Welcome to the Sword of Sure podcast. Where doubt looms, fear whispers, and the only way forward is through. I'm Samar Carbo, and if you've ever felt like you're just sort of sure about what you're doing, you're not alone. This is where we face the uncertainty. Push past the hesitation, and keep going anyway way. So take a breath, step in, and let's move forward together.

Hello, and welcome to the Sort of Shore podcast. As you may have caught in the beginning, my name is Samar Carbo, and today I'm going to bring you something a little bit different. You see, I've. I've got a lot of interviews in the can and ready to go, but honestly, I wanted to bring you a little bit of me. I find that I do my little interjections and I talk to the guests and it's awesome. And I absolutely love that format of show. But this week, this Friday, July 25th, I think that's the date I didn't look it up. I'm gonna bring you a little bit of me kind of interviewing myself. Obviously, I'm not gonna ask the questions. I know them already, but. And maybe that's a little bit of journalistic integrity disappearing down the tubes. But I'm not a newscaster. I am a coach who is extraordinarily passionate about making your life better, somebody who's here to help. And one way I can do that is by sharing me. So where to start? I think very few of my guests touch on this, so let's talk about what you do when certainty never comes. When we're young, I think we're really used to it right when that certainty isn't coming. Because this is the crux of the show. It's not what do people do? Or what should people do? It's explaining the experience of people who made it through a situation and were better for it and explaining how they did that. So I'm explaining how I am better for going through this. Not what you should do necessarily, but it might give you ideas. So I was at a job at a bank. I won't name the bank because they may or may not want to be associated with this podcast. So I was at a bank. I was a frontline employee, but it was looking like soon I could post out and do something a little bit more office oriented, a little bit higher pay scale and stuff like that. Things were starting to really look up for me there. I had gotten this job just because it was something to do to get me out of a situation. Where I was basically on my friend's couch to put a very, very general point on it. So to get me off the couch, I applied for a job at a bank. I got the job at the bank. Things went well. Two years later, I had this idea I was going to be a purveyor of, of fine foods. I was going to start a food truck. And. Well, it didn't start as a food truck. It started as a food cart. And a buddy of mine had it said, hey, do you want to go half seas on that? Who also worked at the bank. And I was like, ooh, if somebody else wants to get in on this, we could do a whole food truck. We don't have to just do a cart. We can change the world with a food truck. I wanted to do hot dogs. And then as I went to the food food truck idea, I wanted to do more hot dogs. And we got two more investors and we did just all the things. We, we did graphic design. We, I, I did the, the administrative work of, like, getting the LLP was a limited liability partnership, and I did all of that background stuff. And I found us a truck and I started cleaning it up and all this stuff, and I made sure I got it to, you know, it's kind of. It was not the best truck in the world. I could not drive it. It had to be towed. All sorts of things did not. It wasn't the best start, but keeping busy was the best for me. So I had these two competing ideas in my life, right? One was very professional, one was very entrepreneurial. Things were working out for me at the bank. Things were going so well for me that I felt like I was on cloud nine occasionally when I walked in that building, and other days I felt like I could have been buried under the building and I would have felt the exact same way. And then I had this, this, this food truck, which if I wanted it to be successful, I definitely should have started small. I could have bought a food truck later. But I, I went with, I didn't go with the food cart. I went with the food truck. And it was a whole thing. But, but this other idea, when it was beginning, it was perfect. It was what I wanted. It was where I wanted to be. Everything was great. So I had the work that was going well, and I had the food truck that was promising, and I didn't know what to lean into. These things were in my brain equal in opportunity. And so I just had to wait for something, some magical thing to tip the scale. Well, I wasn't sure what that magical thing would be or could be. And I couldn't ask my investors for certainty. They had given me money and they wanted me to be sold on the idea. But I was the managing partner so I was putting a lot more hours into this idea than they were. And I waited. I think it was six months before I did it. I went and quit my job at the bank and thought I need to do something much lower responsibility for money. So I started working as a bartender. And it was out of