Steve Gavatorta | Embracing Adversity and The Summer From Hell - Mick Unplugged [Ep 6]

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the latest episode of Mick Unplugged. And today we have a great one for you. My guest is one of the leading consultants for leadership and personal development. He also has one of my greatest books that I just started a few weeks ago and I'm already on Listen number three in the defense of adversity. He is an Allegheny College legend, football all American, Muay Thai and hot yoga expert himself, everyone. Nice. Welcome to Mr. Steve Corretorta.

You roll the R's with that attend Gaba Torta.

So there you go.

Wonderful introduction. Thank you, sir. Much appreciated and happy to be here. Looking forward to it.

Absolutely, absolutely. Steve, you know, here at Make Unplugged, we really are talking about going deeper than your why and being fueled by your because. And I have to tell you, the reason that I am on round three of your book is because I feel like you almost wrote that book for me. Right. In the Defense of Adversity, an amazing book. I want to dive into a couple of of of highlights in that book momentarily. But how about you start by giving the audience a little bit of your background and. And what makes Steve Steve sounds good.

My name is Steve Gava Torta. I own a consulting company called Steve Gava Torta Group. And what we do, what I do is really provide custom based Personal professional development programs to my clients based on their specific needs. So it's really customized. It's not generic, off the shelf stuff. It's really customized coaching, training, development and speaking programs or some combination of those, again, based on client needs. I've owned my business for 20 years. Prior to that, I spent over 20 in corporate America in an array of sales, leadership, marketing, managerial roles, training, development, liaison between sales and training, basically with some great consumer packaged goods companies that really, really spent a lot of time training and developing their people. So I have a great background for training and development and I have a great passion for it, too, because I know the importance of people's success is dependent upon how their skills are in a given job. If I don't have certain skills to be successful, I'm not going to be successful. So I'm very passionate about that world and that's why I left cold turkey and started my business over 20 years. And as I tell people, I never work any work a day in my life anymore because I love what I do. If you love what you do, you never work a day again. So I'm fortunate enough to say that.

Amen to that. And that is exactly the philosophy that I live by as well. All right, Steve, let's go straight into this book, man. Because it opened my eyes. It kind of confirmed a lot of things for me. And then after having some side conversations with you, it's like, steve's my guy. Steve's my guy. And we definitely have to do this podcast, chapter two of your book, the Summer of Hell. A lot of things happened in that summer at Allegheny College where you were a freaking legend. We're going to talk about that, too. But a lot of things happened in this said summer. And one of the captions, one of the subheadings of that chapter was, we lost our home. Take us to that moment. Because I personally believe after reading the book and listening to the book several times, that was the moment of your. Because that's when your why went a little bit deeper.

Right?

Take us to that moment, that summer of hell for you.

Yeah, yeah, that chapter was actually called Summer from Hell. And yeah, that was a moment that I was probably 19, 20 years old, old at that time. And it was really an impressionable time on me and was, I say, it enabled me to go from a kid to a man. You know, I had no choice. I didn't have a choice, I should say. But thank goodness I selected the right choice and took the bull by the horns in a very difficult situation. My family was facing, but just a little background. I'm from a small coal mining town in western Pennsylvania, 32 miles west of Pittsburgh, right along the West Virginia border. It's called Burgetstown, Pennsylvania. That area is known for coal mining, zinc mining, steel mill people. It was an actual influx for immigrants from all around the world who were looking for work. Immigrants who didn't speak each other's language, let alone English, and became usually successful businessmen and women lawyers, entrepreneurs, athletic directors, great football coaches, war heroes. It's really an amazing little town. So. So I was fortunate enough to grow up in that area, but as I said, it was a coal. Mainly a coal mining town. So it was the end of my junior year at Allegheny College. I wasn't home yet, but I received a call from my mother. She was crying, which shocked me because number one, they didn't. My mom didn't call my fraternity house much, and number two, she was crying. So I knew something was wrong. But she proceeded to tell me a story. The night before, her and my father were watching TV in the living room, and all of a sudden they started hearing weird creaks, cracks going on the house, that really unsettling noises. The ceiling was starting to crumble. Cracks were forming along the wall. They could actually see. So they knew something was wrong. So they left, went up to my grandmother's house who lives on our property. Next day they came down and the foundation of our house sunk by three feet. Our house? Yeah, our house, unbeknownst to us, was built over a coal mining room. There were no records of it or anything. And the house was built years before my parents bought it, but no one knew, no one had records of that. And all of a sudden, the house collapsed in that hole. The two other factors which hurt even more homeowners didn't cover that. You had to buy special insurance called mine subsidence insurance. So we didn't have insurance. And my parents had two more house payments to pay off the house. Oh, wow. So that was. Yeah, that was really devastating. So the government came in and said, you know, if you rebuild on the house, we'll fill the hole for you, and if you rebuild on that property, we'll give you a 2% loan. So my dad took that offer.

