Finding Your Summit

138: Unstoppable Tracy: Public Speaking, TV Show Host of ‘Unstoppable You,’ Business Transformation Consultant, and Best-Selling Author, talks about how she overcame the physical obstacles that came with being born missing both legs above the knee, missing her left arm above the elbow and missing her right hand.

Unstoppable Tracy

Unstoppable Tracy may have been born missing both legs above the knee, missing her left arm above the elbow and missing her right hand. But when it came to achieving her dreams, nothing would stand in her way. “I believe I’m unstoppable and that you are unstoppable for reasons much bigger than being a four-way amputee. There is like this big secret. I was born ‘limb,’ l-i-m-b, ‘limitless. And the bonus is I was born limitless. But the bigger secret is you were born limitless. We were all born limitless.”

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Unstoppable Tracy, Public Speaking, TV Show Host of ‘Unstoppable You,’ Business Transformation Consultant, and Best-Selling Author. Unstoppable Tracy let’s it be known where she gets the fierceness from to never back down or give up. “I had a mom that was born in Liverpool and a German dad and there was a lot of tough love in my house. At five-years-old I had to make my bed.”

What You Will Learn:

Unstoppable Tracy talks about figuring things out that she didn’t know how to accomplish right in the moment without entertaining any limitations. “That’s kind of what happened when I skiied, and when I sailed, and when I climbed the Himalayas, and when I bused and Ubered into Canada, and when I helped the airlines with pilot strikes and bankruptcies, growing from young to old, through sports and through business or humanitarian in 20 countries.”

How did it all work for Unstoppable Tracy in school to write without physically having hands? “Maybe we are talking about kindergarten where I am learning about how to read and write. But what are some of the new skills your learning, which is like being back in grade one where you are learning new skills? And to listen that way and just to say, I was born this way. I just expected like they’re eating with a fork so I got to figure out how to eat with a fork. They have a cookie so I just want to eat a cookie. So in some ways, I was blessed just to be born this way because I just looked at it as, well, of course I can do it.”

Unstoppable Tracy talks about how she acquired tools to pick things up. “Doctors, they glued steel circles on a fork on a pencil, on a knife, on a toothbrush, on a hair brush and it was kind of like, why don’t we just make one device with the circle and I wear that all the time? And so all I needed was an opposition device for that one longer arm with a bit of a digit there so I can hold my pen, my pencil, my tooth brush, and my glass of water.”

How did she get to the point of putting herself out there on the worldwide stage with her ambitious accomplishments? “I cannot begin to judge some of the horrible, painful things, and illnesses and community circumstances and what is going on in your worlds. I don’t mean to judge what it means to have something where you say it is not realistic right now to spend that money. It is not realistic right now to take on that health regime. It is not realistic for me. But, I know that because I live a life of no excuses, even if I’m allowed. Even if there is every reason in the world that no one would judge me. If I live a life of no excuses, then I get to live a life of no limits. No excuses...no limits.”

Unstoppable Tracy shares the upward progressions she made, how acquiring certain skills would lead to opportunities to acquire others. “Because I could swim I could fall out of a boat and because I could fall out of a boat I could spend a whole summer figuring out how to get back in that boat. It wasn’t the first try. Because I could sail I could teach sailing as a teenager and because I could teach sailing I could get my teaching degree. I could demonstrate teaching competency so I got into teacher’s college. Because I got into teacher’s college, I graduated with a degree from Queens, a well-recognized university in Canada, and I ended up teaching in Nepal, in Uganda, in Mexico in Jamaica. I tought all around the world as this humanitarian.”

From Unstoppable Tracy to Unstoppable You

What was the transition that expanded Tracy’s outlook on her work? “I realised, this isn’t about me. It is not about ‘I can do it.’ It’s about ‘We can do it,’ you know? It’s about if I can do it you can do it, no excuses. We can all do it. No, limits, right? But it took me to like, 40 to figure that out that it isn’t about unstoppable me. It was like an extended teenaged headspace I think somehow.”

Canadian Hall of Fame

During this episode...

