Balancing Faith, Family, and Career by Fred Sievert

“But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”
—Joshua 24:15

This article is largely composed of the content of one of the most popular chapters of my book Fast-starting a Career of Consequence. While the book was largely written to provide Christian business advice, I view balancing of all phases of one’s life to be highly beneficial and therefore I have heavily emphasized the faith-based advice in this article.

Given the importance of this topic, please indulge me as I share some of my own priorities and experiences related to this topic. This is not an attempt to aggrandize myself, but rather to use my spiritual gifts to positively impact your life—something I consider my greatest passion.

Recently, Jack Krasula of WJR radio in Detroit interviewed me. Jack has interviewed hundreds of Christians, many of whom have also been successful in business. We have become good friends. In one of our many luncheon meetings, he asked me to send him a note that succinctly describes my philosophy of life.

What I sent to him (below) is what I believe to be a guide to living a happy and fulfilled life:

Philosophy of Life
I believe to realize happiness and fulfillment in life, you should:
1. Identify your spiritual gifts and use them to serve the Lord.
2. Study the teachings of Jesus Christ and live your life as He would have you live it.
3. Love God with all your heart, mind, and soul.
4. Love your neighbor as yourself.
5. Love yourself.

With that philosophy as a backdrop, now I offer some guidance about setting priorities and balancing your life.

In this day and age, whether you are in the early stages of your career or you have advanced into greater responsibilities, the demands on your time can be quite extreme.

With today’s technology, we are hyperconnected to other people and to seemingly infinite amounts of data and information, available to us in a millisecond. But we all seem to be more overworked, less productive, and lonelier than ever.

RescueTime, an automated time-tracking software program, analyzed 185 million working hours of anonymized and aggregated data from its users to find out how they spent their time in 2018. Here are some highlights from that research:

• 21 percent of working hours are spent on entertainment, news, and social media.
• 40 percent of people use their computers after 10:00 p.m.
• 26 percent of work is done outside normal working hours.
• Workers average at least 1 hour of work outside working hours 89 days/year (and on
50 percent of all weekend days).
• We check email and Instant Messaging, on average, every 6 minutes.
• 40.1 percent of our day is spent multitasking with communication tools.

It all boils down to priorities. We are inundated with expectations, responsibilities, and self-exerted pressure to succeed to the point where we try to do everything well, all at once. It’s just not possible. We must decide what’s important and focus on that task. Quality is more important than quantity. We need to focus on what’s truly important in our lives—often a balance of faith, family, and career—and a prioritization of those elements in our daily schedules.

Another example of spiritual sharing and disclosure of my priorities was something I mentioned in presentations I made as the president of the New York Life Insurance Company to all sizes of audiences of agents, employees, and even members of the company’s Board of Directors. I indicated in those presentations, as well as in numerous radio and TV interviews following the publication of my first two books, that the following have consistently been my top five priorities:

1. My relationship with God (as a Christian, that is more specifically my personal relationship with Christ).
2. My relationship with my wife, Sue
3. My relationship with my children and my extended family
4. My job
5. My volunteer and leisure activities

Imagine the president of a Fortune 100 company listing the job as fourth on his or her personal priority list. But that’s exactly what I did.

Your list will probably differ somewhat from mine, but defining your priorities helps you articulate them in writing and reminds you of them regularly. In that way, they will be top of mind. And if you start to reorder them, whether intentionally or not, you’ll realize that you need to return them to their proper sequence.

For many of us, not just top executives, our jobs sometimes demand a higher ranking.  That is to be expected, but it’s important to give your job no more than a temporary repositioning.

The pressures in the current environment are enormous and can easily cause us to ignore important priorities. Let me go on to discuss those pressures and some coping techniques I have successfully deployed.