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Oh no.

So yeah, yeah. So I, I the only thing my father didn't tell me at that time was what his profit margins were on different products in the store. Candy, milk, eggs, produce, things of that nature. So I said, I think it's time you tell me what the margins are on your products and calculations for that. And thank God he did because the next day he was laid up in the hospital. His lung collapsed from some sort of calcium deposit that cut his lung. So here our house collapsed, my father's lung collapsed. We're at the beginning of summer and it's just my My mother and I, I'm an only child dealing with this whole situation. When that happened, I had probably about five minutes of what I would call probably a panic attack. First ever, you know, stress. My head felt like it was going to explode. What are we going to do? What am I going to do? What are we going to do for the business? How are we going to pay our bills? What are you going to do about the house? And it really was the most intense situation I ever had. But it was, strangely enough, after about five or so minutes, I had a strange calm that came over me and I, I realized that my dad maybe not purposeful, but was preparing me for how to run the store. Through everything that he taught me, the experiences he provided me, the education he provided me on merchandising, deal with customers, all those things prepared me for this day. Not thinking it was going to be this way it happened, but, you know, prepared me to actually run this store. And that strange of calm really lifted me up and I took the bull by the horns and I actually ran my parents store by myself. My mom had another job, she would come in and help occasionally. But I ran the store as my father recovered and he actually supervised the building of our new house. So by the end of that summer, yeah, by the end of summer he was healthy, the house was built, and I was ready to go back for my senior year at Allegheny College. But that year really made me, I often look back, what would have happened if I stayed in that panic attack mode, didn't take the bull by the horns? What would have happened to our family? What would have happened to me? You know, would we have to have gone in bankruptcy? Would we have to close the store? What would have happened to me personally? You know, it could have been devastating for all of us, but thank goodness, you know, I had that sense of calm. I knew I could do this and it really, I learned so much that summer and it really made me help make me the person I am today in many ways. The end of my senior year, I most likely had and I went to a very good school and I had a lot of guys in my fraternity that were a heck of a lot smarter than me, had better grades than me, but I was one of the guys that had the most job offers. The end of that year, primarily because interviewers, companies were coming in, they weren't worried about my grades, they weren't worried about my major. They wanted to know about that story about the house collapsing. In that story I was able to share real world competencies that would be relevant for success in any business. Leadership, communication skills, problem solving, people management, solution. You know, all these things that are great attributes for anyone in a business. I was able to not only say I had them, but give real world stories for that. So that was a very monumental moment in my life and really helped me, as I said, become a man. A little long winded, but it's an important story that we could build on.

Absolutely. And one of the things that, that I said in one of my solo podcasts is the analogy of why versus because. Right? Like your why brings you to that crossroad. It brings you to that intersection. Your because is what gets you through, right. Like why can show you the top of the mountain. Your because is the energy that gets you there. It's the, it's the drive that gets you there. And I think in your story, your parents obviously were your why. Right. But you're. Because that thing of, oh, crap, if I don't, who's going to.