135: Scott Kujak: Author of Underdog: True Stories of Overcoming Adversity, Podcast Host of Underdog, and Territory Sales Executive at Beckman Coulter, talks about how he overcame the low points of his life, from his wife leaving him to losing his friend and inspiration Phil Taylor to cancer.

Scott Kujak

Scott Kujak is an ex-college football player who has gone on to live a life of lifting up those that have faced adversities head on. Hear how the obstacles that prevented him from attending his first choice for college, Texas Christian University, where he had a partial academic scholarship and a preferred walk-on position on the football team waiting for him. “I actually grew up in an impoverished area in Florida and just with my own financial circumstances and my family dynamics I was not able to attend TCU and cover the rest of the tuition. So, I went to Eastern Illinois University where I had a full ride offer and went there and played quarterback. I was actually backup for Jimmy Garoppolo, who is the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers right now.”

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Scott Kujak, Author of Underdog: True Stories of Overcoming Adversity, Podcast Host of Underdog, and Territory Sales Executive at Beckman Coulter about his football experiences, and how his friend Phil Taylor, who died at age 25, was a huge inspiration when Scott was overcoming what he defined as the worst time of his life in 2016, when his ex-wife left him abruptly for good. “With Phil, he was also going through the worst time of his life. He was undergoing tremendous stomach pain and he didn't understand why. A couple of months later, he went to the doctor and they told him he had a large tumor blocking his large intestine. Although we were going through two separate scenarios, we experienced a lot of the same emotions of doubt and anger and ‘what the heck is going on?’ Yet, his reaction to those emotions was often much different than mine. He often looked at it in a way of positivity and optimism.”

What You Will Learn:

Scott Kujak talks about what he learned in terms of how to cope with adversity. “You can always make something good out of it. It doesn’t matter what you are going through. Cancer, someone dies in a car accident, you get walked out on, you have a devastating sports injury. No matter what the pain is that you face, whether it is physical, emotional, spiritual, you can respond in a way that makes a positive impact on the world.”

What did Scott’s friend Phil Taylor mean to him? “Phil is a perfect example of someone who touches your life and just had a profound impact that he knew during the last couple of years of his life. But he won’t know the huge impact because he passed away.”

Scott Kujak talks about how Phil Taylor helped inspire his podcast Underdog. “I thought, man, he has had such an immediate impact on his circle of friends and family. What if I got his message out there to the broader public. How do I do that? I thought of podcasts because I listen to a lot of podcasts, especially when I drive and I thought, I’m not just going to interview Phil and be done with it. Why don’t I interview people who have overcome many different types of adversity?”

What was it like having Chris Norton, who has also been a guest on Finding Your Summit Podcast, as a podcast guest on Scott’s show Underdog? “One of his PR people reached out to me and when I read about his story, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. Yeah. He has got to come on the show.’ Chris was playing football in college, just like you and I. He was at a D3 school in Iowa, and he was on a kickoff team and went to make a tackle and everything changed for him in a second. Bad tackle gone wrong. He was paralysized from the neck down, never to really walk or live on his own again.”

What about Scott Kujak’s podcast is therapeutic for him? “Common ground. I think it lays a nice foundation of common ground between us and whoever we interview across the world because we realise no matter how big or how small the name is, the person that we are interviewing, there are very common emotions that we all go through that no matter what the situation is, we can empathize with them. We realise, hey, what I went through, maybe compares or doesn’t compare at all to what another person went through. Like they had it way worse and yet they responded in a much more positive way and I can try to emulate that.”

Scott’s Fiancé

Scott Kujak went from heartbreak with the end of his prior marriage to having his heart reunited with love thanks to his new fiancé. “She has been nothing short of amazing and just filled with grace and patience and love for me and for many, many others. She is without a doubt a Godsend and an angel to me. She has lifted me up at times when I felt down and she supports me and...

In this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Mike Ramos, Retired Olympic Decathlete who competed on the USA team. How did Mike move from high school sports to NCAA-level college track?