The Dangerous Consequences of Overextending Yourself

Most companies have become more aggressive in pursuing higher profitability. One way to achieve that, in addition to greater revenue growth, is through cost reduction. Yet, despite significant improvements in technology in recent years, employees at all levels continue to be expected to produce more with fewer and fewer resources—including human resources. The output expected from an individual today is multiples of what was expected from an individual just a few years ago.

The unintended negative consequence and collateral damage from this environment is the
negative impact on our personal and family lives.
According to numerous studies by Marianna Virtanen of the Finnish Institute of
Occupational Health, overwork and the resulting stress can lead to all sorts of health problems,
including the following:
• Impaired sleep
• Depression
• Heavy drinking
• Diabetes
• Impaired memory
• Heart disease

The more hours we work, the less healthy we become. This is a costly outcome for our own health and our relationships as individuals. It’s also detrimental to a company’s bottom line because the consequences of overwork lead to increased absenteeism and turnover, decreased productivity, and rising employee dissatisfaction.

Productivity decreases when we scatter our attention. So how can we stay focused?

Coping Techniques to Help You Focus on What’s Important

While I was serving as the president of a large Fortune 100 company headquartered in Manhattan, I was also active in my church and busy as a husband and a father of five children.  Over the years, I developed a number of coping techniques that allowed me to effectively balance faith, family, and career. I have heard many effective coping techniques from people who have attended numerous small-group speaking engagements I conducted after writing my first two books. In those sessions, I would often start by talking about my coping techniques and then ask participants (mostly “bedroom community” Type A executives and employees) if they had any to share.

Years ago, I had a true epiphany about the importance of making time for family. It has been the most important technique to my family and me. The best way for me to share the impact of this coping technique is to share with you an abbreviated version of a story titled “The Accidental Legacy” from chapter 6 of my first book, God Revealed.

The Accidental Legacy
In the mid-1980s, after several years of working long hours and regretfully neglecting my family, I became the senior vice president and CFO of Maccabees Mutual Life Insurance Company in Southfield, Michigan. My career aspirations were coming to fruition, but other dimensions of my life were suffering. My three children were young and needed a father, and I knew that my wife, Sue, was carrying almost all the parenting burden.

Since my actuarial training was a way to leverage my success to a broader network of industry contacts, I’d begun volunteering on a variety of industry and professional boards and committees. I agreed to serve on a number of committees and task forces of the American Council of Life Insurance (ACLI), a trade association representing hundreds of insurance companies nationwide.  Involvement with the ACLI enabled me to network with some of the top professionals in the insurance industry. While those contacts proved to be valuable, this level of industry service only exacerbated my work/life imbalance. I was away from the family even more and feeling even more guilty.

ACLI committee meetings were almost always held at its corporate offices in Washington, DC. Typically, I flew from Detroit to Washington the evening before an event, attended the meetings the next day, and returned to Detroit that evening…until one Thursday in May 1984, when this pattern fortuitously changed for the good.

It started ordinarily enough: Thursday afternoon, I flew into Washington for a Friday meeting of the Actuarial Committee. I checked in to my hotel near the Capitol, where someone recommended that I have dinner at The 1789, a historic restaurant in nearby Georgetown. After grabbing the documents I needed to read for Friday’s meeting, I caught a cab to Georgetown. I was multitasking long before the word found its way into the popular jargon.

As usual, I watched the city go by through the windows of the cab, pondering the next day’s meeting. It was a rainy, somewhat cold evening, but the restaurant was quaint and warm. The meal was wonderful, and the ambience was rustic but elegant. Since the dining room was too dark to read the documents I had brought along, I found myself intermittently deep in thought or observing others—in despair over my lack of productivity.

A few tables away was Bob Johannsen, a fellow member of the Actuarial Committee who would be attending the meeting with me the next morning. He was eating with a girl of about thirteen or fourteen. As I waited for my dessert to arrive, I began to worry about all the work I wasn’t doing. But realizing the futility of this, I decided to shake it off and simply go say hello to Bob.

