had guessed that if you had to put “locking in” into one basket of existing research, you’d drop it in the mental toughness basket. I was wrong.

It turns out that locking in is not just about mental toughness. We seem to lock in when engaged in four different types of experiences requiring different cognitive, behavioral, and emotional resources.

We lock in for reasons of mental toughness. We lock in when we go into flow. We lock in when we go into deliberate practice, and we lock in when we go into deep focus.

I think it’s worth a few paragraphs to describe how locking in aligns with these concepts.

Let’s start with mental toughness and the lock-in. Researchers Peter Clough, Doug Strycharczyk, and John Perry define mental toughness as “a set of attributes related to how people deal with challenges, stressors, and pressure.” Their model of mental toughness is structured around the
“4 C’s” framework, which includes:

One, control. The extent to which individuals feel they are in control of their lives and emotions. High control means feeling able to influence outcomes and manage emotions effectively. Two, commitment. This is the ability to set goals and consistently achieve them, demonstrating reliability, focus, and perseverance. Three, challenge, the tendency to see challenges, change, and adversity as opportunities for growth rather than as threats. High challenge is associated with adaptability and a drive for personal development. Four, confidence, the belief in one’s abilities and the inner strength to stand one’s ground, including both confidence in one’s skills and interpersonal confidence. As I dug into this research, there appeared to be considerable overlap between concepts like mental toughness, hardiness, and resilience. So, when you hear me talk about mental toughness, if you’re thinking, wow, that sounds a lot like resilience or hardiness, I think there is some overlap here. The next one we’ll look at is flow and lock-in. I could also see the concept of flow in the interviews and the observational field notes I took while watching film. The concept of flow was introduced by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi in his 1975 book, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, and has more recently been defined by the European Flow Researchers Network as, and this is the quote, again, that started with Csikszentmihalyi and then has been redefined by the European Flow Researchers Network.

Here it is. “A gratifying state of deep involvement and absorption that individuals report when facing a challenging activity and they perceive adequate abilities to cope with the challenges. Flow is described as an optimal experience during which people are deeply motivated to persist in their activities.” The six elements of flow as conceptualized by Csikszentmihalyi and Jeanne Nakamura were clear across the “locked-in” research. I’ve added some examples under each element to capture how they showed up for me and how I interpret these elements.

So we’re going to go through the six elements and then I’m going to kind of give you my take on what that might look like or feel like or sound like. So number one is intense and focused concentration on the present moment. To me, that’s I feel focused without effort. Two, the merging of action and awareness. I’m one with the work. I’m almost inside the work. Three, loss of reflective self-consciousness. My interpretation, I’m not distracted by thoughts of how do I look? What will they think? Four, a sense of personal control or agency. To me, that translates as I’ve got this. I got this. I can do this.

Five, a distortion of temporal experience. I think this means, look, I’m on a different clock. Sometimes I’m fast. Sometimes it’s slow. Sometimes it’s a mystery. But I’m not clocking at the same rate as the world right now. I’m in it. And number six is experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding. For me, this translates to I feel swept away and the outcome is not even in my thoughts. I’m just moving along of the work. Adding to this flow work, we also saw a connection in our data to Cameron Norsworthy’s significant contribution to our understanding of flow. Specifically, Norsworthy’s idea of optimal challenge and flow’s teachability were brought up across the interviews. Here’s a simpler way of thinking about these two ideas that I think are introduced on top of the research. Optimal challenge requires matching skill levels with escalating demands. My translation, I avoid challenges that are too easy and lead to me being bored, and I avoid challenges that are too difficult and lead to my anxiety. Next, flow isn’t just a state, it’s a skill. My translation, I can learn to access flow with discipline and practice. Okay. So what we’ve done so far is we’re talking about the term locked in.

