Start With A Win - The Five Steps to Overcoming Adversity

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Tony Giordano is a top real estate agent, business consultant, renowned international speaker and owner of four successful businesses. He is a national and international best-selling author of the books 'the social agent,’ which teaches clients, and sales professionals the correct ways to integrate online presence and grow their business. Tony is also passionate about helping others find success through his company, R.I.S.E. Coaching.Adam and Tony talk about overcoming adversity and why we should even welcome setbacks in life. Because extraordinary success doesn’t come without a lot of failure. Tony even says, “I hope you fail so much in your life because that means you tried." Tony encourages listeners to not become the people who never try because they’re afraid of failing—or who immediately quit after a setback. “You just have to be willing to get back up and take the hit.”Overcoming adversity begins with mindset. You must always have the mindset of being willing to accept setbacks. Having a positive mindset like that is what gets us through the setback. Tony also warns of the “naysayers” in our lives. Most people are afraid because they have people in their life who are always telling them they can’t or shouldn’t do something because it’s too risky. When we let these voices live in our minds, they compete against that positive mindset we’ve worked so hard to cultivate. “Anyone who tells you you can’t succeed in something is never anyone who has succeeded,” says Tony. He encourages us to surround ourselves with people who have succeeded and who will propel us toward our own success.Tony walks listeners through his method to overcoming adversity called the Five Rounds to Success. The same way a UFC or MMA fighter faces an opponent in the octagon, we face adversity in life.Size Up: How we’re testedMind Set: How we respondAccountability: How we learn Heart: How we overcomeFinish: How we succeed and winEvery day we get another opponent—or three. If you follow these steps, you will succeed.Episode Links:RiseMastery.com  Discount code: TGVIPhttps://www.giordano.globalhttps://www.facebook.com/GiordanoIntlhttps://www.instagram.com/tony_giordano/Order your copy of Start With A Win: Tools and Lessons to Create Personal and Business Success:https://www.startwithawin.com/bookConnect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/https://www.facebook.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://twitter.com/AdamContosCEOhttps://www.instagram.com/adamcontosceo/

Welcome to Start With A Win, where we give you the tools and lessons you need to create business and personal success. Are you ready? Let's do this. Coming to you from Brand Viva Media Studios, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win with producer Mark in the studio here. How are you doing, buddy? Hey, I'm doing so good. We had some tech issues, which I want to encourage everybody, as you're creating your content and you're making videos and you're doing podcasts and doing all this stuff, right? You're going to run into tech issues from time to time and you can't be discouraged. You got to push through the pain and you got to hope you have great guests like Tony.

It sticks by you and hangs on. Tony, you've been on the podcast before. So, you know, it's like a three-peat, I think. I don't know, something like that. You've, you know, no introduction really needed. We're really appreciative that you're here and, you know, just looking forward to having a great conversation. I was talking with Adam, you know, the last time we had you on, we talked about a lot of great, great ideas and concepts. And one of the things that have kind of been hitting home and things that I've been experiencing lately as far as feedback from people in my sphere and other business owners is, you know, sometimes when you hit difficult times, you lose a lot of steam and you get discouraged. And so, you know, how do

we pull ourselves out of that? And sometimes we just need to hear from other people who have struggled in the past and overcome those struggles to kind of give us hope to keep moving forward. And so I thought, hey, I know Tony has a great story. I know that he has talked more about this and other venues, but not so much on Start With a Win, so I thought it'd be great to have you back so we could have a deeper conversation, and here we are. Right on. Tony, welcome.

By the way, for those of you that don't know, Tony is an expert in real estate. He's known globally as one of the top minds in real estate. Also, he's an expert in blockchain, cryptocurrency, NFTs, things of that nature. But really, what Tony does more than anything is he helps people find success through his coaching company, Rise. It's risemastery.com, Rise Coaching. So, Tony, like Mark said, we experienced a little bit of a tech setback this morning. But ultimately, having been a CEO and you're a CEO of your company, should we look for challenges to happen? What is your perspective on that?