“Hi, Fred! So good to see you,” said Bob warmly. “I’d like you to meet my daughter.” Bob explained that he made a practice of bringing his children with him on business trips. “We stay an extra day or two to do some sightseeing.”  I listened intently. They both looked so happy. What an excellent way for a busy executive to spend some quality time with his children. At the time, my daughters were nine-year-old Heidi, five-year-old Dena, and three-year-old Denise. Bob was just as busy as I was, but he’d found a way to add at least one element of balance to his life.

When I returned to the hotel, I immediately called my wife, Sue, and told her about Bob and his daughter. “What would you think of sending Heidi to Washington tomorrow? She and I could do some sightseeing over the weekend.”  “That’s a terrific idea!” said Sue. And she made the flight arrangements while I arranged for two more nights at the hotel.

I could hardly wait. After Friday’s committee meeting, I rushed to the airport. At the age of nine, Heidi was understandably apprehensive about traveling alone for the first time, and I could see the nervousness on her face when she walked off the plane with her airline escort. But once she caught a glimpse of me, she broke into a broad smile. Not only was she relieved, but she was finally going to have some time alone with her dad.

I had been to Washington several times, but this was Heidi’s first time.  We planned two days of visiting major tourist sites: the Vietnam Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, Arlington National Cemetery, and Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated. The weather was quite nice, so we did a lot of walking, and when we got to the Lincoln Memorial, Heidi begged me to race her up the steps.

“Here’s an idea,” I said, smiling. “How about if I stand here at the base and time you running up and down?”  Heidi thought this was a great challenge, and when she returned and I toldher how long it had taken, she insisted—positively humming with unbounded youthful energy—on running it again in an attempt to beat her previous time. What fun!

At the Vietnam Memorial, I searched the Wall for the name of my junior high and high school friend, Arnie Sarna, who had been killed in the war. When I’d heard about the Vietnam Memorial, I was not particularly impressed with the design. But searching for Arnie’s name and seeing hundreds of linear feet of personal notes, flowers, and memorabilia placed at the base of the Wall was something else—I couldn’t move.

“Why are you crying, Daddy?” Heidi asked, turning to see what I was doing.

I struggled to explain the war and the loss of my friend to her, and suddenly I realized how moved Heidi was. This was important. This was good—for my daughter to share something so profound, for her to witness me reflecting on something so true and deep.

Here is another deep truth: when I’d boarded the plane for Washington the previous Thursday, I never could have imagined that a seemingly coincidental encounter with Bob Johannsen and his daughter would initiate a practice that would endure for the next twenty-five years—resulting in at least a hundred trips, impacting hundreds more people than my family (but I’ll get to that in a minute).

Starting with that first trip with Heidi in 1984, I began taking each of my five children on annual trips alone with me for that special one-on-one bonding time. When the kids were young, a trip up the road to a local hotel for two or three nights was an exciting adventure. As they became teenagers and young adults, we sought out more educational and cultural experiences; the trips got more exotic and often included travel across the country, or even overseas. But in each case, the important thing was not where we traveled, but rather the fact that we did it together.

And this trip-taking practice birthed yet another practice: I would talk about this practice of taking trips with my children hundreds of times to thousands of New York Life employees and agents throughout my career—inspiring hundreds of those employees and agents to adopt the same practice with their own children.

Seeing how this single event impacted my career, my family, and my personal happiness, I now realize that God arranged that providential meeting at The 1789. I also recognize that God knew how the effects of it would ultimately play out over the ensuing years—multiplying the benefits exponentially as I shared our experiences. Even today, years after my retirement, the most frequent comment I receive in emails and holiday greeting cards from members of my extended family at New York Life is a thank-you for sharing the stories of those trips because so many of them adopted a similar practice with their own families.

During eight of the last eleven years of my career, New York Life achieved the number-one market share position in the sale of life insurance in the United States. We achieved many other distinctions and number-one rankings during those years, but I truly believe my greatest legacy to the company was more about my faith and my family values—values that inspired others—than any of those corporate achievements.

