Emily Parker spoke to Lorene Phillips about her book '29 Keys To Unlocking Your Faith At Work And Win!', unpacking what it means to have a right attitude, and the importance of investing into your family as well as your career.

Lorene Phillips

Emily: First of all, tell me a little bit about yourself.

Lorene: In short, I'm an Insurance Executive. I've been in the insurance industry for just over 25 years. I'm a wife and a mother of three boys (I should say young men), ages 22, 18 and 16. I'm an author and I love the Lord tremendously. I am also a career strategist and a trained executive coach.

Emily: How did you get to where you are?

Lorene: Like most people did around that time, I was taking a year off having just completed my bachelor's degree in economics. I was trying to figure out what my next steps were, whether I was going to do an MBA or whether I wanted to go on to law school. I was fortunate to have been a scholar for an insurance company the year prior and they offered me a job, so I didn't have to look for a job. I thought "Okay, I'll do that." That's about all I knew about insurance at the time.

Emily: Was going into insurance part of your dream job when you were younger?

Lorene: Not at all. I had no idea what corporate insurance was. I'm not sure about you, but I thought it was like the salesman that knocks at your door selling house insurance, or car insurance, and I definitely did not want to do that. But fortunately for me, through the scholarship and the job that came with the scholarship, I was exposed to an amazing industry of professionals. Their job was to secure insurance coverage for multi-million and multi-billion dollar organisations, both in the United States and all around the world. It was a fascinating industry to be in and very dynamic. Hence the reason why 25-26 years later I am still working quite happily in that industry.

Emily: What does a usual day look like for you?

Lorene: My day involves meeting clients, and understanding large corporations' risks and their exposures, seeing how we can help solve some of their problems. For example, hurricanes can have a huge impact on organisations and countries. Insurance helps put those countries back into the position they were in before the hurricane; it gets lives back in order and it gets businesses and economies moving. It is very high-level. You really have to know your stuff and be prepared.

I work in a white male-dominated industry and I am a female Afro-Caribbean, so most of the time I am the only female and certainly the only black female in the room - no pressure there!

I'm aware that when God places you in an environment like that, it's definitely an opportunity for you to shine and to show the best of who you are for Him.

Emily: When did you realise that God is interested in our day-to-day?

Lorene: I wish I could say that I've known that my whole life, but I haven't. I accepted the Lord as my personal Saviour around the age of 12, but it was in my mid-twenties that I got a clearer idea of what I was committing myself to, and made a recommitment in terms of my faith walk with the Lord.

At 12 you make a decision, but in your early twenties you have a better sense of where you're going, because you've started to work and have experienced the grind and grit of life. So you make a fuller commitment to live a life that truly models and bears out the things you say and believe, at least that's how it was from my perspective.

Emily: How have you seen God at work in your workplace?