Keeping cool when everything’s on fire: Producer Marta Ravin’s lessons from her celebrity-filled TV career

Rachel Salis-Silverman is chief content officer at Ragan Communications.

For 30 years, Marta Ravin has worked in a world where the unexpected is inevitable with no opportunity to pause, regroup or try again.

As a producer of pop-culture programming, Ravin has managed celebrities, navigated high-pressure broadcasts and made consequential decisions with the clock ticking. She spent eight years producing MTV’s “TRL,” created the hit TLC series “Long Island Medium” and has built a career that spans hosting and producing television shows, stand-up comedy and orchestrating massive live events.

At Ragan’s upcoming Leadership Retreat & Summit for Women, Ravin will take attendees behind the scenes of live television to explore what confidence, leadership, communication and adaptability look like in real time. Spoiler alert: It involves humor.

She’ll also lead an interactive “Main Character Energy” workshop to help attendees step more confidently into milestone moments in their career or personal life.

Ravin shares a sneak peek on her session at the Sanctuary Camelback Mountain Resort & Spa in Paradise Valley, Arizona, Sept. 23-25.

You’ve produced live television, major events and hundreds of celebrities. What has that world taught you about remaining calm when everything is going wrong?

As a live television producer, you always know that something is going to go wrong. A guest is late. A piece of equipment fails. Someone misses a cue. A reality star refuses to go on unless the medic gives her an enema because she feels bloated (that was fun).

You try to go in as buttoned up as possible so as the hits start coming you’ve already got your contingency plans in place. You’ve communicated to your team so everyone is ready to pivot. But then, of course, things happen no one could have planned for. So you laugh and figure it out.

Live television demands fast decisions and sometimes there is no clearly right answer. How do you project confidence when you’re still figuring out what to do?

Having been in this business for 25-plus years, there are very few things that will truly throw me or rattle me. I pride myself on being unflappable. And people often hire me to be “the grown-up in the room.” It’s my job to keep calm no matter what happens. It’s not so much that I’m projecting “confidence,” I’m projecting “Marta-ness,” which means we stay calm, nobody yells and we figure it out. There’s always an answer.

Has confidence always come naturally to you, or has your understanding of it changed over the course of your career?

When I started out as a stand-up comic, I learned very quickly that confidence was the difference between having a good set or being booed off stage. So back then it was about “fake it until you make it.” And that muscle has served me well in other parts of my career; a live event, speaking to a large crowd or before a big pitch, I say to myself, “Marta, you’ve done stand-up in front of 1,000 people for a live TV special — you can handle five dudes in a conference room.”

But something I’ve actually been thinking about a lot lately is that I’ve realized you can be profoundly confident in one part of your life and deeply uncertain in another.

Put me in a control room when everything is falling apart, and I’m your girl. Give me a complicated production problem, a room full of strong personalities or a live show that suddenly needs a new ending, and I trust myself completely.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve always carried that same confidence into every room in my life. As a recently divorced, single mom dating again at 54, I am definitely not showing up for a first date like I show up to work. So it’s been interesting figuring out who I am in this new stage of life and how I want to present myself.

 You’ve said that people are often more valuable than they realize because they take their own strengths for granted. How can women identify the overlooked skills in their personal toolkits?

I think one of the biggest mistakes we make is assuming that because something comes easily to us and/or we enjoy it, it isn’t valuable.

We think, “Oh, everyone can do that.” No. They can’t.

Maybe you’re the person who can walk into a tense room and immediately read what’s going on. Maybe you’re incredible at getting difficult people to trust you. Maybe you can take a giant, messy problem and turn it into five manageable steps. Maybe you’ve been putting on the big PTA dinner for years and don’t think it’s anything special.

Those are skills.

I tell women to pay attention to the things people consistently come to them for, especially the things they themselves don’t think are a big deal.

Your superpower often doesn’t feel like a superpower to you. It feels normal because it’s yours.

Your retreat session includes a “Main Character Energy” workshop. What does Main Character Energy mean to you and when do women need it most?

The late, great and incredibly talented screenwriter and director Nora Ephron shared this famous advice during her Wellesley College Commencement Address in 1996: “Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.” I think women are incredibly good at becoming supporting characters in their own lives. We’re thinking about what everybody else needs, how everybody else is feeling, whether everybody else is comfortable, whether we’ve taken up too much space.

Meanwhile, we’ve edited ourselves out of the scene. Main Character Energy is the moment you ask: What do I think? What do I want? What do I need to say here?

You need it before the negotiation. Before the difficult conversation. Before you walk onto the stage. Before you ask for the opportunity. Before you decide not to apologize for taking up the space you’ve already earned.

At the Leadership Retreat & Summit for Women, Marta Ravin will share more behind-the-scenes stories and practical lessons during her interactive session, “In the Hot Seat: What Producing Live Television Taught Me About Confidence, Leadership and Keeping Cool While Everything’s on Fire.”