Coming home is a skill. Not a feeling. Not a luxury. A discipline.
Every frontline operator must learn it. Because coming home well is not the reward for performance.
It is the condition for it.
Without this skill, strength breaks down.
Focus erodes.
All other mental skills fail—quietly, then completely.
I had the honor of speaking about this at the 4th Multidisciplinary Resuscitation Conference, drawing inspiration from the work of Dan Dworkis.
Like any skill, coming home must be trained.
Not after the mission.
Not when things fall apart.
But as part of the job.
Because if you can’t come home well,
you won’t last—
and neither will your team.
Here is my complete lecture
The 4th Multidisciplinary Resuscitation Conference
On Coming Home – The Forgotten Skill of Transition
Erik Hein
Please stand up.
You just heard a sound that marks a transition.
We are about to enter a new activity.
So before we begin, I would like to invite you to leave behind everything you were doing before you entered this room.
The emails.
The conversations.
The cases.
The cognitive load.
In the military, this posture is called standing at attention.
And it is not about discipline.
It is about presence.
Stand upright.
Feel your feet firmly on the ground.
Distribute your weight evenly over both feet.
Head aligned over your spine.
Knees slightly bent.
Shoulders low and resting on your body.
Take a moment to notice your body.
In many professions and cultural domains every activity begins with a check-in — and that is not by accident.
It is essential to make a clean transition from one activity to the next.
Because without a transition, we carry residue from the previous activity into the next one.
And when that happens, full attention is no longer possible.
One final check-in.
I will clap my hands once.
Please clap back.
My name is Erik Hein.
I am a movement scientist and AO psychologist, and I work (ed) in defense, law enforcement, and education.
For the past 30 years, I have worked in the field of performing under pressure —
with police officers, military, and acute medical professionals.
In other words: I have spent my life around people who are very good at switching on.
And yet, there is one crucial skill that I overlooked for a very long time.
That skill is transition.
The ability to move from one activity to another,
from one role to another,
from one world to another —
in the best possible way.
What makes this even more interesting is that I had known this skill for over 40 years —
from my background in Japanese martial arts.
When you enter a karate, judo, or aikido dojo, you bow.
You greet the dojo.
You greet the mat.
You greet the teachers.
Before training begins, there is a brief moment of stillness:
seiza and mokuso.
You check in.
Are you really here?
You leave the noise of the day behind
so that you can train with full attention.
The same principle exists in monasteries — places I often visit.
There, every activity deserves a good beginning and a good ending.
Between activities, monks practice something called statio.
Statio means: the conscious pause between two activities.
Not rushing.
Not multitasking.
Not carrying one world into the next.
Just stopping — long enough to arrive.
This skill of work to home transition becomes even more critical in frontline professions.
The previous speaker, Karina Damsgaard (a psychologist specializing in emergency medicine) writes in her research: “Repeated exposure to minor but persistent challenges, such as for example work-life imbalance, can have a more significant long-term effect on mental health than acute incidents.”
And Coming Home is such a minor challenge.
The more because the contrast between our professional world and our home world
can be enormous.
That is true for police and military — but it is just as true for acute medical care and resuscitation work.
High stakes.
Moral pressure.
Sudden intensity.
And then… straight back home.
For many years, I lived in two completely different worlds.
(Show photos)
In one world, there was violence. Training and preparing for extreme violence, terrorist threats. Firearms. Fighting.
In the other world, I was a husband. And a father.
And too often, I brought my work home with me.
I was physically present — but mentally absent.
After a day with my team chef involving a hanging and the discovery of a pedophile network,
I came home with a head full of images and stress.
My wife asked:
“How was your day?”
I answered:
“Fine.”
But she felt it wasn’t.
Over time, she stopped asking.
And slowly, our worlds drifted apart.
I woke up on one of my baddest and saddest days.
One day, I came home after being serious threatened with death because of me working within the police.
Highly stressed.
I felt dirty — inside and out.
When I came back home and walked through the door, as a zombie.
I was unable to communicate.
They had been extremely concerned—and when they saw me, even more so.
I had no feelings, numb.
But beneath the surface, in my unconscious, there was a hurricane of anger, grief, and everything tangled together.
My ten-year-old daughter wrapped her arms around me.
She told me how strong I was and that she believed in me.
And I realized something painful:
I had never learned how to transition properly from work to home.
(short pause)
Many professional teams spend a great deal of time training how to put their game face on —
how to switch into performance mode under pressure.
Yet very few ever talk about the equally critical skill of taking that game face off.
Every experience we have leaves a residue.
When that residue is processed,
it becomes fuel for wisdom, growth, and maturity.
When it is left unprocessed,
it hardens — and slowly begins to poison the next chapter of our lives.
The real danger is rarely one single, catastrophic moment.
It is the daily, unnoticed transitions between work and home
that accumulate over time — like death by a thousand cuts.
It’s not the one big call that breaks us.
It’s the hundreds of unclosed transitions.
That is why rituals matter.
Rituals are bookmarks — clear lines in time that mark a point of departure.
Without ritual, without deliberate closure,
residue cannot be integrated.
I guess that the next speaker – Vahé Ender – will tell you that the Challenger didn’t fail because of one bad part. It failed because nobody stopped the process long enough to notice that something had changed.
And that’s what missing work to home transitions look like — small changes with important results.
Once we understand this, the question becomes very practical:
How do we close transitions?
The first skill is communication.
Have the conversation at home — once.
Explain what your work actually involves.
What does a good day look like?
An average day?
A bad day?
And then ask the most important questions:
What do you need?
What does your family need?
Agree on codes.
Develop habits.
Maybe after a heavy shift you need
30 minutes of quiet.
Or a walk.
Maybe together.
These are not soft skills.
They are protective skills —
for you, and for the people you love.
The second skill is developing transition rituals from work to home.
Not something complicated.
Something small and embodied.
For example:
- Changing clothes with attention
- Washing your hands or face mindfully
Instead of rushing out of work
while already thinking about dinner.
Jumping into the car stressed.
Getting angry in traffic.
Arriving home with a heart rate of 180.
Because then you don’t really come home.
You crash land.
There are many small, effective skills you can train
to arrive home in a better way.
And they matter —
because your nervous system does not reset automatically.
Coming home
may be the most important skill
for sustainable performance under pressure.
Not just for you —
but for the people who love you.
I would like to close this talk with a message
from a colleague of yours —
someone who works in the same high-stakes medical reality you do.
He created something especially for this moment.
Please welcome: Dr. Dan Dworkis.
(Showing Video made for this event by Dan Dworkis about coming home)
“We’ve talked a lot about transitions.
So let’s practice one — right now.
In a moment, another lecture will begin,
and afterwards there will be a drink and conversation.
Before that happens,
take ten seconds to finish this moment.
Feel your feet.
Notice your breathing.
Let this talk end — before the next one begins.
Thank you.