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with an extremely busy man, Justin Batt, Founder and Chief Daddy Officer at Daddy Saturday, Father of Four, Best-Selling Author, TEDx Speaker, Managing Partner at Hayden Olivia Bridal, and President Growth and Revenue at Kameleon Partners. Being intentional about his activities with his kids on those Saturdays was vastly improving his engagement and connection with them, while improving his relationship with his wife

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Leon Logothetis, Author, TV Host, Cause Adventurer, Motivational Speaker and Philanthropist. Leon talks about how he overcame feeling lost, depressed, isolated, resistant to share his pain with others, until he came across the movie The Motorcycle Diaries.

131: Gary Vitti: Former Head Trainer of the Los Angeles Lakers from 1984-2016, Author of the book "32 Years of Titles and Tears From the Best Seat in the House", shares stories of Shaq, Kobe, Magic, Kareem & others while experiencing the highs and lows while winning multiple championships. What a life!

Gary Vitti

Imagine becoming a head trainer in an era where there wasn’t a clear path to this position. Gary Vitti shares what it was like to navigate the world of sports during the 1970s and the 1980s. “I graduated from college in 1976, which means I went in ‘72 and although there has been athletic trainers around since the gladiators, a real major in athletic training at the college level, evidence-based practices of sports medicine really didn’t exist. There weren’t that many athletic training programs in the 70s. In terms of myself at that age at 18 years old I didn’t even know what an athletic trainer was.”

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Gary Vitti, Head Trainer of the Los Angeles Lakers, working with 13 different coaches and achieving eight championships. Gary Vitti discusses working toward wanting to work in academia for a Division I university to transitioning into the upper echelon of sports, training superstar NBA players like Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul Jabar, Kobe Bryant, and James Worthy for one of the biggest franchises in sports history. “If Shaq decided he wanted to win every game, we would have won every game. That is how great he was. But he had a different thing in life. He didn’t care about being the best.”

What You Will Learn:

Gary Vitti talks about how the Lakers rolled out the red carpet for him to get the head athletic trainer position, including interviewing for six hours. “They sent me a first-class ticket. I’d never flown first class before. So that was pretty cool. Believe it or not, Jerry West picked me up at the airport in a navy blue Mercedes with tan interior. I had never been in a Mercedes before and Jerry West is driving. My childhood idol Jerry West picks me up at the airport, drives me to the fabulous Forum and it just happens to be that that day is the day that USA basketball was playing Spain for the gold medal in the 1984 Olympics.”

Gary Vitti discusses writing his book 32 Years of Titles and Tears From the Best Seat in the House that covers his experiences with the Los Angeles Lakers and sports science. “The book is a series of chapters about what I learned about happiness, greatness, and leadership. What Kobe taught me was that you can never have enough talent. But talent is the most overrated thing in life. What if I told you, are you ready for this? Kobe wasn’t that talented...Nobody worked harder than Kobe. But a lot of players work hard. In addition to working hard, Kobe worked intelligently. He was really smart about how he expended his energy.”

Gary’s talks about Bill Sharman. “The Lakers played the Celtics and the Knicks I think seven times and could not win a championship until Bill Sharman showed up. So people that don’t know Bill Sharman, Bill Sharman is one of three people in the Hall of Fame, Nesmith Hall of Fame, that are in there as both a player and a coach. There are only three people that are in that way. He is also one of the only people that ever played professional baseball at the major league level and professional basketball. He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Celtics.”

Was it Pat Riley’s intensity or was it Earvin ‘Magic’ Johnson’s intensity that created that dynamic that the Lakers had? “West took Riley out of the broadcast booth and made him an assistant coach. After West had actually won the championship in ‘80. So, they drafted Magic in ‘79, won the championship that same year 79-80, because it crosses the new year. Then going into the next year, they fire West and make Pat Riley the head coach. Then he brings in Bill Bertka. Then they go on to have basically the rest of the decade, for the most part, being on top. Winning 5 championships from 79’-89.”