Let’s lock in, baby, let’s go. And the four different reasons we lock in. So we’ve talked about mental toughness. We lock in in mental toughness times. Two, when we get into flow, we’re locked in. The next is locking in in deliberate practice. The idea of deliberate practice emerges very significant to how the research participants talked about their experiences of locking in. Anders Ericsson’s work helps me understand that while achieving flow in our work can be a really enjoyable experience, it is different from deliberate practice. He explains that deliberate practice is a matter of engaging in a, “training activity aimed at reaching a level just beyond the currently attainable level of performance by engaging in full concentration, analysis after feedback, and repetitions with refinement.” I just want to say that my translation, and I’m off script here with the book, but my translation of deliberate practice when he talks about, you know, it’s a practice aimed at reaching a level just beyond the current level of performance, what I think he’s saying here is deliberate practice is going toward something you can’t quite do yet. It’s hard. There’s no question that the research participants enjoyed the feeling of flow and felt locked in during that experience.

However, they also locked in for deliberate practice and developing mastery, which was not, again, as comfortable, but equally meaningful. I’m a huge believer in deliberate practice. I don’t enjoy it. I don’t enjoy the stretch, but I love the growth. Here’s an example. Like, I really hate drilling in pickleball, but you drill to improve technique on the court. What I do love is being competitive. I do love that part, and that often means better ball placement and shot selection. And you don’t develop better ball placement and shot selection in gameplay. You develop those through drilling. That’s deliberate practice. So now we’ve looked at three different circumstances in which we lock in. Mental toughness, flow, and deliberate practice. The last one is we lock in when we need to get into a space of deep focus. The data we collected on locking in and deep focus drove me straight to Dr. Amishi Jha’s work on attention and focus. Dr. Jha, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami and director of contemplative neuroscience, studies how our brain pays attention and how we can strengthen this critical cognitive function. I interviewed Amishi for the Dare to Lead podcast, and oh my God, yikes.

It was a big, not only change for me, but in just, I’m going off script for a minute, in our podcast process, a lot of people that work with me listen to the podcast before we release them to the public, and everyone was like, oh shit, this was hard. Her work is a huge lesson in accountability for all of us. In her words, I was not paying attention to my attention. I was convinced that I had 10 flashlights at my disposal rather than one, and here are some key learnings from her book, Peak Mind, that changed my work and my game on the court. Number one, your attention can be like a flashlight. Where you point it becomes brighter, highlighted, and more salient. Number two, this is going to hurt y’all. Multitasking or more specifically and more correctly called task switching is terrible for our performance, accuracy, and mood. Three, you have one flashlight, not two, not three, certainly not ten, which I thought I had, and your one flashlight can only ever be shining on one thing at a time. In a day, when you do a lot of task switching, you’ll start having less integrity in any of the states your attention is in.

You’re going to become slower, more error-prone, and emotionally worn out. The training that I’m working on from the same book, Peak Mind, and this is the training I’m doing personally in my life, from her book Peak Mind, is the same training used in a study with active-duty military service members preparing for deployment. In her studies, Jha discovered that without intervention, attention becomes compromised under stress and attentional lapses increase. She discovered that with appropriate mindfulness training, attention can be strengthened and protected even in high-pressure situations. I actually feel a significant difference at work and on the court after practicing her mindfulness approach. In fact, when I’m playing and I tell myself to lock in, I actually visualize my flashlight. All right, let’s take this information about where we lock in, why we lock in, again, mental toughness, flow, deliberate practice, deep focus, and let’s talk about what locking through is. During my lock lesson while I was watching and waiting for the chamber at Teddington to fill up, so a very, very cool narrowboat, I mean, this is like from a movie, could come through the lock and continue on its journey.

I asked Gemma if the button she was pushing forced the gates open and closed. And she told me, no, there’s no force. It’s all gravity. When the water levels are exactly the same, pushing the button simply unlatches the barrier and allows gravity to open the gates. Of course, for my whole day in Teddington, I was in full kindergartner-field-trip mode. And I was like, okay, wait, wait, let me ask you this question. What if there’s a difference of just half an inch between the water level and the gate, just half an inch? Gemma smiled and said, yeah, it’s not going to open even if there’s a half an inch difference in the water levels because it’s half an inch over the course of 100 miles of river. Think about that. You’re waiting for water to get to the same level and a half an inch in 100 feet of water is not close enough because that half an inch is a half an inch over the course of 100 miles of river. Physics is nuts. And while we unfortunately can’t apply these types of clear science and math rules to how humans work, there’s a powerful analogy here that I think math can help us understand.