Because people all the time stumble. They have problems, whatever. It's like it ruins their day and you think ruins their life. What's your take on setbacks? You have to welcome them because there's no such thing as having a life for a business without setbacks. The problem is that when somebody gets their first setback, they immediately think, well, because I have failed now at this particular thing I was working on, that means I'm a failure. And that's where quitting starts to come into play. But as I've told my son before, like my son has flat out asked me before

after a soccer game because he didn't score a point and he got hurt or whatever, and maybe they lost three games in a row, am I a failure, dad? And most people at that point would be like, no. But I said, I hope so. I hope you're a failure. I hope you fail so much in your life. I said, because that means you tried. The problem is, is the people who never try because they're afraid of failure or the people who quit after they've experienced that setback. I go, but there's not one example out there, son, or anybody listening to this right now. You cannot tell me one example of extraordinary success that didn't come with so much failure for that person getting to the point of their success. There's not one example. Everyone has to fail. That is the first step to succeeding is failure. It's actually step one. I have talked about the real estate space. I know you were just on one of Remax's broadcasts not

long ago. But ultimately, and by the way, we even had you come and keynote at our international convention here. I mean, just for crying out loud, there are a lot of people that are entrepreneurs that are like, oh, this is really hard. And you're like, yep. I mean, how should an entrepreneur or a business person look at that failure also? Because it seems like everybody's so afraid of, you know, they don't want a cold call. They don't want a door knocker. They don't want to, um, and even just sit down with a client and people are afraid of putting numbers in front of people. I don't, I don't know. It's just kind of they're risk averse, I guess. What do you have to say to them? Well, it kind of just goes back to what I said in the sense of welcoming setback.

But in order to be able to welcome setback, you have to have the mindset to be strong enough to start with mindset, always. The most that we can do if we have a negative mindset is very little. But what we can do when we have a positive mindset that welcomes that setback, then the positive mindset is what gets us to the next steps, it gets us through it. So I would say, don't be afraid of it. And I would say that, you know, you kind of asked it in a way, you know, when you're thinking about entrepreneurs, and they're trying to develop something is, I think that most people are afraid because everyone has naysayers in their life. So when the naysayers say, yeah, right. Or, or they hear that that person probably doesn't think that they can achieve it. Or their parents said, can't you

just be a doctor instead of an entrepreneur? Like, why do you have these goals of having all these different things in your life? Like whatever it might be, all of us have naysayers. So when we let the naysayer in our mind, it's hard to create the positive mindset. So what I try to tell people is anyone who is a naysayer, anyone who tells you you can't succeed in something or believes you can't succeed in something is never anyone who's succeeded. No one who has succeeded will ever tell you, no, you can't do like, so when you think about the people who are the naysayers, almost all of them have not succeeded. They don't have big goals. They don't have, and whatever it might be, but they, you have to remember that. So if you,

if you look at the situation, if you look at the person, it should make you positive because now you know that person hasn't succeeded. So now I'm going to surround myself by people who have succeeded, who will help propel me to all the different things I want. It's all going back to who's in our circle. I like that. I want to break down. You mentioned the word mindset a couple of times. We've got these differing mindsets in society when it comes to somebody not succeeding or something, or they broke it, or they failed, or whatever. And it seems like we immediately label them a bad person, or a poor performer, or there's some negative we throw at that. I mean, it just, and that's what sells,

you know, press. That's when, you know, you get the article feed of the different blogs or the industry news of whatever industry you're in and, you know, such and such failed at this. And we love to throw that out there. Why, I mean, why are we so obsessed with this negativity when you're right? So many of the people that are involved in it obsessed with this negativity when you're right? So many of the people that are involved in it are like, hey, you know what? I just learned something. I'm positive about this. I'm going to move on.

Why do we have to always try and turn this negative? Any ideas on that? Well, I think it's because of the people who are negative, meaning if you are naturally somebody who's afraid of failure, then you want to only hear about other people failing. So that's what people watch. The majority of the world are not very successful. They have dreams and goals, but they're not willing to do it. So when you know that the majority of the human race are not going after their goals at a high level, then that's why the media and the news and everybody feed to them. Well, who, what do people mostly want to hear on the news today?