That's right.

The moment that your dad is hospitalized, right. All of a sudden that comes on Steve. And if Steve's not prepared, right. Which is something I also want to talk about. Steve's not prepared. Steve's just an add on to mom stress. He becomes an add on to mom's stress. So when you talk about those traits that you learned, what do you think were the most important true behaviors behind those traits? And what are some of the things that you're teaching people from a leadership or personal development standpoint that you feel are really important to take you to that next level?

Right. And this, a lot of this ties into the title of my book, In Defensive Adversity, Turn youn Toughest Challenges into your Greatest Success. In my book, I talk about two important parts of the brain, the limbic system and the cortex. And I'm getting. Hold on here. I'll get to your question, to your answer, to my answer. I just want to explain this real quick. The limbic system is our emotional brain. It's what we're born with. It does not grow, transform, or evolve through time. It's essentially, essentially stays the same. And when we're functioning in that limbic state of mind, our response to adversity is going to be freeze, fight or flight. It's going to be emotional or some combination of those. The cortex, part of our brain does grow, transform and evolve through time, through our life experiences, both good and I think, especially bad, through our education system. Reading, writing, arithmetic, through training and development, teaching skills, anything that can teach us A lesson on how to be successful in a given endeavor is from accessing your cortex, part of the brain. And I subscribe that you can build your cortex muscle through those things, life experiences, training, so on and so forth. So when I talk about in my book and what clearly happened, it was always interesting to me how I ultimately panicked. And I got out of that in a heartbeat. I couldn't discover why until I started understanding this whole brain functionality piece. And what ultimately happened was I originally fell into that limbic state of freeze, fight or flight. It was really freeze. I was shutting down. I was frightened. But then it transitioned into my cortex, part of my. My rational, thinking brain. The word reason and logic lie that my dad taught me this. I know how to order product, I know how to price product. I know how to work the register. I know how to deal with customers. I know how to lead people. And it was because of those experiences my father taught me how. That enabled me, to some extent, strengthen my cortex, right? And it allowed me to think rationally that, hey, I can do this. Now, if my father hadn't done that, if he didn't teach me anything, the odds of me becoming calm and accessing the cortex may not have happened. Does that make sense? So, like these life experiences, and this is why I'm so into training and development, if you don't teach people relevant skills for success in a given job or an endeavor, the chances of them succeeding are minimized. Hypothetically, if in sales training, I talk about people handling objections of a customer, the objection is, a customer says no to your recommendation. I've seen this happen. If people aren't trained in how to handle objections, when a customer gives them that objection, they'll get angry, they'll fight back, or they'll shut down. They don't know what to say. They get nervous. It's because their limbic system, their emotional brain has kicked in. Because they don't have the experience or skill set in dealing with handling an objection. If you teach people the skills of that, they'll fall back on that rational cortex part of their brain. And that's why I'm such a big proponent in training development, because I've seen it happen in me in the story of my family's house collapsing the summer from hell. That I've seen it in my personal, professional life as well, and I've seen it in others as well. If you are functioning in an emotional state of freeze and freeze, fight or flight, you are no longer productive. You need to function in your rational, thinking brain that's when you're productive. That's when you can solve problems. That's when you think, can think creatively. That's when you can say the right things, do the right things, make wise decisions and things of that nature. And that's my whole point. Adversity can teach us to function in that cortex, rational thinking, part of the brain.

I love it. I love it. One of the things that I heard you say before, and I hear a lot of former athletes say the same thing, right? How you prepare and how you practice is going to equal how you perform, right? It's like the three P's. And I hear that in everything that you say, right? Like you've got to prepare and you've got to practice.

That's right.

Like I know as a consultant that that does very similar things to you. When I'm coaching students, when I'm talking leaders, it's you're not going to read a book and get to from A to B, right? Like you've got to put action behind, you've got to practice, you've got to role play. You've got to put yourself in these situations. Because if you don't prepare for that, your outcome, your performance, your production is never going to be what you want it to be.

