Roland Hanekroot is a business and life coach, as well as the founder of New Perspectives Business Coaching.

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1) To kick things off, could you tell us a little about your career background and current role?

So I’m a business and life coach, I work with business owners who feel overwhelmed and stuck in their business, they feel frustrated at their lack of progress towards their goals and I help them get unstuck and start to achieve those goals again.

My background in business is from the construction industry. I started a building company in Sydney in the mid eighties and I sold the company in 2003. After selling the company and getting out I took time out for a year and a bit.

I started studying and training in the fields of coaching, counseling, therapy and training on the one hand and business management and change theory on the other hand and building my model of business and life coaching that I have been practicing ever since.

2) What does a day in the life look like for you? Can you take us through a recent workday?

A day in the life for me is a mixture of seeing clients (I work one-on-one with my clients, via video link like Skype or Zoom), various marketing activities such as online ,marketing and face to face networking and relationship building and then there’s always business admin and email etc.

But my days are varied and I usually find time for some reading during the day as well. Besides I tend to try and keep my client appointments to Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, to give me time to focus on home and garden projects, as well as getting out into the bush.

3) Does your current role allow for flexible or remote working? If so, how does that fit into your life and routine?

I work from home and have done so for many years and all my client work is done via Skype or Zoom, so yes, I’m fortunate that way and also I am in control of my diary and so I can simply decide on what days and times to make myself available for clients.

4) What does work-life balance mean to you and how do you work to achieve that goal?

Because I work very intensively with my clients, I can only work with a limited number of clients at any one time, or my head would simply go on “Tilt”.

It’s important for me to have time to do other things besides working with my clients, to keep the head in a good place, so I make a big point of making sure I have time for the things I mentioned above, reading, projects, getting out in the bush, etc.

If I didn’t do that, I would slowly but surely destroy my ability to do good work with my clients.

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5) What do you think are some of the best habits or routines that you’ve developed over the years to help you achieve success in your life?

To be honest, I’m not much of a routine person myself, routines drive me mad.

So I would say that the best habit I’ve formed around routines is to allow myself to be haphazard and I’ve learned to trust myself that I’ll do the stuff that needs to be done by the time they need to be done and to stop stressing about that and to stop giving myself a hard time about my “lack of discipline.

It turns out that 99.9% of the time that things need to be done, I do them, and do them well (or well enough) and on time, so I’ve just learned to go with my natural inclinations around routines, and have very few of them.

6) Do you have any favourite books, podcasts or newsletters that you’d like to recommend?

There’s many. One suggestion I’d like to make is to also read good fiction. There’s as much to learn from reading fiction as there is from business and personal development literature (and it’s often better written). From a business and marketing perspective you can never go wrong by reading anything by Seth Godin and a bible for me have been two specific books: Good to Great and Blue Ocean Strategy.

Both are absolute classics. From a personal development perspective I think you could no better than watching Brene Brown’s Ted Talks and read some of her books, and take her message about learning to be kind to yourself to heart.

7) What is the number one thing you do to make sure you get the most out of your day?

I try and focus on joy. I am training myself to always focus on “doing life with joy.” In other words, I ask myself two questions: 1) what would give me joy right now? and 2) how can I find joy in the thing I’m about to do?

Focusing on joy in the things I do, actually mean those things are done better and more efficiently as well.

8) If you could read an interview about work-life balance by anyone, who would that be?

Actually a friend of mine and former client. Mark Coburn, from the Southern Highlands of NSW. I’m just amazed and in awe of him, because he seems to get so much done every day and every week.

He’s building an amazing world class whiskey distillery business, and at the same time he still finds time to breed prize winning roses, cook incredible meals, design and build all kinds of intricate machinery for the distillery, (and a steam train side project he has on the go) and post about it all regularly on Facebook.

I just don’t understand how he does it all and still get sleep and spend time with his family (which he does as well, it seems). Some people just seem to have the ability to keep so many more balls in the air then others, and I do wish I had some more of that ability myself.

9) Do you have any last thoughts on work, life or balance that you’d like to share with our readers?

Work-life balance is an incredibly personal thing. What’s balance for me is unlikely to be balanced for anyone else. The key is to find what make you feel good.

There’s an incredibly simple (simplistic even) statement I’m trying to live by myself, more and more: if it feels good, it probably is good ( and if it doesn’t feel good, it probably isn’t either).

It may seems simplistic and it may seem as if that would lead to laziness and slothful lives, but it doesn’t. Lazing around on the couch and not doing anything useful or interesting gets boring and it may be fun for a little while but very soon is stops feeling good. In other words, you can trust you subconscious to guide you in how to create the balance in your life that is right for you.

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