Well, mostly people are negative because of their surroundings and not hitting their dreams. So of course, they're only going to want to hear the negative news to make them feel better about their situation or their life. And, and so I think that that's just my take on on this whole thing at r4 at the at the remax r4 when i was a keynote i spoke on two different topics one was the cryptocurrency keynote but the other keynote was the five rounds to success and you're literally hitting everything on the questions you're asking me of what i was actually teaching that day. I believe we are all born, it's kind of surrounded by boxing and mixed martial arts and the UFC. And so what I educate people on is you don't have to be into fighting, you don't have to be into the UFC or anything, but I call it,

you know, in the UFC, they call it the octagon, that two fighters get in that cage that has eight sides and they're locked in and anything goes for the most part. Well, the same way a fighter faces an opponent is the same way we face adversity in life. So if a main UFC fight is five rounds, then I believe the same thing a fighter is doing in the cage is the same five steps we have to take to overcome any adversity and I call adversities our life's opponents and we are all born into an imperfect octagon of life a symbolic octagon that we never get to leave never because anybody who's imperfect has adversity coming to them always, no matter how successful they are. So you can't tell me, well, I don't want to be in a cage my whole life. You're

in a cage. It's called imperfection. It's the life we have. No one's perfect, which means you can have physical opponents. You could have mental opponents. You could have spiritual opponents. It's going to happen. So until we die, we are in an octagon of adversity, a life of adversity. So if you're willing to accept that, then what I say is accept and do the same thing a fighter does. So I call, I break down the five rounds. Round one is size up, how we're tested. So when a fighter gets in, you'll sometimes see them kind of just sizing each other up in that first 30 seconds, looking at each other's feet, looking at their surroundings, seeing if the guy's confident in

his eyes or her eyes. Like, are you scared of me? Do you already have fear? So when opponents in life face me, I close my eyes and I literally pretend I'm in the cage. And so let's talk about a business adversity two years ago, COVID. So when COVID broke out, I closed my eyes and I pretended that this massive giant with huge muscles came into my octagon wearing a t-shirt that said, COVID, your business is screwed. Wow. Right. And I looked at that and I said, okay, size it up, Tony, you're going to have to size this up. What is it? Is it really going to cause a housing crisis? And so I had to size it up. I did research on it. I researched the Spanish influenza. I looked at what happened to the stock market in 1918 during the Spanish influenza that killed 400 million people when the world population was only 2.8 billion. And the economy actually had some bad moments and then skyrocketed. So did housing after it. So I was like, I don't see that this is actually going to cause what everybody thinks it's going to cause. And then round two, mindset. Now that I've sized up my opponent, now I have to have

the positive mindset on how I'm going to respond to the adversity. Round three, accountability, how we learn the mistakes we make. We're holding ourselves accountable to achieve our goals. Round four, heart, how we overcome. That's where the fighters who can make it to four rounds, those fighters have cardio. So you'll hear the commentator say, well, if we know he's going to win this fight, he's going to have to do it in round two because we know he tires out in round four or five, but the fighter he's facing, we know that they can go all five rounds. So blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So we have to make sure we have the heart for it to overcome our adversity. And then round five is finally how

we finish is how we win. So any adversity we're faced with, and I have been faced with tons of adversity, both in my personal life and business life, I followed those five steps in order to overcome it. And it works. It works every time. Like I don't know how else to say it besides face your opponents just like a fighter does. So let me go through these real quick with you. So number one is size up. What's number two again? Mindset, how we respond. I love that. So I call it size up, how we are tested. Round two, mindset, how we respond. Round three, accountability, how we learn. See, we always think of a negative thing when we think of accountability. Everybody, you know what? I'm accountable for that. My bad. My mistake. Oh, I got to hold myself accountable for that failure or my team not doing well.

My bad. Well, yeah, we have to hold ourselves accountable for our mistakes, but why are we only ever using that word that way? Why aren't we holding ourselves accountable to achieve our dreams? Like, why aren't we holding ourselves accountable to keep moving forward? Forget the mistakes. Hold yourself accountable to create the legacy you want for your family. Round four, heart, how we overcome, and then round five, finish, how we succeed and win. And you're going to get, no matter when you get into the octagon, you're going to get punched. You're going to get hurt during this struggle, even if... And we don't get to choose when we go in the octagon. We're in the octagon, we're in the octagon. What I'm saying is we have to constantly face another opponent. Every day we get another

opponent. Sometimes we have to face three at the same time. It's three against one. But if you follow these now, never, when I talk about this, do I ever want anyone to think when they hear what I've gone through in my life, that I'm trying to say my life has been worse than yours and I have faced worse opponents because guaranteed I have not faced worse opponents than people who are listening to this. Who knows? There's no question. We have unequal opponents. The key is no matter if yours is 20 times worse than my opponent, if you follow these five steps, you will succeed. It just might be longer rounds. Round one might last a few years before you're able to go to round two. And then a smaller opponent, you might get through the first