I tie my training to that and that's what I call building the cortex. First, you need to lay the foundation of skill sets relevant for success in a job. Hypothetically, it could be a four step selling process. But how that is executed is specific. To make it really take hold and make a, make it stick and build that cortex muscle is you take those four skill sets and you practice them in a real world environment relevant to that, that specific situation you're dealing with. So to your point, we teach a four step process in selling. Then we practice that via role plays, via case studies, you know, via exercises. So we're applying these skills in a world that is relevant to that person. Basic football people. You know, every year companies or every season teams, I don't care, NFL teams, people have been playing for 20 so years, the beginning of summer camp, they, they go back to the basics. Blocking and tackling, running a simple play. Then they scrimmage. So it's basically blocking, tackling, running, really simple place in a real world environment. So they're practicing these relevant skills in that real world. So that is building that cortex muscle. You're teaching a skill and applying it to a world that's irrelevant to you. So you're, that, that's where that real sticking that's where the binding happens.

Absolutely. I have another question for you, Steve.

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What are the traits that you see common in winners? So the people that you're coaching and developing, what are three or four common traits that you see for people that succeed?

Yeah, you know, the main one is I think that overrules everything is the ability to learn, grow and evolve from adversity or losses or failures. I can be the most well conditioned athlete at the top of my game. But if I can't handle losing or if I can't handle a mistake, if I get easily frustrated, then I'm no longer successful. You know you can hypothetically, let's say I've done work with the Iowa Hawkeyes quarterbacks. I've worked with their former quarterbacks coach Kenny Ken o' Keefe and we talked about the importance of quarterbacks to say stay rational under pressure or if they make a mistake. So hypothetically, a quarterback throws an interception, if they get frustrated, get angry or get PO'd about it, they go to the sidelines, they're in that emotional state of they're mad, they're shut down. Well, fumble happens next play, they have to come back in a game.

Right?

That quarterback can't immediately get out of freeze fight or flight. He's got to, you know, get back in that rational thinking mind. So it's important for them not to ever fall into that emotional state or to be afraid of failure or not to be open to understand learn from failure. So I think that's hands down the most important thing. The ability to learn from any situation both a success or and most importantly a failure. I hope I'm not insulting any of your listeners, but I am not a fan of participation trophies.

Agree completely.

Because essentially what you're doing, you're robbing young kids learnings ability to build their cortex and what it means to fail or what did we do to succeed. You know those what we did to succeed are building blocks we can use for the future. Those failures, if we learn from them again are building blocks for the future. So if I've never, I've been given participation trophies. I've never known what it means to lose or hear no. It doesn't bode well for me as an adult because hypothetically, let's say I'm interviewing for a job and there's one opening, there's three people, you know, that they're considering. There's only 33% chance I'm going to get that job. So if I don't get it, how am I going to handle it? If I haven't learned to handle no before, I haven't learned to handle failure before. If I've learned to handle it, I can accept that no and go back and say, why didn't I get that job? What can I do better? Do I need to change the resume? Do I have to get better at dealing, you know, dealing with interviews? So I think that's hands down the most important thing is willingness to learn from events, grow, transform and evolve from events. That's the most important thing. Then other things to your point, you know, hardworking, persistence, perseverance, all those things make a great athlete, a great person, all those other things. But I think the most important thing is not having fear of failure and looking at failures as opportunity, so to speak. I think Conor McGregor said he never loses a fight, he always learns from a fight.

There you go.

So that's good. Good. Yeah, good quote.

No, I, I love that. And I love the no participation trophies. Me and anyone that's in my circle. That's how we think, right? Like I'm, I promise you, Steve, I'm the most competitive person that you will ever meet in life. Right? And I'm always learning, I'm always thinking, because we don't always get it right, right? We don't always get it right. And if, if we just show up and everybody wins, what are we learning, right? Like what are we learning? And if we don't put forth effort and we're just there, what's our purpose? What's our strategy?