The forces at play in our transitions from work to home have their own calculations of one, cognitive lift. How much brain power is this taking for me to make this switch? Two, context switching. What does it cost me to change focus from the brief I’m writing for my boss to reading a Slack message that’s unrelated to what I’m doing? Then there’s something even more difficult, which is domain switching. This is a type of context switching that often involves shifting between completely different life domains. How much energy in my account is being drawn to shift from thinking about the hard feedback I received from my boss about that brief that sucked because I got distracted by a Slack to then shifting domains and helping my mom find her lost meds. The investment of deep focus is so intense. And while the return is great in terms of our efficiency and even our feelings of satisfaction, our brains end up worn out. They’re spent. Context switching, including domain switching, is more costly than what we can even see. When we knowingly or unknowingly switch between tasks or contexts or domains, the demand for cognitive flexibility takes a huge toll on us biologically, inducing chronic stress, emotional dysregulation, cognitive depletion, memory issues, and burnout.

Basically, it pulls a shit ton of resources from our account. Part of addressing the toll that all of these cognitive demands put on us is just naming what’s happening. And in the case of the 6,324 small bullshit disruptions during the day, minimizing those where possible. And you know what I’m talking about with the infuriating disruptions, the email pings, the firefighting when someone’s hair is on fire about something, the nonsensical meeting schedules, and the swirl of so many shifting priorities that there are actually no priorities at all. When this scenario is the reality for most of us, the most important thing to know is that we may not just be in a slump, and we may not need more sleep. We may be completely overdrawn at the cognitive bank. Insufficient funds. And that’s real. Researchers who study these issues suggest a two-pronged approach. Minimizing switching where you can. For me, that’s like goodbye to the slack alerts on my damn watch. And two, engage in deliberate recovery to heal from the demands that will always be a part of being human. We know a lot about deliberate recovery from athletic training research. Unfortunately for us, when you apply deliberate recovery to cognitive and emotional overwhelm, it leads to our favorite term, metacognition.

The first step in deliberate recovery is understanding the demands on us in the language of cognitive lift. And then observing in ourselves what kind of thinking, focus, and switching fuels us and what kind leaves us depleted. What does that mean in the language of cognitive lift? That means that part of our metacognition assignment here is to say, wow, that was a big cognitive lift. Or, ooh, the cognitive switching right now has me worn out. Or, geez, it’s a domain switching from working, getting phone calls from home, working, wearing my goggles. Metacognition means naming it. The second step in deliberate recovery, and this is super important because very few of us know this, and even fewer of us actually practice it. The second step in deliberate recovery is understanding that this type of recovery, it’s not passive. It’s structured and intentional and often very physical. Part of our recovery is cleaning out attentional residue. Sophie Leroy is an associate professor of management at the University of Washington Bothell School of Business. She explains, “attention residue refers to cognitions about task A that persist even though one has stopped working on task A, transitioned to task B, and is now working on task B.

Understanding the cause and consequences of attention residue is important because people who experience attention residue while performing another task operate under cognitive load due to the lingering cognitive activity. Since working under cognitive load tends to hurt performance, people experiencing attention residue after switching tasks are likely to demonstrate poor performance on that next task.” I know that this sounds complicated, but there’s some serious stuff going on in our brain, some of it self-inflicted, and some of it’s just honestly due to the deep dysfunction and greed in our world and at work. And some of it’s just part of being human. I think we need to understand our brain given that lots of people are working very hard to leverage our brain, manipulate it, and use it in service of issues that we actually may or may not support. I’ve changed my life with this information. I have protected my time and my thinking in new ways that, to be honest with you, have not landed well with some of the people in my life, but have protected my heart and my mind. In fact, when it comes to deliberate practice, I’ve learned a lot about deliberate recovery from Magnus Carlsen, a Norwegian chess grandmaster who is a five-time world chess champion and widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.

In multiple interviews over the past two years, Carlsen has been very forthcoming about the relationship between being a champion, staying in good physical shape, and deliberate recovery. He runs, he does yoga, and he still plays on a recreational soccer team in Norway. When he travels to tournaments, he will play pickup basketball and soccer games. He also runs on treadmills. What I think is really interesting is something he said in an interview for The Wall Street Journal. Carlsen explained that in both soccer and chess, this is his quote right here, “Games are lost or won in the final hours due to mistakes caused by fatigue.” Let’s go all the way back to chapter one and my trainer Tony’s sage wisdom. We’re looking for intentionality and consistency over wild intensity. Winning in here will be a focused and systemic change across your life. This is about you making a commitment to your body, mind, and spirit and holding yourself accountable to that commitment. And I’m going to go off script here and just say, when I say that I’ve made changes to help me recover deliberately from some of the really hard cognitive lifts and switching and domain switching that I have to do in my life.