nowhere, right? I. I wasn't thinking about it, right? So there wasn't this imposter syndrome or self doubt. It was just a means to an end. And isn't that the craziest thing when we aren't thinking about whether or not we are worth the opportunity and, and we're just thinking about the fact that we want or need the opportunity. So many. And maybe this isn't everybody, maybe this isn't you, but so many of us are able to do these near insurmountable things, right? I was able to achieve and this is going back quite a ways but I was able to achieve a perfect attendance record through high school by walking to and from school probably 50% of the time for four years. It wasn't because I thought it was easy to walk. I would be walking home sometimes in negative degree weather. It was Buffalo, New York, it's pretty cold. Sometimes I'd be walking in negatives and I never thought about it. I just knew I had to go home. I wasn't going to stay at school until when my parents worked quite late hours occasionally. I wasn't going to stay at school until 7 or 8 when they could make it to the school to pick me up. And so I didn't even think about the difficulty. All I thought about was it's time to go home. So I'm glad I brought my hat and my coat and my sneakers because I always wore sneakers, never boots for some crazy reason. Eh kids? So I always had this ability to turn off this self doubt mechanism that I had in myself but I didn't use it unless something bigger self doubty was happening. So naturally I didn't feel up to the task to to being a bartender but it didn't matter. And because it didn't matter I was able to get a job pretty quickly and it was a. And then I ended up getting a second job because I. I needed to get more money. So I got a late night job bartending because my bar closed pretty early. The one I worked at and then the second one didn't. A few hours after that one closed. So it was two kind of speakeasy ish places. And I loved it. I was able to, you know, shift work and bringing in a lot of money in short periods of time. I liked it at first. Busy nights were rough for me. But when it came down to it, I had food truck time. Well then things didn't work out with the food truck. The food truck went belly up because my investors wanted their money back. Now by the end of these things, I had definitely put more money into this thing than any of my investors had. But it did not matter. I wanted to give these people their money back. So we got rid of the truck. I actually ended up signing it over to them and I left town. But the way all of this worked out on, on a sort of humanity scale was I ended up bartending for a whole other year after that. I moved, you know, 90 minutes away just to clear my head. And I ended up keeping the bartending because momentum, I was already doing it, so I may as well do it somewhere fun. And that's what I did. I went down to the beaches and I bartended for a while. Not because I thought I was worth worth it or I thought I was particularly amazing. It was because although I was in a different context, I was still a bartender in my brain. And there's just something about those moments. There's three separate jobs intertwined. There's the bank job, there's the food truck owner, and then there's the bartender. And these things came together because I didn't need clarity to move. Clarity doesn't always come before action. Sometimes we have to move to find clarity. You can build momentum before you build certainty separately. And some of you may know this, some of you may not. We'll, we'll see. I was a very well churched kid. My mother was a as many times as feasible at the church. She was not an everyday church person, but she did make sure that we got there at least once a week, almost always twice a week. And, and we, her kids, at least, you know, three out of four, I'd say, but especially me, we got to the church and we studied and we, they did, you know, fellowship. We did all the things. We did everything we could to be more connected to the church. It was a large part of my social circle and as I'm going through life outside of it, as I grew up and got out of church circles, I found myself wanting to get back. And I had been told I think I was 16 when I had. When I had been told I was going to be a pastor one day. And, man, it was a. It was a thing in my life that I did what I was told. It was a problem. I shouldn't have done that quite so much. But when I was, you know, three, a short three years later, I was sitting in my apartment at college and I got a call. The call was from a board member at a church who knew my mother. And she explained to me that they were looking for just a person who was excited about ministry to come aboard and teach their children. I had done public speaking before. I have. I did skits. I did very, very, very, very, very, very short speeches. I did dances, all sorts of things in front of thousands of people before. So I was never really afraid of a crowd. But when it comes to things coming from my brain, oh, boy, did I not have clarity. But I did move. When I was asked to become a