Life Balance Essentials Life Admin Podcast

In this episode of the Life Balance Essentials Life Admin Podcast, Lisa chats to Justine Martin, a woman who has made a career out of resilience and second chances. Faced with a devastating multiple sclerosis diagnosis at age 40, Justine was informed she would never be able to work again. This moment, coupled with other severe personal challenges, could have been crippling. But step by step, Justine began to rise to the challenge.

First she decided to learn how to paint, inspired by the suggestion to find a hobby to cope with newfound free time, and this quickly turned into an unexpected new vocation. With time, Justine emerged not only as an artist but as a successful multi-business owner, speaker, and author. Resilience is not about bouncing back but pushing forward creatively, transforming adversity into opportunity.

Justine’s top strategies for managing life’s everyday responsibilities:

- **Keep It Simple**: Justine swears by a paper-based notebook system for task management. This straightforward approach helps simplify her life, allowing her to focus on what truly matters.

- **Focus on Priorities**: Justine focuses on tasks that contribute to her businesses’ financial health. She’s not ashamed or afraid to ask, “What’s going to make me money?” in order to prioritize her work.

- **Time Management Tools**: While she uses digital calendars for scheduling, Justine combines these with traditional tools like a glass board and chalk pens to visualize tasks and deadlines clearly.

- **Embrace Flexibility**: From handling meetings on a sofa with a feet-up approach to combining Pilates classes with work calls, Justine shows that adaptability is key.

- **Lean on Your Team**: Recognizing the importance of collaboration, Justine expertly manages a VA and PA who help maintain her businesses’ efficiency and innovation.

- **Plan Downtime**: Justine allocates time for rest, understanding it’s vital for mental and physical wellness.

What’s important is a tailored approach to productivity, deeply rooted in personal resilience.

Justine Martin offers a captivating lesson in perseverance. It’s not merely about surviving life’s challenges but thriving in spite of them. Through resilience, creativity, and the right support systems, Justine has built a life not just of success but of purpose and meaning.

To dive deeper into her story and gain more insights into building resilience in everyday life, listen to the full episode on the Life Balance Essentials Life Admin Podcast.

00:00 Meet Justine Martin

01:01 MS Diagnosis Turning Point

01:50 Finding Art And Income

03:49 Health Crises And Comebacks

05:30 Resilience Mindset Speaking

07:03 Family NDIS Business

07:38 Publishing On Her Terms

09:14 Managing Mental Load

09:41 Notebook A And B Lists

12:12 Time Lord Data Dump

14:00 Team Tools VA And PA

16:58 Calendars Travel Blocking

19:34 Downtime After Events

20:27 Prioritising For Profit

21:17 Systems And Delegation

23:08 Ask For Help

24:20 Content Repurposing Strategy

26:08 Social Media Visibility

27:34 Self Care Scheduling

29:56 Life Changing Diagnoses

32:39 Where To Find Justine

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Life Balance Essentials :

https://lifebalanceessentials.com.au/

Justine Martin :

https://linktr.ee/justinemartincorporation

https://justinemartin.com.au/

https://www.morpheuspublishing.com.au/

http://www.resiliencemindset.com.au/

http://www.juztart.com.au/

https://www.grcagm.com.au/

https://www.youtube.com/@justinemartincorporation

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Music: www.purple-planet.com

Lisa interviews Liz Wheeldon, creator of Circle Talk, an app-based platform designed to address the “transition cliff” where key personal information is lost during life changes, especially from around age 15 through life after school and across services like education and NDIS.

While many tools help people organise information, Circletalk is about helping people communicate who they are, what matters to them, and how they want to be supported through life’s major transitions.

Liz developed Circletalk to help people maintain their voice, identity, agency, and ability to advocate for what matters to them as they navigate significant changes in circumstances.

One of the main areas of support need is young people transitioning from school to adulthood, but the same principles apply throughout life, including employment, changes in support, and later transitions into aged care.

Liz runs Transition Bridge Workshops, designed to support specialist schools and their parent/carer communities, with Circletalk scaffolding the journey before, during, and after the transition.

In this interview, Liz explains how repeated intakes force families and participants to retell deficit- and risk-focused narratives, leaving people feeling overwhelmed and retraumatised. Liz argues for a strengths-based, participant-voiced living profile that stays current as interests and needs change.

Lisa and Liz also chat about:

- barriers such as turnover in care teams,

- consent and disclosure,

- administrative milestones like Medicare access at 15 and NDIS nominee changes at 18

- the option to trial the Circletalk platform for 30 days through OTs or speech therapists

Circletalk isn’t just another app, it is a platform for empowering people through life’s major transitions.

00:00 Lisa introduces Liz Wheeldon

00:25 Why Circle Talk Exists

01:25 Explaining the Transition Cliff and Transition Bridge

03:01 Empowering Teens At School

04:27 The pain of having to retell your story over and over

12:16 What Good Intake Looks Like

13:55 Lightening Carer Load

17:11 Life Admin At Age Eighteen

18:49 How To Use Circle Talk

Suzanne Rowe turned an after-hours extra-income-gig taking minutes for board meetings into a full-time successful business. Listen to this audio episode for free here, or become a paid member if you'd like to see the full video interview with Suzanne.

Corporate admin and life admin have more in common than you think. In this conversation, Lisa sits down with Suzanne Rowe, founder of Board Support Services, to explore how minute taking, board governance, and high level organisation translate directly into everyday productivity.Suzanne shares how she built her business from a side hustle, the systems she relies on to manage overwhelm, why handwritten lists still work, and how to decide which tech tools are actually worth your time.Lisa and Suzanne chat about:• How board admin skills can simplify your home admin• Why templates and checklists reduce cognitive load• The real reason recording meetings can slow you down• How to break big tasks into manageable steps• When to ask for help instead of pushing throughIf you're juggling work, home, and the endless admin that comes with modern life, this episode is for you.--------Music: https://www.purple-planet.com--------Lisa Hawkins, Life Balance Essentialshttps://lifebalanceessentials.com.au/

Running a business is supposed to give us freedom — yet so many women find themselves working harder, carrying more, and slipping back into the same patterns that burnt them out in corporate. In this week’s episode, I sat down with Racquel Collard, founder of Navitential, to talk honestly about what it really takes to build a business that supports your life instead of consuming it.

» Free to listen to the audio podcast — upgrade to paid to watch the video interview

Racquel’s story is one many of us recognise: years of consulting, constant output, and then a health crisis that forced everything to stop. What came out of that pause was Navitential — a custom business system designed for solopreneurs, neurodivergent thinkers and anyone who wants structure without rigidity, automation without overwhelm, and clarity without losing their creativity.

In our conversation, we dive into the systems that keep a business running smoothly, the boundaries that protect your energy, and the mindset shifts that make delegation possible (even when you’re a lifelong “I’ll just do it myself” person). Racquel shares how she uses ROI thinking in her personal life, why she only works four days a week, and how she reduced her inbox from 700 emails to a couple of dozen.

If you’ve been feeling stretched thin, drowning in life admin, or craving more time for the things that matter, this episode will feel like a breath of fresh air — and a reminder that your business can be built differently.

~ Lisa Hawkins, Life Balance Essentials