Can Men Find Balance Between Work and Family?

Every man wrestles with the same question: How do I succeed at work without losing my soul — or my family?
In this first episode of the Men and Work series, Don tackles the tension between career ambition and being fully present at home. You’ll learn how your allegiance — what or who you ultimately serve — determines whether your life stays in balance or spirals into burnout.

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Question for You
Where does your allegiance get pulled off track the most — work or family?
 Comment below — your story might help another man find his balance.

⏰ TIMECODES
00:00 Introduction: The Struggle of Balancing Work and Home Life
 00:35 New Series: Men and Work
 04:19 The Importance of Allegiance
 06:55 Influence of Childhood on Work-Family Balance
 12:21 Setting Boundaries for Work and Family
 17:28 The Benefits of Proper Allegiance
 20:33 Conclusion: Aligning Ambition with Allegiance

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Transcript

Don Ross: 0:00

Man. Do you ever struggle with knowing how to balance your career ambitions with being present and purposeful at home? I can almost guarantee that you do it is maybe one of the universal struggles among men with families is that we don't know how to balance work and home life in any way. That actually feels satisfying to us, but that also feels like we're engaging in both places really. well It is a challenge for all of us, and that's the challenge that I want to talk about today. Here on The Manhood Tribe Show. Happy New Year. We are getting into a new series here on the show where we're gonna talk for a few weeks about men and work and just all of the things that kind of surround this major part of our lives as men. For most of us as men, we are full-time workers. We are often the breadwinners of our family, and so our work takes up. Probably about 50% of our waking lives. I mean, it is the thing that dominates our schedules. And honestly, we probably spend more time with our work than we actually do with our home life, with our family. And so figuring out how it is that we can do both things well is a challenge for all of us. There's all kinds of competing interests and tensions that pull us from one side to the other, and for a lot of us, there's a constant sense of guilt over whether or not we're doing it right. Wishing that we could give more time to work, wishing that we could give more intentionality to our family members, wishing that we could be more present in both. Places wanting to accomplish major goals in both places and just at the same time feeling stretched and exhausted because it can all feel like too much to do a lot of the time. This is a struggle that's common to most men, and so if you feel that way, I want you to give yourself the freedom to be okay with that feeling. This is hard. It is hard to know what to be able to do in the midst of this kind of tension because look, let's be honest, career ambition is not a bad thing. God made us as men. With a desire to work, to create, and to leave a mark on the world. That's how he built us as his images. We were meant to be creators in the same way that he's a creator. We were meant to reflect that idea into the world. We were meant to bring life into places that there hasn't been any. We were meant to bring order into places where there hasn't been any. We were meant to make something better of the world that he has given us. That kind of ambition is a really good thing. It is built into us and something that we are meant to live out. And yet at the same time, we are designed to be in relationship with others and especially with our family. God calls us and puts us into a relationship with another woman where we are meant to together display what it means. To love the way that God loves. The otherness of man and woman and the family that comes from us is something that is incredibly special to God. It is unique in the way that we exhibit who he is to the world. And so doing that well is really, really important to him. And I think for us as men, it's really, really important to us as well. Very few men would say that they don't really care all that much about doing right by their family, and if you do say that, there's probably something that you need to take a hard look at in the mirror because that's not an okay thing. Most of us know intuitively that doing right by our family is a, a really high and honorable thing for us to do. So how do we go about figuring out what it looks like to do both of these things Well, is there a tension that we need to try to solve? Is there actually some kind of mysterious balance that we need to be able to achieve? I don't know that there actually is. I think if we take a hard look at it, there's just no real formula for how to be able to succeed in this area. But I do think there are some things that we can get right that can help us be able to move in the direction that we actually want to, which is finding meaning, purpose, and success in both work and home life. Okay, so the place that we're going to start is actually with one of our very familiar five marks of manhood. If you've listened or watched the show at any point in time, you probably have heard me talk about the five marks of manhood, which are strength, courage, skill. Honor and allegiance. These are the things that every man needs to exhibit in order to demonstrate to the world what it means to be a man. And so in doing those things, we show what manhood is all about. These are kind of the baseline things that we as men need. And I think what's particularly relevant to our conversation about work and family is this whole idea