A football team, every, if it's a college team, every high school team, every Sunday or Monday, what do they do? They go back and watch film of the game. They look at what they win, lose, draw. They look at what they did well, they look at what they didn't do well. And what do we need to do and grow from that? So sports, we do those things. But unfortunately in the business world, the personal development world, the self help world, we don't often go back and reflect on our failures or what we did wrong, you know, or what we can learn from that because those situations can be used for our own benefit later we grow from those lessons we learn and we can hardwire our brain to build our cortex or our rational thinking part of our brain for future similar type events.

Same, same. I tell salespeople and I tell leaders all the time. Even in wins. There are learning moments where we lost even in wins. Because you go back to watching film, right? And I'm sure Steve, you had grades, right? Very rarely. Would you grade a hundred percent, right?

That's right, very rarely.

And those who normally grade 100 were usually like punters and kickers because they had two opportunities. But if you're not a punter or a kicker, if you're, if you're an office manager, if you're a CEO, if you're a CEO, if you are a ground crew, right, There are moments that you need to get better even in wins. There are moments to get better even in wins. Getting you out of here on this, Steve. What are two things that you want listeners to do right now for self improvement? What are two things that they can do right now? Whether they call Steve Gava Torto or not, what are two things that they can do today?

Well, one I think start looking at adversity as an opportunity, adversity as an opportunity to grow, transform and evolve. Start looking at those difficulties in your life, not as a difficulty. So I say in my book, I'll give you these two things, acceptance and acknowledgement. Start accepting that life's not fair. Start accepting that life's full of adversities, difficulties, irritating people. That acceptance is important because it allows us to not be surprised when those things happen. If I don't think, if I'm acting like those things don't happen, when it happens, I'm going to be maybe put in that emotional state of freeze, fight or flight. But if I accept that there's difficult people in the world, there's adversity in the world, it doesn't surprise me and it allows me to think rationally. The second part of that is acknowledge that this adversity or this difficult person or this difficult scenario is an opportunity for myself or my people or my company to grow, transform and evolve into something better or break competition. I often say if we think, if we accept and acknowledge situations going with a company, and I always say we're in a fast paced, high tech, ever evolving world, adversity striking is harder than ever. The speed at which we need to make decisions is getting shorter and shorter. This is the new way of the world. If companies Leaders can function rationally. When all hell's breaking loose, that's an opportunity for a competitive advantage because other people may not be thinking rationally. So I think the two things are accept the difficulties are part of life and acknowledge that they are opportunities for us to grow or me to grow or team to grow. And all that's in my book. I'm going to plug it in. Defensive adversity, turning your toughest challenges into your greatest success.

Freaking love it. I don't know if you were paying attention ladies and gentlemen, but Steve dropped a lot of insight. I'd say come back and listen to this again because all 30 minutes he was giving us something. I have two pages of notes of everything that Steve was talking about. Steve, where can people find you? Where can we follow you?

Yeah, go to my website www.gavaturta.com that's my last name. G A V A T O R T a dot com. My email address is very simple. My first name at my last name dot com Steve Torta dot com. You can feel free to google me as well. You can find my contact information there. You can find information about my books. I'm a two time soon to be three time published authority. There's plenty of videos out there that I have a nice YouTube site. There's plenty of self help personal professional development videos I have up on my site for free. So just feel free to google me as well too. And there's a plethora of information. You can learn more about me, my capabilities and credentials, but also learn some good helpful skills and insights that you may need for yourself depending upon what you're facing in your life.

There you go. And I'll drop a lot of those links here on the podcast website. Definitely go get the book. I'll have a link to the book there. Or if you're an audible person like me, go download it and listen. You won't regret it. Mr. Steve Gavator. I appreciate you brother. I appreciate you more than you. For all the listeners, remember your because is your superpower. Unleash it. Until next time, this is Mick Unplugged. We'll talk soon.

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