four rounds immediately because it's not that big of an opponent. You're stronger than it. So I think that's the key is just knowing we're not talking about who's got a worse life. We're talking about the steps to overcome anything is the same. Okay. So, and this is, I love this. This is fascinating to me. You know, mindset is its own in there. However, obviously there's mindset and all of these because we all get into our own heads. Talk to me about us personally being our own opponent a lot also. So this keynote is usually about three to four hours long because I go deep in my own personal life and then I break down each round. But in round two, when I'm talking about that for 20 minutes, I go deep and say that you can't play victim first and foremost. And when we play victim, when we say, why me instead of I will, when we are a why me,

woe is me. I'm a victim. The banks are bad bad i lost everything in the 08 crash i'm still digging out of that hole why me i only did what everybody then we're putting it as two against one or when we face an opponent and we're sizing up the opponent and we feel like we're confident now we get to go to round two but our mindset's not there We don't believe we can actually take this opponent down. So that's when you get ready to take a hit and you go, no, he's way stronger. I'm going to back up. I'm going to back out of this. And now it's two against one. Your brain's playing games on you and the opponent is still playing games on you. We cannot make it two against one. We have to have the powerful mindset to stay positive. And it's not easy. We know that, you know that. It is so hard to stay

positive in a world that we live in where we have to wake up and hear about 20 children being shot to death at an elementary school because some teenager had a really bad day and had access to daddy's guns. Like, how are you supposed to stay positive with something like that and go on with your day? Well, I'm going to be negative for a moment. I'm going to be angry that it happened. But the sooner I can get positive about it by thinking, how can I have a positive response to this? Oh, I was bullied when I was a kid. So yes, this was sad, but how can I help prevent it? How can I make just a little possible prevention of it happening again? Maybe I should go back to the elementary schools I went to school at that I was bullied at and maybe not charge them to come and speak to their children at the

school, at the assembly and say, I was bullied. I had bad thoughts when I was a kid because I was constantly bullied, but look at my life. And it's because I would never allow people to ruin my dream and knowing what I, what I could do. So I surrounded myself by people who supported me and I didn't care about the naysayers. So now I've turned something so negative into maybe a positive outcome because now I'm doing something about it. I'm not just angry about it and saying, yep, see, this life sucks. Why should I even try to aspire for anything? Gotcha. I mean, this is fascinating because, you know, we get into this mental match with ourselves all the time. The majority of these problems,

almost every single one of these problems are not life or death situations. They're all recoverable from, for the most part. And it's really, really interesting what you talked about in setting this up. You know, I wanted to take in, before we get to our final question, I have one more content question for you here. And that's, we're going through a situation right now in all of our lives where we have, you know, like you look at the real estate space and there's adjustments in, you know, there's increases in interest rates. There's, you know, everybody's like predicting some sort of, you know, slowdown in the real estate market, which we know it's going to, you know, kind of simmer down. Exactly. There's S curves in everything. It's always, there's always a cycle. The economy, if you look

at the economy and the, you know the economic headwinds that we have, and whatever else you want to throw at this. I mean, you could sit down and list a number of situations that anybody and everybody listening to this is going to face, up to and including if you're in Ukraine, you've got a completely different situation or something like that you're dealing with here. But there's always another one, there's always another octagon you're stepping into. And I know you've mentioned that. What can we do when we hold up the mirror in the morning and look at ourselves and go,

here's how I'm going to prepare for that next fight. Here's how I'm going to be better than the last one. Here's how I'm going to be ready for the next one. What do you have to tell our listeners that gets them ready for the next fight? Goes back to the first thing you said at the beginning, welcome setback. And then that is where we, round three, the accountability, how we learn. So if we think of previous round success, previous fight success, it makes us more confident that we start to be prepared for anything that's phased us. Do you realize I am not phased by anything anymore? and I used to play victim and my mindset wasn't there. There is nothing that can come at me in my octagon of life that I'm going to be running away from. I'm going to size it up. I'm going to have the mindset that I can overcome it. I'm going to hold myself accountable to do it.