of. Allegiance. Allegiance is really about how we handle the authority figures in our life. And in particular, there is this aspect of allegiance that I call ultimate allegiance, which is figuring out whether it's a God or a moral code or some kind of philosophy or ideology that you follow the thing that really kind of dictates and orders all of your life. That is what your ultimate allegiance is all about. And getting that thing right, really understanding what your ultimate allegiance is and should be, and following that well is going to help you find peace and satisfaction in meaning and being able to live out this balance or tension between your work and your family. So what do I mean by that? If you have your ultimate allegiance in place, then you have kind of a like North star or lighthouse for figuring out how to order these things. Your ultimate allegiance will help you determine what are the most important things in your life and how to live in order to make sure that those things are most important. So if you're really clear on your ultimate allegiance, then it becomes much more clear how to be able to figure out what's the right balance for you as it relates to your work and your family. Now, here at Manhood Tribes, we talk a lot about giving our ultimate allegiance to Jesus. I believe personally that Jesus is the man most worthy of following, and he is the one who is most deserving of our ultimate allegiance. And he has a lot to say both about work and about family. As we look at his words and the broader teachings of God and the scriptures, and in doing that, we find out a lot about how we should order both work and family in our lives. But if we're honest, it's not always our allegiance. That actually is what dictates what's going on with our work and our family. A lot of us. Are choosing to live out our work family balance in a way that's actually dictated by what our childhood home was like. Maybe you grew up in a home where your dad wasn't really present because he was a workaholic or because he had a social life where he cared a lot about doing things with his buddies and his group of friends, but wasn't all that interested in doing stuff with the family. He felt like when he got a break from work, he wanted to spend it doing the things that he really cared about and enjoyed. Maybe there. Maybe that was, or maybe that wasn't his family, but So his time was his time and it wasn't really family time. And so maybe you have reacted to that in some way of saying, I'm not going to be like my dad. I want to really give more of my time to my family than he did. I want to be more present to my wife and kids than my dad was. And I wanna set a different example for what it looks like to be a man to my family. Maybe you had a dad who was exceptionally present. He was with you for every ball game, for every practice, for all the things that you did. He was involved in all the things that you as a family did. He took you on vacations. He made a habit of creating meaningful experiences around holidays and birthdays and. All the things that a dad could do. He was really good at those things. But at the same time, maybe he wasn't the best provider for your family. Maybe he didn't work all that hard, and your family felt the suffering from that at times where bills got tight and the family had to kind of pinch pennies or find other ways of being able to provide for themselves because he wasn't doing the best job at providing for the family. Now both of these examples are a little bit extreme, right? Okay. No picture looks exactly like that. But my point is just to say whatever your home life was like growing up as a kid, that may be what's influencing your idea of what it looks like to be a good man and to balance work and family. More than that, you've actually thought about what is the ultimate allegiance in my life and how does that thing say that I should make those kinds of decisions? If you're only doing it out of reaction to the way that your dad was, then you're really just swinging the pendulum in the other direction, and you may not make the same mistakes that he did, but you're still going to make a lot of mistakes because you're just reacting. You're gonna make the opposite mistakes that he did and maybe potentially even cause just as much damage as you feel like your dad did to you and to your family. Nobody wants that. Right. We, we don't want to make the same mistakes that we encountered and experienced growing up, and we don't want to pass on the same hurts and the same pains to our family that we might have encountered when we were kids. So the only way though really to avoid that is to go about it with a different lens. It's not just about reacting to what you experienced growing up, but actually being proactive about letting the ultimate allegiance in your life really set the agenda for how you live out this balance between work and family. So what might that look like then? What would it look like to allow your allegiance to be the thing that really sets the agenda for how you handle work and family? Well, I think it starts by making sure that you're putting your ultimate allegiance first. You've got to make sure that before work or family, that you're carving out time to be with God, that you are making it a priority to say, I want to know you, and I want to follow you, and I want to put you first in all things. Jesus says that if we will seek first the kingdom of God and all his righteousness, that everything else will be added to us now to seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness means that we were, we're going after the things of God, and righteousness is really about the way that he relates to. Us and to others. So