If you have children at home, or if you plan to start a family soon, I sincerely hope you will consider implementing a similar practice to mine. I can assure you that you will be grateful you did, and you will be creating special memories for your children that will last a lifetime. If you are re-entering the workforce after a number of years of absence, your children may be
grown, but consider implementing this technique with your grandchildren.

My Daily Balancing Routine
I am going to describe for you my daily routine, but I am not suggesting that you adopt the same practice. I did not realize until I retired from New York Life that I must have been seriously sleep-deprived throughout my career. Perhaps the Lord blessed me with a lesser need for sleep than most humans.

In any event, I hope you can modify the approach that I found useful and gratifying as appropriate to your situation.

Nearly every working day for me started by awakening at 4:00 a.m. It was such an engrained practice that I never needed to set an alarm clock.

Then I would proceed to my home workout area and mount my stationary bike for a forty-five-minute ride. A habitual multitasker, I would be on my Blackberry throughout that ride. Initially, I was doing nothing but New York Life work while on the exercise bike. I would typically read and answer emails, most of which had come in from the overseas operations of New York Life while I was sleeping.

After a couple of years of this routine, I decided I would use my morning time more effectively by communicating daily with my five children and my wife. I would write typically short emails (and later, short text messages) that simply checked in and asked how they were doing. I usually ended them with “I love you, and I am proud of you.”

I didn’t often receive responses unless I said, “Please acknowledge receipt of this message.” Then I would get a two-word response: “Got it.” But I knew they were reading my emails because if for some reason I missed a day or two, I would invariably get a message like this: “Hey Dad, what’s up? No message today?”

Once I finished my bike ride, I would read a chapter from the Bible. When I first started this practice, I read from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There is a total of ninety-nine chapters in the four Gospels, so I viewed this as my three-month start-up plan. If you start a practice like this (or any practice) and maintain it for three months, it becomes habit-forming and easy to sustain. I went on to focus on Proverbs and the Psalms, and eventually to all the books of the Bible.

After the Bible study, I went through my daily prayer list, which often contained more than two typed, single-spaced pages. I would list mostly intercessional prayers for others in need. I found this practice particularly gratifying because, over time, it was amazing how many of those prayers were answered. I highly recommend this practice. If I had to choose just one of these elements of my daily routine, it would be the prayer list.

By 6:00 a.m. every working day, before most people were even out of bed, I had accomplished a physical workout on the exercise bike, had communicated with my family through email or text messages, had heard from the Lord by reading His Word, and had spoken to the Lord in prayer. For me, it was an excellent way to start each day. I took comfort in knowing I did so as a way of balancing faith, family, and career.

Other Suggestions for Balancing Your Life
In numerous speaking engagements following the publication of my first two books, I would often try to generate spiritual sharing among the participants. Recognizing that many people find it difficult to muster the courage to share something deeply emotional, I would often start by telling them about my own coping techniques in attempting to better balance faith, family, and career.

I would then ask them if they had developed any of their own coping techniques. This was a relatively safe approach to triggering unemotional discussion and often led to strong engagement among the participants.

Below is a list of ideas that came out of those sessions for you to ponder in your own future efforts to achieve a better balance in your life:
• Family prayer time
• Family devotionals
• Dedicated one-on-one, face-to-face chat time with each child and/or your spouse
• A weekly date night with each child and/or your spouse
• Attendance at special events of interest to each child and your spouse
• Coaching of one of the kids’ teams or one-on-one coaching of sports, music, or other
activities of interest
• Attending special summer camps or events together
• Scheduled phone calls each day with each of the kids and your spouse
• Daily expressions of love—both verbal reminders and hugs

The list could be even longer. You might have techniques that aren’t mentioned in this chapter. I strongly encourage you to make a regular habit of doing some of these things and stick to it until they become a normal routine part of your everyday activity. If you do, I am certain you and your family will benefit enormously from the commitment to spend more time together.