Full Video Transcript
Sandra: Hi everybody. Sandra from sandralarkin.com.au. Today we’ve got the beautiful Shannon Harvey from Place Estate Agents in Bulimba. Thank you Shannon for joining us today.
Shannon Harvey: Thank you for asking me.
Sandra: What a beautiful home.
Shannon Harvey: Yeah it is beautiful and I would know.
Sandra: Yes. Shannon, just before we start on some questions, obviously we’re talking about the habits and behaviours of successful people. You are in my eyes definitely a very successful woman and even more so recently because you’ve got now a little baby that you’ve got in the mix of your successful life. I’d love to talk about that as well. Little bit about what yourself and what you do at Place.
Shannon Harvey: I’m a sales agent. A leading sales agent which just means that we’ve been there a long time and we take charge of negotiations and appraisals and all that sort of stuff.
Sanadra: How long have you been at Place?
Shannon Harvey: It’s coming at 15 years.
Sandra: Wow.
Shannon Harvey: I know. A lifetime.
Sandra: Yeah. Shannon, is there any challenges recently that you’ve experienced that nobody knows about that you’ve had to get through? You’ve had to challenge to overcome.
Shannon Harvey: I’m an open book so I think if there’s a challenge everyone probably knows about it.
Sandra: Everyone knows about it. What is a recent challenge that you could share?
Shannon Harvey: Well, definitely having my daughter was going to be … It wasn’t a negative challenge because I think you can have positive challenges.
Sandra: Yes. Definitely.
Shannon Harvey: Any change potentially is a challenge so just learning to navigate moving forward with changes. Yeah. I had my daughter and I didn’t know what kind of baby she’d be like and how I was going to juggle things and how clients would react and how I was going to manage everything, but I just thought, “Well, I’ll just take it day by day,” and I guess being in negotiations in real estate, you have to be an excellent lateral thinker.
Sandra: I have to take my hat off to you. You are amazing real estate agent, you have an amazing following and you’ve decided to become a mom. A single mom at that and do it all on your own. This is for the girls out there because there are a lot of women in the same place that want to have a family and they want to do it on their own. I think that’s grand fantastic and I take my hat off to you.
Shannon Harvey: Yeah. Hopefully that’s inspiring to a few people. The response has been overwhelming, the amount of support that people have given me and assistance and I think I know a few girlfriends that are contemplating that it’s something that they’d really like to do because there is a lot of rite of passage with having children and a yearning and a lot of my girlfriends are worried that they can’t do it but I think when you want to do anything, if you decide to do it, things fall in to place.
Sandra: What would be your advice to a woman, a professional woman deciding to go out and be a single mom and by choice on her own? What would be your advice in terms of habits and behaviours?
Shannon Harvey: My entire life ethos which is just do it. Things manifested that I didn’t even contemplate and if I was in control, those things wouldn’t have even happened. I think be open to wonderful things beyond your even imagination happening in life.
Sandra: Beautiful. Beautiful advice. Next question that I’d love to ask you is success. What is success to you and how do you define success in your life?
Shannon Harvey: Definitely success to me is having balance. I was very fortunate to be able to get number one in the company for sales a few years running. I can take that off a list which I know a few people are striving for. Having achieved that, I realised it was probably something that you don’t need to achieve to feel wonderful and really it’s more about work life balance now for me. Success for me is being healthy, it’s contributing to the community. Success for me is having … I know that my integrity and ethics have just been driven home substantially the last few years and having people come up to me in the streets and knowing what I do and thanking me and having respect in the community.
Sandra: Don’t you find, Shannon, when you have that success in giving back to the community and helping that that actually flows on with success in your professional life?
Shannon Harvey: Absolutely.
Sandra: It’s like a natural flow back.
Shannon Harvey: Yeah.
Sandra: Some people have it the other way around.
Shannon Harvey: Yeah. The first time ever I had someone say, “I went to the [inaudible 00:04:55] festival and I want you to come and appraise the house.” I’ve done it nearly 10 years and never had that direct link, but people just … I think it’s just being brand you, isn’t it? People just know you as a good person.
Sandra: What continuous habit or behaviour do you do every day?
Shannon Harvey: I know that there’s some things that are unique to me because sometimes I see it in staff. They come to me, “Oh my God, this has happened.” Nothing is a problem to me. I always see things because life’s not perfect.
Sandra: Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Shannon Harvey: Yeah. It’s just like, “Okay. Well how do we get around that to get where we want to go?” Often the challenges like that get their creative juices flowing where it gives you an idea of something even better. To me, they’re always an opportunity to do something better than you thought. I know that I consistently do that. People often say to me that they don’t see any mood changes in me which, yeah is amusing but yeah. I don’t get … I very rarely get angry or upset-
Sandra: You don’t have these ups and downs. You pretty much have this emotional stability.
Shannon Harvey: Yeah yeah. I’m just me and things happen. I don’t go up with something and down with something.
Sandra: Shannon, if you had the opportunity to sit down and spend one hour or a day with somebody famous or somebody really influential, doesn’t have to be famous to make a difference in your life, who would that be?
Shannon Harvey: I did think Barack Obama definitely because I would like to learn a lot from him.
Sandra: What about if there was one piece of advice that you could give the audience watching this video today, what would that be?
Shannon Harvey: Like I always go back to control the controllables which is what Dr. Phil Johnson taught me years ago.
Sandra: Explain that a little bit.
Shannon Harvey: Well, there’s a lot of stuff out … We can’t control the market, we can’t control who’s buying.
Sandra: Okay. Control the controllables. Work out what is controllable and then work on controlling that. Thank you so much Shannon for today. It’s been a great bit of insight. Thank you for coming darling.
Shannon Harvey: My pleasure. Happy to help.