Gary Vitti explains his major respect for Karrem Abdul Jabar’s athletic prowess and success. “I make a very strong argument in the book that Kareem Abdul Jabar may not only be the greatest basketball player that has ever played the game. But he may be the most successful athlete to ever walk the planet. If you look at what he has accomplished in sports from the time that he was a child, he has won everything. Everything that you could possibly win and he has done it multiple times. He was in the playoffs 18 times out of 20 years. He has six championships with two teams. When he retired, we never won again, until the Kobe/Shaq era. So, even though Magic was still playing, he didn’t win without Kareem.”

Pieces of the Puzzle

Gary Vitti compares being on a team to a puzzle....

Anthony Trucks
Anthony Trucks talks about overcoming foster care and then coping with having to transition after having a short professional NFL football career. “I came out of the NFL and I toured shorter. So it ended before I wanted it to, which is even worse, because I didn’t go out of my own doing. And then I tried to find myself again and unfortunately in doing so, I found that I lost a lot. Because for me it’s like I knew what I had to put in. I earned my keep in football, right? Then all of a sudden I’m in this realm where it’s like...the real world.” 
 
On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Anthony Trucks, Retired NFL Player for the Buccaneers, Redskins, and Steelers, President & CEO of Anthony Trucks Industries, Author, Speaker, Coach, and Current American Ninja Warrior on NBC. Anthony Trucks started his own businesses and become a motivational speaker for others to benefit from. “I think a lot of people think it has to be sports or military. It could be a mom. All of a sudden your kids go to college. Who are you without driving people around all day? Maybe if you are a dad and all of a sudden you retire. Or you are a dad and your kid doesn’t need you to coach anymore. We always have these shifts and people attribute them to just the sports world. But its humanity.” 
 
What You Will Learn:
 
Anthony Trucks shares the physical, mental, and emotional hardships of his early life in foster care. “It was just a level of not feeling secure, not feeling stable, not feeling loved. I bounced around from house to house for three years, six different homes I was in. A lot of them were just bad people. Be starved, torchered me, like weird stuff as a kid. At six years old I got put in my family, which is my family to this day. I was not adopted until I was 14 though. So everyday you have no idea. ‘Am I going to go back to foster care, in a different house?’”
 
Why did it take eight years for Anthony Trucks to get fully adopted by his current foster family? “For eight years I was in that house but my real mom had what’s called parental rights. Which means that she can control what I can and can’t do. Couldn’t play sports. Couldn’t take trips. Couldn’t get adopted. And so at 14, I finally let the family love me. Because for a lot of years I always wanted to go back to my real mom and I think we don’t realise that sometimes the thing you want so bad is not the greatest for you.”
 
Anthony Trucks talks about getting arrested as a kid after hanging out with the wrong crowd and breaking into cars, which he still regrets to this day. He shares how his mindstate at that time shifted between the feeling that being a foster kid set up his life for failure and having doubt that he deserved the chance to have a good life. “‘You’re a foster kid Ant and what do foster kids do?’ You look at any prison in American, 75% of the inmates are former foster kids. Like 50% of the homeless population...foster kids. Less than 1% of us ever graduate college. So I’m not numerically set up to do anything well.”
 
How does Anthony define real love? “I think real love has to be tough because everybody can give you false love which makes you feel good all the time. But love is like, ‘I want you to be better,’ and usually it means breaking you from the direction you feel comfortable going because that is not taking you where you want to go.”
 

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Gus Frerotte, Retired NFL Quarterback for the Broncos, Dolphins, Vikings, Redskins, Bengals, Lions, and Rams, Podcast Host, Partner at ProDayExperience.com, and President of Business Development for the startup RC21X who developed a tool for brain performance monitoring. Gus Frerotte shares his career in athletics, overcoming adversity and the idea behind coming up with his podcast Huddle Up with Gus with his co-host Dave Hager.

128: Patrick Sweeney: Fear Guru, Keynote Speaker, Author, and TEDx Speaker helping companies create a culture of courage, shares how he managed to go from overcoming an exhaustive work-over-everything mentality and being consumed by fear to aligning his life with balance, family, and courage.

