Brené on Lock-In and Lock-Through Power

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1:28the 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 of 2025, I walked onto the 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.

2:24I 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 passerby. Not that the English are prone to freaking out, I might say. Father Thames, the patriarch of a large group of travelers, and Mother Thames, a striking Nigerian woman with equally gorgeous daughters, each named after a tributary of the Great River, have a very contentious relationship that's always right on the verge of erupting into a full-scale turf war.

3:10This 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 non-title to title. 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, pony-tailed woman wearing coveralls and sporting Wayfarer glasses. I smiled at her and asked if there was really a lockkeeper who runs the locks. For a fifth-generation Texan, finding an actual lockkeeper in this storybook English setting would seem about as magical as the river gods.

3:58She smiled back at me, extended her hand, and said, I'm Jimma, the lockkeeper here. How can I help? So, y 'all, 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 have a lock problem.

4:52Specifically, 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, Oh, you mean when it's bath and bedtime for your two young ones, and you know your partner's been home for 15 minutes, but he's still not inside the house? Relieved that it made sense to her, I said, that is 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.

5:41Either 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 am locked in work energy into the house without even realizing it until their frustrated partner says, hey, I don't work for you. Or, dude, you need to 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.

6:26We'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 and 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.

7:15Gemma 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. This is where it gets weird, y 'all. 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 Aronovich. Before I could even go on, she smiled and said, ah, yes, the rivers of London. I understand that we are where custody of the river changes hands between mother and father Tim's. We laughed again, and I told her that I was already on the fifth book in the series.

7:52And 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 water-tight 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.

8:40Once the water level in the lock chamber matches the level of water beyond the gates, the gates are opened and the boat or ship can continue smoothly on its journey. A weir, which is often part of a lock system, is a barrier that's built across the river to control flood levels and flow and to help with flood management. For two wonderful, incredible hours that day at the Teddington Locks, I watched Gemma led a narrow boat 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 of the Thames is as interesting as Ben Aronovich's fictional portrayal of Mother Thames' daughters.

9:31In the books, each daughter is named after the tributary she oversees. For example, Aronovich explains that Tyburn, or Lady Ty, is pompous, she lives in Mayfair, she goes to posh people's parties, and that Ephra Thames is not only the goddess of the River Ephra, but also the goddess of Brixton Market and the Peckham branch of the Black Beauticians Society. The real history is like as interesting and wild as the fictional history. 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 very pleased to have helped with a metaphor that illuminates how hard it is to transition from work to home.

10:28Gemma 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.

11:20Or 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 an hour of playing. Come on, let's go. Lock in. 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, hey, I'm locked in. Can you give me 15 minutes? To better understand locking in, mental toughness, and related constructs, I ran focus groups and conducted interviews with a very wide variety of folks, from fighter pilots and military rescue teams, including casualty assistance officers.

12:17If you don't know what that is, those are the courageous and compassionate people who make next-of-kin notifications and provide support to families. I interviewed professional athletes, coaches, trauma-focused medical professionals, hostage negotiators, intelligence community members, and high-level organizational leaders. I also watched about 40 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.

12:58The tapes were deeply helpful because, as I talk 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 definitely the case here, I immediately start mentally creating different sized baskets so I can sort the information into categories and supporting properties, baskets inside of 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.

13:43The journalist said unrelenting taxonomist, but I heard it as taxidermist. And I hated it. I was like, why is she calling me a taxidermist? So I developed this enduring aversion to the term taxonomist. I think this is just a linguistic sensitivity for a Texan who was raised in deer blinds. I love taxonomy. taxidermy, not as much. 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 right into the mental toughness basket. I was wrong. It turns out that locking in is not just about mental toughness.

14:34We 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 each of these four concepts. Let's start with mental toughness and the lock-in. Researchers Peter Clough, Doug Strehorzik, and John Perry define mental toughness as, quote, a set of attributes related to how people deal with challenges, stressors, and pressure.

15:29Their model of mental toughness is structured around the four 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.

16:16Four, competence. The belief in one's abilities and the inner strength to stand one's ground, including both competence 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.

16:57The concept of flow was introduced by Mihaly 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.

17:45The six elements of flow as conceptualized by Csikszentmihalyi and Gene 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.

18:23Three, 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.

19:07I'm just a moving along of the work. So 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.

19:53Next, 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 kind of four different reasons we lock in. So we've talked about mental toughness. We lock in during 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 helped me understand that while achieving flow in our work can be a really enjoyable experience, it is different from deliberate practice.

20:48He explains that deliberate practice is a matter of engaging in a, quote, quote, 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, end quote. 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 towards something you can't quite do yet.

21:36It'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.

22:17And 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.

23:12I interviewed Mishi 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 listened to the podcast before we released 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.

24:03Number 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 10, 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.

24:58The 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, Ja 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.

25:41In fact, when I'm playing and I tell myself to lock in, I actually visualize my flashlight.

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26:27Support for this show comes from Nike. No matter the team, no matter the ranking, every season starts with the same goal. Win it all. And Nike knows that reaching for that goal starts long before the final whistle. It starts with the battles at practice, the losses that keep you up at night, and everything in between. Nike has the best gear to get you on the court, field, or track, and pushing through the hardest moments. So whether you're the champ or you're looking to knock them off the pedestal, Nike is there to help you with winning no matter where you play. Visit Nike.com for more information.

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27:20All right, let's take this information about kind of 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.

28:05Of course, for my whole day in Teddington, I was in full kindergarten or 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. Jim has 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 a hundred miles of river. I mean, 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.

28:55I mean, 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.

29:42This 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.