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When Mike Green made the decision to semi-retire from his role as managing director of Harcourts, he had little idea that three years later he would be back.
Mr Green, who recently resumed the position he vacated in October 2019 after 37 years with the company and 20 at its helm — recently spoke on REB’s Secret of the Top 100 Agents podcast about some of the trials he endured and lessons he learnt during his three-year absence from the top job.
He admits the decision wasn’t one that came about swifty or easily, which began in the lead-up to 2019. “I’d been thinking long and hard about it,” he said.
“It had been a busy time, and I was coming up on my 60th birthday, and I was thinking, ‘Really, it’s probably time to think about stepping back. Maybe not getting out 100 per cent but stepping back.’ I’ve got four grandkids. We were spending a bit more time with them. We were enjoying travelling a bit. So, it all just seemed like the right thing to do.”
He added social expectations about life structures and career durations — especially the noise around retirement — played a role in his decision, but admitted that at the time, it felt like the right path to take.
Yet barely six months into what should have been a new and relaxing chapter in his storied life, the introduction of the COVID-19 pandemic had unprecedented effects on his life, throwing a spanner in the travel plans of he and his wife Irene — which included safaris, a Rhine River cruise, and a week in picturesque Greece.
Not only did the pandemic dissolve any holidaying hopes, but it also added untold amounts of pressure and uncertainty on both his professional and personal life, disclosing that initial meetings at the pandemic’s outset by Harcourts’ leadership team had them budgeting for market declines of anywhere from 20 per cent to 85 per cent.
The turn of events threw Mr Green completely off his feet into what he admits was a “really dark place”. He found himself living a life without purpose, which involved “staying in bed till 10 or 11 in the morning and watching videos on my phone and spending more and more time in front of the fridge than anything else”.
“There was nothing, no compelling reason for me to get up. And very quickly, I got into a bit of a mind space where it was, ‘What’s the point? What’s it all about?’”
Of course the pandemic exacerbated these issues, but Mr Green elaborated on the confronting nature of transitioning away from being business-centric 24/7 where his lifestyle was fast-paced to a completely alien environment at a much slower pace.
“It can damage your identity,” he professed.
“You are in that environment and then suddenly you go to this totally different pace, and people talk about where you get your identity from, why you are what you are or who you are and what have you and do go from being the centre of an awful lot of stuff to being the centre of nothing.”
“That’s a really confronting thing,” he confessed, before divulging that one of the major learnings he gained during this period was that he’s “got to be challenged”.
“I’ve got to be active and I’ve got to have stuff going on,” he shared. “And if I’m not, then I can very quickly lose direction. As I said earlier, I’ve got to wake up with purpose and passion.
“If you don’t get up with purpose and passion every day, then you can very, very quickly go down a rabbit hole.”
Admittedly, Mr Green said he “became a lesser person” during this period as he wasn’t living his best life, instead “playing golf all the time or doing stuff that wasn’t fulfilling me”.
The knock-on effects of this reality were also felt by those around him because he described how “if you’re feeling like crap [then] very quickly you bring the whole room down in terms of the energy”.
What he found during this tribulating period was the importance of reaching out, talking to people and always asking for support, noting the recent tragic passing of former North Queensland Cowboys coach Paul Green as an example of how “life’s too short and too important and too special. Always reach out and always ask for help if you need it.”
Listen to the full conversation with Mr Green here.
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