Patrick Sweeney

Patrick Sweeney, who grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, and was diagnosed with leukemia. “I was born first generation Irish immigrants in Boston, blue-collar neighborhood. My parents didn’t go to college or anything like that. My dad is working three jobs. I had a really rough time growing up. But I had a bunch of trauma events as a child that planted this seed of terror in me.” In order to create an image to protect himself with when he was younger, Patrick trained for the Olympics for six years, coming in second in the Olympic trials, 10th in the world, rowed the World Cup for three years, and started three technology companies, raising over $50 million dollars.

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Patrick Sweeney, Fear Guru, Keynote Speaker, Author, and TEDx Speaker who is helping companies create a culture of courage. Patrick discusses the importance of seeing what is on the other side of fear and embracing the things that we are depriving ourselves of. “I learned that if I was going to live life, I had to choose courage instead of succumbing to fear all the time.”

What You Will Learn:

Patrick Sweeney discusses the book he has been writing about fear. “As I started to learn more about courage and that sort of thing, I’ve interviewed now over 36 neuroscientists over the past five years for this book Fear is Fuel, which is coming out in January (2020). And during that time, one thing that is clear to me is that we all have something I call a ‘fear frontier.’ So, before you are 10 or 12 years old, you have an event or a series of events that you have to create a defense mechanism to.”

What was the root of all of his fear as he sees it? “I saw a plane crash when I was 7 years old and that planted that seed of terror inside me and so, two things happen when a traumatic event occurs. First, you create what is called a semantic memory, and those are just the facts. That gets written into your internal database. For me it was Delta, DC9, 100 people died, Logan Airport, rainy day, and that was it.”

“The second thing you get is the emotional memory. Death, dismemberment, I might have lost my parents. It could of been me. And at the same time too, I had a grandfather who felt that the way to make me stronger was to take his belt off and put me over the bed and beat me with it.” The way Patrick would respond to all of this was with a fear-based mechanism that prompted him to run away.

Having a supportive wife, of 20 years now, and being a father has been a significant part of Patrick Sweeney’s stability and drive to fight his fears face-to-face. “Uniquely enough, I decided I was going to get over that fear of flying. So, I started taking flying lessons. I got to tell you. The first one, I think I peed four times before I made it out to the plane.” Patrick Sweeney actually fell in love with flying by the third or fourth lesson and got his private pilot license, his commercial license, and even started competing in aerobatics.

Patrick discusses the advice he learned about his fears of not constantly working. “You’ve got to embrace that little boy in you. When you do something like go out and play on the rock or go and play on the ski slope or whatever, you’ve got to let go of this fact that you feel guilty that you should be working.”

Another Way to Live Life

What was the common reaction when Patrick Sweeney decided to live a new way? “If you can imagine at that time, being a part of this whole high-tech community and venture community where your identity is an entrepreneur/venture CEO and people saying, ‘What are you talking about you are going to move to Europe?’ ‘What are you talking about you are going to start adventuring and start doing the summits and buy a bike? That is ridiculous.’”

Find More Fear

If the common cliche is to get over our fears, why does Patrick Sweeney recommend that we find more fear? “We have to find more fear everyday. Scare ourselves everyday, and it doesn’t have to be jumping out of a plane. It can be getting up and making a toast at lunch because you are afraid of public speaking. It can be taking a cold shower because everyone says, ‘You can’t take a cold shower.’” Hear how you can jumpstart something good to happen in your life by working through fears during this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast with Patrick Sweeney.

Links to Additional Resources:

Patrick Sweeney: Linkedin Twitter Instagram Patrick Sweeney’s Website: PJSweeney.com and...

On this episode of Finding Your Summit Podcast, we talk with Chris Waddell, American Paralympic Sit-Skier and Wheelchair Track Athlete, and Founder of One Revolution. The chat takes place in Squaw Valley during the Spartan World Championships Media Fest. Chris was parlyized in college from the waist down, and currently gets around in a wheelchair.