we're righteousness is really just kind of a big Bible word that means relating rightly. It's just about putting things in the order that God would put them in. And so if we're seeking those things first, then God is gonna take care of the rest for us because we've got all of our priorities in the right place. So we wanna make sure that we're spending time with him, we're developing a relationship with him, and we're prioritizing him over all the other things. This is important. It's not just about saying, what is the order that God would have me put those things in? It's about saying, how do I make sure that I'm knowing God first? How do I make sure that he is my primary relationship, not my work? Not my family, but God. That's different than just what are the principles that he wants me to follow, and how do I make sure I'm following them? Because then at the end of the day, you don't really need God at all. You just need a set of principles that He's given you. All right? We're after a relationship with him, we're after making him the priority, and then from that is where we can begin to order work and family rightly. All right? So prioritize your allegiance first, and then your priorities will start to fall into place. And I think at that point is where we can begin to see that God loves both work and family. He calls both things good. In fact, in the very beginning chapters of the scriptures, we see that he created us for work and he created us for one another. These things are meant to go in tandem. They're meant to go together. They are both a part of who we are, so we don't need to neglect one or the other, but we do need to put some boundaries in place to help make sure that we are protecting both of those fears of our lives. So what are some ways that you can do that? Well, I think it's pretty simple. It's just to kind of make sure that you are recognizing what are the things that you really need to protect in both places. Okay. So for example, at home with your family life, what do you need to make sure that you are safeguarding Well? You know, maybe it's, I really want to be present for dinner. I want to be able to sit at the dinner table with my family. I want to be able to have good conversations. I wanna be able to, you know, enjoy Saturdays with my family. I want to take my church to family on Sunday. Uh, whatever it is, you know, whatever the specific things are for you and your family, you wanna be present for birthdays and holidays and vacations and bedtime stories. Those things are for you to figure out as to what the boundaries actually need to be. But figuring out how you can be present for those things that you consider to be most important is what the allegiance is about. It's about saying, okay, I need to protect this fear in some way because God calls this thing good. No one else can be a husband to my wife but me. No one else can be a father to my kids but me. So I have to make sure that I'm showing up in that role and in those relationships in a way that communicates my love to them, the same way that God is intentional about communicating his love to me. So whatever you can do to protect that sphere, to demonstrate that kind of love to them, that's what's important. Set the boundaries that work for you. Talk with your wife about what those boundaries might need to look like and how you can be able to maintain those things together. Now the same thing goes for your work, and I think it's really important to actually just think about what are the priorities that you want to be able to accomplish, and what are the ambitions that you want to be able to see be met in your career and in your lifetime of work. Because if you have some goals like that in mind, then it helps you be clear about where the boundaries actually are. The corporate workforce will actually tend to draw boundary lines for us, but they will always be expanding on those boundary lines. Maybe when you first start out in your career, it might be as simple as like an eight to five job, and the boundaries are, you've got to be present from eight to five and to really give your best during all that time. But slowly, those boundaries might begin to evolve. Maybe you take on more leadership or management responsibilities, and now all of a sudden it's not just eight to five, it's eight to five, plus, you've got to have your phone kind of always with you, and you need to be available to answer texts and emails pretty much any hour of the day. Or it starts to become like your eight to five is where you get your work accomplished. But outside of those normal work hours is where you handle the relational drama of the job or kind of the intangibles or things like that. So all of a sudden those boundaries start to really get pushed on. They start to creep into the rest of your life, and this is where you have to really decide what are the priorities. What are the things that I actually want to accomplish? I'm not gonna let my work decide how present and available I'm supposed to be to my work. I'm gonna let my allegiance decide how present and available I am to be to my work. And if my work has a problem with that, then ultimately that's not the place that I need to be working. Now that's hard to navigate. I understand. You know, maybe that means you need to change jobs. Maybe it means you need to have a hard conversation with your supervisor to be able to say, we need to talk about my boundaries, uh, and what's actually expected of me, and how many hours I'm supposed to be working during the week. Uh, maybe it could be any of those things. And it may be that you have to draw some hard lines in the sand to be able to say, Nope. I'm going to be more present to my family than