And this came really when I was caregiving for my mom during her dementia, I block out time, sometimes right in the middle of the day, to work out or play pickleball. And that has pissed some people off because I’m not available. And what I can tell you about that is I’m not available, but I’m okay. I’m sane-ish, I’m stronger, and I have more of me left for me and the people I love. So I just want to say, when you start thinking about deliberate recovery, I think not doing it is physically dangerous. Okay, next section in the book, Capsizing. When I was observing the lock in Tettington, it felt as if it took a very long time for the chamber to fill up so we could get the narrowboat through. Watching it happen in person helped me really get my head around the fact that a ship transitioning the Panama Canal typically takes eight to ten hours to pass through the three sets of locks, which that totals six lock chambers, from ocean to ocean. Granted, that’s relatively no time compared to the 10 to 22 days, and about 8,000 nautical miles of travel it would take to sail around the tip of South America via Cape Horn or the Strait of Magellan.

When I asked Gemma if there was a faster way to fill the chamber, her answer hit me like a ton of bricks. No. The transition takes what it takes. If you force more water into the chamber, it will become very turbulent and vessels could capsize. When I got home from London, I immediately told Steve, oh my God, I am grumpy when I get home because I spend so much time locked in and I’m not locking through when I get home. I’m rushing my transition from work to home. It’s too turbulent and I am capsizing. It’s funny, but it’s true. Transitions have been a very, very difficult part of our lives. I have an intense and demanding job. I am deeply introverted and for every hour I’m with people, I need a percentage of that back in recovery time. And Steve’s day at his pediatric practice can take a very difficult turn in a literal heartbeat. We both come from families in which end-of-day transitions were anxiety-producing and very egg-shelly. We know that everyone was doing the very best they could with the information and the experiences they had, but there was little to no self-awareness, no emotional regulation, and no one was above the line.

It was not a great setup in either one of our homes. Steve didn’t skip a beat when I told him that things were too turbulent and that I was capsizing when I got home. He was all in to try something new. Steve and my son are avid fishermen and he got the metaphor immediately. Like he identified so quickly with the lock. He right away asked, what’s your ideal chamber time for the lock through? After thinking about it, I said, honestly, I probably need 20 to 30 minutes after a full workday. If I’m just coming off a hard 30-minute call or an hour-long meeting, I might just need 5 to 10 minutes, but after work, I’m going to need half an hour. I had to trust him enough to ask for what I need. I can’t sit in the car in the garage for 30 minutes. I want to come in. I want to grab a cold sparkling water. I want to put on my sweatshirt. I want to take my makeup off. I want to pull back my hair. I want a full half hour of alone time of pure introvert recharge and recovery time.

I think for me, part of the struggle has been that in my family, growing up, that kind of request would have been seen as self-indulgent and it would have been ridiculed. But I also grew up in a house that felt a lot like the Drake Passage. In the evenings, you know, cue that scary music you hear on, like, TikTok, the yo-ho, hoist the colors, like that song that they play when the videos are shown from, like, oil rigs and ships that make you completely seasick just watching your TikTok minding your own business. Like, no, thank you. Steve and I talked about the things that capsize us the quickest. For me, it’s two seemingly innocuous questions that just, I can’t do it. One, how was your day? And two, what do you feel like doing for dinner? Hearing these questions before my lock-through time or even when I’m mid-chamber pushes me so far under the water that it can feel like I’m drowning. And I get that they’re both thoughtful questions. I just can’t do it. I cannot do it. I cannot play back the day I’m actively trying to shake loose.

