George Harb: The Moment I Stopped Surviving My Own Life

Every day in Australia, three out of four people who die by suicide are men. It’s the leading cause of death for men between 15 and 44. And yet, most of these men looked like they were “doing fine.” Good jobs, good families, good reputations. Men who were praised for being reliable, steady, composed. Men who had mastered the art of holding everything together, especially the parts that were quietly falling apart.

For years, I was one of those men.

On the outside, I was admired. Steady. High-performing. The kind of man people trusted in a crisis because I never seemed rattled. I had spent nearly two decades leading teams, delivering results, and meeting expectations. I looked like someone who was exactly where he was meant to be.

But inside, there was a different story unfolding, one I didn’t know how to tell, even to myself.

I remember a boardroom meeting, long before I ever found the language for what I was feeling. Around the table, everyone was discussing strategy, next steps, deadlines. I contributed, nodded, tracked the conversation. But under the surface, my mind was racing. Not with ideas or solutions, just noise. A quiet, relentless pressure. A sense of holding my breath without knowing how to exhale.

I had become very good at performing composure.

What I didn’t realise then was how many men live that same double life: the external role and the internal reality. The success that looks stable but feels fragile. The career that brings status but slowly erodes identity. The weight of expectations carried silently, because silence seems easier than vulnerability.

My moment of truth didn’t arrive in a dramatic collapse. It came quietly, late one night, long after everyone else had gone home. I was sitting alone, lights off, the house still. And for the first time in my life, the pressure I’d been carrying felt too heavy to ignore.

way. I learned that the brain is not a fixed library of old stories; it’s a living laboratory that rewrites itself through repetition, emotion, and identity. I discovered that the beliefs I carried weren’t truths, they were rehearsed patterns. Patterns learned early, repeated often, and silently accepted as “just who I am.”

This realisation ignited a shift in me. Because if identity is shaped, it can also be reshaped. If the mind is trained, it can be retrained.

But transformation rarely happens neatly. It’s not a straight line, it’s a series of small, sometimes uncomfortable steps.

For me, the first step was recognising the old story I had been repeating for decades: Be strong. Be reliable. Don’t burden anyone. Don’t need anything. Don’t feel too much.
A story passed down through generations of men who were taught that strength meant silence.

Rewriting that story required three shifts, ones I didn’t yet have names for, but which would eventually become the foundation of my work.

The first shift was what I now call Recode, challenging the beliefs that quietly dictate your life. I started noticing the moments when I shrank myself, when I avoided being fully seen, when I worried that if people really knew me, they might see someone uncertain or unworthy. Those beliefs weren’t facts; they were outdated codes running the system. The more I examined them, the more they loosened their hold.

The second shift was Rise, learning to act from a place of alignment rather than fear. I remember the first time I expressed a boundary that I would have previously swallowed. It wasn’t dramatic. I simply said what I meant, respectfully and clearly. And the world didn’t collapse. No one was disappointed. In fact, I felt a quiet steadiness I hadn’t felt in years. Rising isn’t about volume, it’s about truth.

The third shift was Reclaim, stepping back into my identity, not the version shaped by expectations, but the one that felt like home. For me, reclaiming began in the smallest moments: choosing rest without guilt. Letting people see my humanity, not just my competence. Making decisions based on what was aligned, not what was impressive. Slowly, I stopped performing my life and started living it.

As I changed, something else started to happen. Men around me, friends, colleagues, clients, began to share their own quiet struggles. Not publicly, not dramatically, but privately, in conversations that began with a sentence I knew too well:

“I don’t know who to talk to about this.”

It became clear that my story wasn’t an exception. It was a mirror.

Behind the titles, the achievements, the expectations, men everywhere were carrying emotional weight without the tools, or permission, to name it. And the cost of that silence was staggering: strained relationships, burnout, anxiety, hidden shame, and in too many cases, lives cut short.

My personal transformation became inseparable from a larger purpose: helping men rewrite their internal stories before those stories consume them. Not through pressure, but through presence. Not through perfection, but through honesty. Not by becoming someone new, but by remembering who they were before the world taught them to disconnect from themselves.

Every man has a moment that asks for his honesty.
Every man carries a story beneath the one he shows the world.
And every man, no matter how far he has drifted from himself, can find his way back.

Sometimes it begins with a whisper.
Sometimes it begins with a question.
Sometimes it begins with a decision to stop surviving, and start remembering who you are.

#mensmentalhealth #livedexperience #masculinityredefined #personalgrowthstory #neuroencoding #healingjourney #emotionalresilience #aussiementalhealth #mentalhealthmatters #theimpactfulvoiceproject