my work is comfortable with me being. And so I'm gonna have to let my coworkers down occasionally, but that's not actually going to get in the way of me accomplishing the things that I want to accomplish through my work. So even though it might be disappointing to some others, it's still helping me to maintain my allegiance by being present to work in the way that I need to be, and being present to my family in the way that I need to be as well. Okay. Do you start to see the difference? It's our allegiance that is meant to really set for us what it looks like to be faithful and present in both of those fears of our lives. Now if this idea of allegiance is kind of new for you, or even if you would just like to explore it a little more, I actually wrote some things about this whole idea of allegiance and all of the other five marks as well in my book called How to Be a Man. You can check it out on Amazon and get you a copy today as a way to just find out more about what we talk about here at Manhood Tribes, but also just to learn more about how to exhibit those things in your life so that you can continue to grow and get better at being a man. Check it out. How to Be A Man by Don Ross on Amazon available right now. All right. Now I want to paint a little more of a picture for you of what it can look like when you actually do have more of the allegiance in order that you want and the balance that you're looking for between those two spheres of your world. You will start to see some really incredible things happen in your life when you get all of that in the order that you really want it to be there. You will start to find peace. You will stop being divided. You will stop feeling the guilt of, I'm not as present as I need to be or want to be in one's sphere or the other, and you will start to actually have peace. You'll be a man at rest over the fact that, yep, I may have made to make some hard calls, but I did it for the right reasons and I'm present in all the ways that I want to be, both to my work and to my family. You are going to enjoy a better relationship with your wife because she is going to be, she's going to feel loved and respected over the fact that she sees you setting boundaries with your work and prioritizing your family, making sure that she and your kids have an important place in your life and in your world, and that they know how, Val, how valuable they are to you. She will respect you for that, and that will only improve your marriage. You're also going to be able to start building a legacy as a dad because your kids are going to develop quality memories with you and with the experiences that they get to have with you being present. And so not only does their life get filled with memories that you are a part of, but their experience of the world gets filled with the idea of a dad who is present. And available and relatable and involved and loves them in all the ways that I know you want to be able to show up for your kids. At the same time with your work, you will probably start feeling more joy and meaning and purpose in the way that you do your work because you know that your work is being driven by your allegiance. You are accomplishing the things that are actually of value to God and a value to you, and not just being driven by someone else's agenda and their expectations, which might be too high of you. Instead, it's your allegiance that's really driving the picture, and because of that, you'll find more meaning and purpose in what you're doing and actually more joy and satisfaction in the time that you give to your work. All of those things I know, even as I say them out loud, I'm like, gosh. I want some more of that, right? I would love for my life to look and to feel more like that. And I think that's probably an example of, okay, maybe I need to go back and really examine my allegiance and figure out where am I making sure that I'm drawing the right boundaries to be able to create the kind of balance that I really do want between work and family and to make sure that my allegiance to God is what's driving all of that. So here's the point. True success means that ambition is ordered under the right allegiance. When you get allegiance right, you can begin to get all the other things right as well. Your family does not have to be sacrificed to your career. It is not an inevitability. You do not have to repeat the mistakes of your father or of the generation of men that came before you. You can do things differently. You also don't have to give yourself over to an innumerable amount of kids' activities to show them that you are prioritizing them and your life. Your kids don't have to be the pendulum swing away from work. They can actually be the thing that simply has you present at the things that matter. You don't have to be. Over involved in their lives in order to be able to be present and loving Again, allegiance is what dictates the picture, and so I want you to really make a point of doing that this week. Put something down in the comments below where you can mention where your allegiance most tends to get pulled off track. Is it from work? Is it from family? Or maybe it's even something else that's involved in the picture there that pulls you away from both things. Okay? Put that down in the comments and let us know how we can help you in being able to get your allegiance on track and get those other priorities lined up the way that they need to. I hope this has been helpful for you guys. I'm really looking forward to several weeks with you as we're continuing to talk about work. I think this is gonna be a great series, and I hope that it really benefits you a lot. I look forward to seeing you next time. See you then.