And even though there is zero assumption by anyone in my family that I’m in charge of dinner, I can’t make another decision until my water level is where it needs to be. As Gemma taught me, there may be only a half inch of difference in the water levels, but it’s 100 miles of that half inch. Once I’m locked through, I’m so ready to talk about my day and cook or order out or make decisions. Steve talked about his locking through needs, which include a warm welcome home and a nod to wanting to debrief our days when we’re ready. And we committed to trying it. I mean, like all commitments to deliberate practice, it’s uncomfortable and it’s so vulnerable. There’s like zero flow when you first start, just awkwardly being new at something. And we all know that trying on new ways of showing up at work or home, it’s hard because it’s brave. Steve and I were both painfully aware of how many times in our past we did not recover in time from the capsizing, and it ruined an entire evening. In hindsight, that 30 minutes of awkward locking through would have felt like a split second compared to navigating heavy swells and whitecaps for an entire evening and potentially the next day.

The difficult part is when two partners get home from tough days, both ready and desperate for some lock through transition time, and it’s just not viable for both of you to take it at the same time. I think just like the boats at Teddington, we have to prioritize and queue up. That seems to be a better answer than both of us trying to shorten the time we need. You’re not going to beat gravity and force those gates open too soon. There’s too much river behind you. Locking in and locking through power. Here are my big takeaways from the work I’ve done on this over the past three years. One, lock in and lock through power are core to grounded competence. I want to work on my own capacity to do both with intention, and I’m now looking for this capability in our hiring process, and I’m teaching both of my kids about what I’ve learned. Last, I’m bringing this work into our leadership performance and culture work with organizations around the world, and that’s led to hearing some really powerful feedback from not only the leaders with whom we work, but their partners and their spouses as well.

Some of us may intuitively lock in, but understanding what we’re doing and the cognitive lift it requires is key to recovering from the lock-in, and it’s part of our deliberate practice to strengthen that ability. Number two, a person’s ability to seriously lock in is only as valuable as their capacity and willingness to lock through. When it comes to identifying capabilities, the combination of this new research and my work over the past two decades has led me to think about locking in and locking through as a capability set. They come together. Locking in is what we do to achieve a number of different cognitive, behavioral, and emotional states, including attention, deep focus, flow, mental toughness, and deliberate practice. Locking through is a transition mindset and skill set. It’s about integration, which is the opposite of compartmentalization. It’s taking the same deep breath that we often use to summon our lock-in power, then using that inhale to shift from deep focus to diffused focus, bringing more things into our awareness than the challenge right in front of us. This process is about moving from harnessing our internal pool of resources to acknowledging the resource pool’s gifts and limits.

To name the human tenderness inherent in a big cognitive spend combined with a big context switching spend. This entire integration transition is in service of honoring and sustaining our lock-in power and our wholeheartedness. You can only protect both. Choosing one hurts both. I added a small note to the end of this chapter that actually, I think, became almost another chapter, but it’s a note in this chapter, and it’s called a note about mental toughness and emotional tenderness. And I want to share this with you because I cannot stop thinking about this. Earlier in the chapter, I shared a list of the groups of people I interviewed for this research, from fighter pilots and military rescue teams to professional athletes and coaches to hostage negotiators and high-level organizational leaders. I knew going into these interviews and focus groups that I’d be impressed with the level of determination and strength that these folks display, but whoa, what took me by surprise were their questions. In addition to generously answering my questions and offering insights into their experiences, they had their own questions. And across the interviews and focus groups, their questions were related to their very, very mixed feelings about the construct of mental toughness.

The research participants were hand-picked by their leaders and met two criteria. One, they were considered respected formal or informal leaders by their peers, and two, they consistently demonstrated strength and resolve under pressure. My spill question, which is a term we use in grounded theory to just open the gates, but leave them wide enough that you’re not telling them what to talk about. My spill question for them was, what do you think mental toughness is and what do you think it is not? Now, given their backgrounds, they were all familiar with some version of the mental toughness concept. In fact, some acknowledged that they had been trained in mental toughness. What was unexpected were their reactions to the term. They ranged from eye-rolling and wary to critical and cynical. This skepticism resulted in having a lot of questions for me. Specifically across the interviews, their clarifying questions fell into these five buckets. One, are you talking only about big moments? Examples that they gave of big moments included like a buzzer beater for an athlete or being on center court, that level of competition, or are you talking about life or death moments?

