Locking through: The Space that Shapes our Lives.

The notion of locking in and locking through comes from Brené Brown’s latest book Strong Ground. The concept is deceptively simple. Locking in is how we prepare ourselves for what we are about to step into. Locking through is how we transition out of one role and into the next. The more time I spend with this idea, the more I notice how little space we give ourselves to actually make that transition. And how important it is in a family business dynamic.

Most of us move between multiple worlds every day. Work, home, leadership, partnership, parenting. When there is no pause between them, the emotional and cognitive load of one simply spills into the next. Emails bleed into dinner. Attention is divided. The nervous system never really settles. Over time, this constant state of partial presence becomes normalised, even though it is quietly exhausting.

Reading Brené’s work has helped me name something I have long felt but never articulated. It has also prompted me to reflect on how deeply these patterns are shaped by context, history, and family systems.

The impact of bringing the work home

This reflection has brought my Dad to mind more than once.

He never really enjoyed work. When he came home, he needed time and quiet to reset before stepping back into family life. He wanted space to lock through. That space, however, was often given with resentment. My Mum had been managing three children all day, one with a significant disability and another with hyperactive tendencies. By the time Dad walked through the door, she was already depleted.

Both of them were carrying heavy loads. Neither was wrong. Everyone was doing the very best they could with the information, resources, and capacity they had at the time. Still, the absence of intentional transition meant that stress had nowhere to go except forward, from one person to another, from one day to the next.

Just as my Dad was nearing retirement, he had a massive stroke, followed by another a few years later. He survived both, yet he never experienced the retirement people imagine. Instead, he has spent the last fifteen years in a care home.

Life is too complex to draw neat lines between cause and effect, but it is difficult not to wonder about the cumulative impact of years of unregulated stress. The body, after all, carries what the mind never fully processes.

Seeing it play out again, this time with my kids

What has struck me more recently is how clearly I can see the same need for locking through in my own children.

When they come home from school and find me working at the kitchen table, their irritation is often immediate. It is not because they want attention or conversation. Actually, the opposite is true. They do not want to talk about their day, answer questions, or even engage much at all. What they want is food, quiet, and the chance to decompress after hours of social, emotional, and cognitive effort.

I've been interpreting this as resistance or disconnection. Now I understand it as regulation. They are shedding one world before stepping into another. They are locking through in the only way they know how. Respecting that requires me to resist my own urge to connect too quickly or remain half in work mode in shared spaces. It also requires me to acknowledge that my needs to transition do not automatically take priority over theirs.

The cost of never locking through

Brené writes of her and her partner's experience, “We both come from families in which end-of-day transitions were anxiety producing and egg-shelly. Everyone was doing the very best they could with the information and experiences they had but there was no self-awareness, no emotional regulation, and no one was above the line.”

That quote landed deeply for me because it captures something many families and workplaces experience without ever naming. When locking through does not happen, what we carry forward is rarely neutral. Stress accumulates. Emotions remain half felt. Needs go unspoken. Without self-awareness or a shared language to describe what is happening, that stress leaks out sideways as resentment, withdrawal, irritability, or silence. The likelihood of these outcomes increases within family businesses and those of close friends. In these relationships there’s less opportunity for downtime between work and life, so unless we’re intentional the resentment will build.

The impact of this compounds over time.

It starts with conversation

I keep coming back to how much could shift with simple, honest conversations. Conversations about what it takes to transition well. About needing quiet before connection. About choosing rest before responsiveness. Locking through is not indulgent or selfish. It is preventative, relational, and deeply human.

I find myself wondering how many lives are shaped, shortened, or diminished not by dramatic moments, but by the absence of these small, intentional transitions. When we learn to honour the space between roles, for ourselves and for those we love, we may be doing far more than improving our evenings. We may be protecting the possibility of a life that is not just endured, but well lived.

We might be making the difference between a business we love and one we grow to resent.