15 Jan Get to know: Janine Linklater

Janine is a Business Advisor

Janine has immersed in family operated businesses from childhood. She grew up on the family farm and her family owned and operated a national coach line and travel service.

Since the early 1990s, Janine has enjoyed creating and developing a number of businesses from start-up and has assisted other business owners to develop and manage their business operations. She has worked in sectors as diverse as recruitment, childcare, personal & leadership development, retail, travel, architecture, construction and IT.

What’s the greatest bit of advice you’ve been given?

A number of years ago, when my marriage ended and I was struggling to adjust to a new family unit consisting of myself and three young boys while keeping my business alive and working out my new identity, I invested in some time with a life coach.

One of the exercises she suggested I work through was life-changing for me and is still very much in the top of my mind every day. The culmination of the exercise is understanding the most important values I have in my life, and then asking myself every day, am I living to those values?

What is the best vacation you’ve ever had?

This time last year my youngest son was living in Germany on a 12-month student exchange and we decided to visit him and our European exchange students whom we had home-hosted here in Australia. It was such a privilege to spend our first visit to Europe with locals in Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Norway and Austria, and experience Christmas and New Year their way.

We visited so many 😊 German Christmas markets – I have the Gluhwein mugs to prove it – and enjoyed different food extravaganzas everywhere we went.

We rode in sleds behind reindeer in -17°C at 3pm, with the winter twilight on one side of us and a full moon in a crystal clear deep blue night sky on the other, and we met Santa in his home on the Arctic Circle (by then it was -23°C) in Roveniemi, Finland.

-22°C in Roveniemi, Finland at about 3pm

In Norway we mushed behind our own dog teams in pristine snow wilderness near the Swedish border out of TrosmÖ; were pushed to the ground by unbelievable winds at Nordcapp; rode snow mobiles on fjords in the dark at 2pm and ate King Crabs 20 minutes after we pulled them out of the same fjord; and we stayed in a Snow Hotel in Kirkenes, where we witnessed an incredible display of the Northern Lights and only three hours of daylight during which time the sun didn’t rise above the horizon.

Dog-sledding in the Norwegian wilderness

Northern lights from the Snow Hotel, Kirkenes

Christmas was spent near Lucerne in Switzerland with our Swiss ‘daughter’ and her family, where we hiked through farms and rode on gondolas in the lower alps, and took a train through the Gotthard Base Tunnel (the world’s longest tunnel) at over 200km/hr. Our last stop was Austria, with New Year’s Eve spent waltzing with friends on the streets of Vienna, and a week visiting palaces and monasteries, and drinking wine in 800yo cellars in a little village on the Danube.

It was truly a trip of a lifetime, and a Christmas to remember. But enough reminiscing – welcome back to another year, working and planning for the next big trip! Where? Our other exchange daughter is in Brazil, and Antarctica is calling. What is it with cold places, Janine?