Then they followed up with some version of, or are we also talking about small but tough everyday moments? So that was their first question. Two, are you talking about something you have to draw on for a day or an hour or for months and months like a deployment? Three, do you want to know about people who can get hard shit done and who are good leaders and good to be around? Or are you asking about people who can get it done but they don’t seem okay? They’re not really trusted. Or do you want examples of people who can get hard shit done and they’re trusted by other people? So these folks immediately, when we talked about mental toughness, started breaking into smaller categories of like good leaders and good to be around and can get hard shit done, not good to be around but can do hard shit, but they’re really don’t seem okay. It was interesting how they broke it down. Four, the fourth basket is, when you talk about mental toughness, are you talking about someone’s personality or are you talking about capability? The fifth question that they asked, which really pointed to how well these people, their own metacognition, their own ability to think deeply about this thinking was, do you want us to talk about mindsets, skill sets or both?

Now, I of course, as a researcher, answered their questions with more questions, which is super annoying, but that’s my job. So I came back with these questions. Are you asking me because you think big and small moments rely on different resources and skills? If so, what do you think those are? Do you think we need different internal resources for short-term versus long-term pushes? If so, can you say more? Do you think there are differences between people who can be tough and who struggle to lead and be trusted and people who can be tough and who are also strong leaders and trustworthy? If so, what do you think those are? Do you think it’s important to separate personality and capability? Are there other things we should be talking about and separating? If so, what are those? And before I answer the question about whether I’m asking about mindset, skill sets or both, do you think it’s a mindset, skill set or both? This is just how qualitative research works. And for me, it’s exhilarating as standing on the Teddington Bridge talking to the gods of the River Thames on a sunny spring day.

For others, probably not so much. By the time I got to year three of these intense interviews, some of my thinking about mental toughness had really changed. First, from a leadership, performance, sport and organizational cultural perspective, the concept of mental toughness made up only a very small part of lock-in power. Lock-in power is something we all need. And with disciplined locking through recovery, I think it makes us better. Mental toughness is different. The resource draw is just huge. And in the extreme, can push us into ways of behaving, thinking and feeling that cut us off from our humanity. The recovery from that level of mental toughness often involves processing trauma. Experiencing trauma is not healthy adversity. It’s something completely different. The second thing I learned is that there is sometimes a place for mental toughness in our lives, but that is not a romantic notion. It takes a serious toll on people. And I grieve for this world that often requires a level of mental toughness just to survive. It’s one thing to celebrate the mental toughness of the surgeon in the 11th hour of a life-saving procedure, but having to tap into that well of resources to survive everyday moments is absolutely destructive to our mind, our body, and our spirit.

And right now, with political power over at play, in so many areas of our lives, more and more people have to live in this constant state of mental toughness just to go about their everyday lives. And as we talked about earlier, power over depends on acts of increasing cruelty. And while cruelty may be the product of mental toughness, it’s always born of weakness and fear. Last, if mental toughness is necessary in a situation, and I believe it can be, we need to get very intentional about our recovery, which happens only when we acknowledge to ourselves and others that we are going to spend major internal resources for a certain period of time at considerable costs. Our capacity for mental toughness should never be separated from our capacity for emotional tenderness. As I peeled the onion in the focus groups and interviews, it became very clear that the research participants’ frustration and questions arose from their experience that the investment and interest in mental toughness had in many ways led to the neglect of teaching people re-entry skills, how to come out of that toughness. We know that many groups of people who regularly depend on mental toughness to be successful in their work also experience higher levels of addiction, death by suicide, and death as a result of high-risk behaviors.

We need to invest in teaching people how to straddle the paradox of developing the toughness necessary to do hard things along with the tenderness required to thrive in their lives, to create meaningful relationships, to trust, to embrace vulnerability, and ultimately to live a wholehearted life. If you look at the ways in which the concept of masculinity is being twisted and perverted today or the way in which empathy and care are being demonized, it’s clear that we’re missing the big picture. If you can’t lock through after being locked in and getting shit done, your lock-in power is compromised and will degrade over time. The human capacity for finding strong ground depends on the ability to be both tough and tender, to be able to lock in and lock through. Anything that sees our human spirit as one or the other is half-hearted. Dare to Lead is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group. Music is by The Suffers. Get new episodes as soon as they’re published by following Dare to Lead on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcasts.voxmedia.com.

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