pastor, I said yes. You know, I mean, I pretended, I prayed about it. I gave. I was like, let me call you back tomorrow. You know, let me. Let me think about it and pray and all that stuff. But no, my yes was on the table. From that time When I was 16, I was a person who was prepared to be a pastor, and I ended up doing that job for five or six years. It really worked out. The skills that I learned. It's not the fact that I'm not doing it anymore that even matters. The skills that I learned as a pastor have served me in every other part of my life. It taught me how to research better. It taught me how to read better. It taught me how. It taught me not to trust things at face level. Being a pastor taught me how to counsel people and how to be there for people without saying a word. I am so much better off after being a pastor. It turned out so much better than I expected. Honestly, I thought, moving into this, I'll do. I'll do this job for six months until they find somebody who's better qualified. I was at that first church for two full years, and then I moved to another church because a friend of mine asked me for help. And I was there for three years. No, I was at both of them for three years. But I was afraid, you know, and. And that's a thing that I think a lot of people are quite unsure of to share. I was afraid when I walked into that church for the first time. I was afraid when I did my first big speech. I had to lead that whole service. I messed up A couple of times. I was 19. People mess up. It worked out. But more than all of those things, I was afraid that I wasn't enough. There's an awesome speaker coach. Not exactly sure what she is. She's a speaker, she's a coach, she's an author, she's all sorts of things. Her name's Marissa Peer. I'll put her name in the show notes, maybe I'll even put her website. But Marissa Peer is a person who almost exclusively trains to people not feeling like they're enough. She believes there are central hurts and believing you're not enough is one of them. But when it comes down to it, the extreme pride or extreme self confidence or what have you in that arena and the extreme self doubt are both fear of not being enough. This is why people fill their garages with cars. This is why people have to have celebrity at any cost. This is why people will fill their brain, myself included will fill their brains with facts because they don't believe they're enough. And if I can just cram more into my life, into my bank account, into my brain, then I'll be more. And I may, I might get closer to being enough. But it's an arbitrary goal. None of us will ever reach that because we keep moving the goalposts. We grade ourselves on a curve and it's a downward curve. But I acted anyway. Every time I had the opportunity to get up, to stand up in front of my, my church family, I got up there and I said what I needed to say. I preached what I needed to preach. I acted if they needed me to. I sang because I can. And I made sure that I was providing the best that I could possibly offer them. And that's what made me act instead of getting stalled and slowing down. And that's what always makes me act instead of getting stalled and slowing down is that I have told the world that I am here to help. And when I can do that, I. My brain tells me I must. Looking back, me being a pastor has saved lives. Why? Because I have written books as a result. I have almost said speaking. I have spoken to crowds that I never would have been able to reach because I found I quite like public speaking in the impact that I can have. I have been in rooms that I never would have been in before. And I have become a much more mission driven individual because of that experience. There's a kind of self trust that you only get in motion. And that's where the magic lies. Not when the answers are obvious and blaring. Directly in front of you, but when they're unfolding kind of as you move. It's so hard to do for many of us, and certainly for people who would be attracted to this podcast. But sometimes we really do have to jump first and then build our wings on the way down, or at least unfold the wings that we built and see if our designs can hold us up. I want to pause right here and invite you, dear listener, to think about a moment that you're wavering on certainty right now. Maybe you're stuck at a crossroads. Maybe you're avoiding something because it isn't perfect. Because it isn't the perfect timing. It isn't the perfect day. You don't feel perfect about it. I want you to think about it, and I want you to ask yourself, will that perfect time feeling whatever you have ever come thanks for hanging out with me on the Sort of Sure Podcast. If you found something helpful in this episode, share it with a friend. Drop five stars. Who are you saving them for? And if you have a story to share, or if you just want to sound off about how you like this solo format or anything like that, shoot me an email at sort of surepodmail.com until next time, stay steady, stay kind of, and move forward, even if you're only sort of sure. That's it for me, folks. Later days.