I'm going to have the heart to overcome and I'm going to win. The only thing, maybe this is what makes, maybe this is all we need to say to answer your question actually right now. When they look in the mirror, the only opponent you cannot beat is death. So if you don't have somebody walk into your octagon with a t-shirt that says death, which you won't even see because you died, right? Then anything else that they're wearing on their shirt is we're able to overcome. When my mom, we unfortunately, we lost her nine years ago tomorrow and it was extremely hard for me. But when she got the news that she had cancer,

then she had to close her eyes and see some big opponent come in that had the word cancer. I had to also see the same opponent come into my cage that said, mom has cancer, size it up. Mindset, we can do this. Let's hold ourself accountable. Let's have the heart mom. But eventually, eventually she was in like round four, right? Moving into round five. And all of a sudden the person took the shirt off and underneath the shirt that said cancer was death. Like eventually you can't beat death, right? So that means anything that comes out you, you can overcome. I love it. And you have, just like you just said, you have overcome everything that you've been up against to this point in life. No, I am still, when I show what I've gone through in my life in this presentation,

and it is also in my coaching curriculum. So when you sign up for my coaching program, you get access to this massive curriculum that you can just watch and, and listen to whenever you want and have all these previous things that I've taught and new ones each month that I'm teaching. And in there, uh, the, the, the whole thing behind, uh, all of the things I've gone through is when I tell an audience, by the way, I'm still in round two on some of this, on this list, I'm still in round three, by the way, I'm still in round five on all of it. I don't think I've truly beat it yet, but because maybe it's still in my

mind or something like that, but I know that I just keep, I keep fighting. I keep going through the steps. So some things I'm in round two, uh, I would say I'm in round three for, uh, abandonment, like as a young kid, uh, I'm probably in round four for the way I was raised, uh, and still trying to figure out how to overcome the issues maybe that it's caused me. All those different things. But then there's opponents that I beat every day that just face me. I love that because you're right. When you wake up in the morning, your challenges are not gone.

You're still in the octagon with so many. So that's a great point, Tony. Thank you. So I have a final question for you here. But before we get into that, I do want to ask you this. Rise Coaching. If somebody wants to look into Rise Coaching and your organization, where can they do that and what can they expect to see? Yeah. So risemastery.com kind of just breaks down simply my coaching program in the sense that I have group program and I have individual one-on-one program.

The group program is my baby. Like this is something that is very inexpensive for how much value it gives people. It's just that you're on these live coaching sessions where there's a bunch of other people on it as well. But you're learning stuff to turn around and go out and you have access to everything. That is what is most common that people sign up for. And so when you go to RiseMastery.com, you hit group coaching, read everything that that page says, what you get, who I am. And at the very bottom, you'll see step one, fill out your information. Step two is where you'll see the price of $199 a month. I'm telling you this for a reason. In that step number two

field, down at the bottom, you will see something that says enter discount code. If anybody on this that's listening enters TGVIP, TGVIP, one word, Tony Giordano, and then you're my VIP, the very important person. One word, TGVIP. You will see the price change from $199 to $62 a month for everything that that page says you get. RISE stands for Relevant Innovative Skill Enhancement. That's why it's called RISE, and it's an abbreviation for first, rise up. But at the same time, relevant is everything. Being innovative is everything.

Having skill enhancement always on your mind to enhance your skill set is everything. So that's my program. Awesome. And Tony, I know we've asked you this before, so I'm not going to ask you again, how do you start your day with a win? But I do have a question for you that I think is pertinent to everybody. How do you recommend our listeners start with a win? Start your morning with just, this is actually something my wife taught me that she was watching

something I think on Instagram several years ago and it showed this army general or maybe it was a marine and he's a motivational speaker and he just said, start every day by just making your bed. Oh, that was a Navy SEAL commander. Yeah. Okay. Do not walk away. Do not go into the bathroom to take your shower. Do not go downstairs to get your coffee. The first thing you should do, the second you get out of bed, by the way, that's your first win. I love it right out of the gate. You got out of bed, but now create the second win of something you're actually going to do and make your bed. It's something psychologically, what it does to move our day forward. Now we've already started with a couple of cool wins. Um, I would

just say something like something that simple and then, and then affirmations and feeling positive and you know, don't turn on the news in the morning turn on cnbc turn on bloomberg but don't turn on your local news to hear about somebody being mugged and all the problems in our world immediately if you're going to listen to news in the morning listen to the thing that you chose to do for a career which is business i love it t Tony Giordano, great friend of ours. I mean, just a wonderful human being, a winner, a fighter and a survivor. Thank you so much for being on Start With A people. And head over to startwithwin.com where you get more great content and you can connect with Adam on the platforms. Get on to where you order your books and download that book. The audio book's coming out soon, right?

It's already out. It's already out. Audible. Okay, Audible. If you don't like reading, you can listen to it. There we go. That's right. Until next time, guys, remember, start with a win.