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 anywhere way. So take a breath, step in, and let's move forward together.

Hello and welcome to the Sword of Sure podcast. In case you missed it in the beginning, my name is Samar Carbo. I apologize for my voice. It's not the best. I am just getting over a cold that either my 3 year old or my 7 month old gave me or one of their friends. I truly don't know where it came from. I just know it's here and it's been here for a couple of weeks. But we are here and so I'm gonna make the best of it. So happy Halloween. I hope you are all going to enjoy safely tonight. And you know, if you're, if you're in the U.S. i hear most people outside of the U.S. don't really celebrate, but haven't spent enough time outside of the US to know that for sure we're gonna be a solo act today. It's gonna be just me. So let's have a conversation about something that comes up. In my life there are different kinds of strength. I know. Kind of the whole thing with this podcast is nobody was built in a lab. There is no super soldier serum to make people amazing executives or to grow people in a night. Incremental growth increasing is the only way really to get better. But we do all have to work at it. Every single person. You may have worked at it when you were a kid, and so it seems like now that you're an adult, that's just who you are. But it is something we all work at. Look at babies. They're just terrible at everything. I've got a seven, well, almost seven month old in my house. She's bad at almost everything, including like la, crying and laughing and she's just, she's bad at him. Sometimes she jokes while she's crying and these things she's just not practiced at. There's nothing she practiced at at all. But someday I know she'll get better at everything she does, for better or for worse. And that's what we're all like. In some areas we're much younger, much less mature. In other areas we're much more mature maybe than average, maybe just the person next to us, but we're all getting better incrementally, and there are different kinds of strength. Let me talk about one. So I don't have many vices, but I have sugar. Sugar gets me. It gets under my skin and it tells me everything's going to be all right. But there was a time when I first realized that sugar had more control over me than I wanted to admit. And that was when I had to make some changes. Let me take you back. So I would have been. It would have been probably like 1997. So I was 10. I know that that does some unfortunate math, but here we are. I'm almost 40, but I'm not 100, so. So about 10 years old, I would get money from one source or another, from doing a job for my. My parents or a relative or a neighbor or. Or it was my birthday, Christmas, whatever. I got money. And then I would go as soon as humanly possible with my friends on our bikes about, I don't know, a mile or two away from home to a little store called Wilson Farms. I don't know that any of these exist in Buffalo anymore. I know that back then they did. So I would go in and I would get just as much candy. I didn't have responsibilities. I wanted to buy candy. So I bought as much candy as my money would buy. And I would just. I'd get, okay, I'm gonna do some math. And then this, and I'm gonna get that. And, oh, this is two for one. I'll get that even if I don't like the candy because it's sugar, Then I'll take this. This haul and buy it all. I'd go out, sit at this with my two best friends at the time, John and Ryan, and we would sit at this picnic table that was inexplicably right next to it. I don't know why this little convenience store had a PIC picnic table. I think maybe it was for the workers to go out there and smoke or whatever it was. It was the 90s, people smoked, but I know I used it. So I would sit there and just consume as much of this. Chocolate, gummies, hard candy, whatever. You know, when taste stations came out, I lost my mind. Just all of these new. When new candies came out and all that stuff. It was. It was just the thing that told my brain life was going to be okay day and the sugar high that I'm. That I made up in my brain, all of this dopamine hitting me so hard taught me that life was going to be okay. As Long as I got the sugar. And that was when the craving set in, right? It's. It's this craving to tell myself everything's going to be okay. It's a temptation to go back to that all the time. But as I grew, that couldn't be part of my daily life, right? And I would say, you know, just one or. Or I earned it. You know, that's the big thing. I earned it. But I didn't, right? I just wanted it. But I realized, right, that this kind of power wasn't in fighting the cravings or the temptations or the patterns that I put in place for this. It was in stacking the deck. So the choice became easier. Now, people, you know, if you're the friend of mine, if you're listening to this and you're a coaching client, a colleague or whatever, you've heard me say this before. I like the phrase stacking the deck in my favor. And I like doing it because it means I don't have to exert effort and mental energy in a moment. My life is already set up for things to go in a very specific way. You see it with million billionaires and billionaires who wear the same clothes every single day. You know, they. They don't have to exert mental energy to get dressed. They just put on the clothes that they have that look the same every day. Presidents do the same thing. But in this. Let's say, for example, in my life, it's Google Calendar. I put everything in a Google Calendar so that nothing escapes my notice, right? If I put it in my calendar, if I want to take a nap tomorrow or I want to go pick up something from Craigslist, I. No one uses Craigslist anymore. Facebook Marketplace, let's say, and I just put that in my calendar and I'm good to go. But that's stacking the deck in my favor so the choice doesn't become easier. The choice is no choice at all. I handled this a week ago. I handled this yesterday. So then the strength then looks like restraint. But really, I just set up my environment to protect my best self, to make sure my best self is who I'm able to present to the world. Sometimes you don't need to overcome temptation by being tougher. You just overcome it by setting up a system to get you from point A to point B. Point A being where you are. Point B is where you want to be. So you just remove friction from those good habits and add friction to the bad ones. And then you learn your triggers and you get in the way of them, so that nobody can force you into whatever. I see this a lot with, with alcoholics in programs. They, this isn't a word, I'm sorry, grammar police. But they de. Identify with alcohol so they, they know their triggers. And one of them is to say that I don't drink. Right, that's it. That is the. I am not a drinker. I'm an alcoholic, so I don't drink. And they preempted it by identifying with being a person who doesn't drink. Self control. It's not about saying no harder or better. It's about designing your life so you don't have to say no as often. Right. Have I beat that horse to death? Great. But sometimes restraint is like, is the real flex. Sometimes restraint is the real flex. But not every challenge can be handled in that specific way. Some require a different kind of strength. The kind that looks more like, you know, a little quieter, more like wisdom than what we would typically call willpower. So when I was a freshman in college, sort of like end of freshman year, then sophomore year. No, no, no. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm misremembering. So when I was a sophomore in College, I was 19. So when I was a sophomore, I was a bouncer at a club that I don't remember the name of. And for legal reasons, I probably shouldn't mention the name of the place, the name of the people involved in this. It was just, it was me with a bunch of faceless, nameless other people in this story. But as, as, you know, things go as I'm a bouncer, I'm. For those who have never seen me, I am six foot three. I am, you know, at the time I was about 250 as a lot of muscle. I was working out every day, had a free weight room at the, at the school and, and not a lot of activities. So I would do that and then I would go be a bouncer. And I got to know this, this one larger gentleman who was the head bouncer. And, you know, one night things were a little bit crazy. The bouncers were saying that the DJ was playing a little too crap. I don't know what the psychology of that is, but they are the experts. I did this job for like 8 to 12 months somewhere in there, and somebody was really, really going. And turned out this guy had a knife or whatever. And the head bouncer, I saw it on his face. The head bouncer got scared and he broke this guy's eye socket in order to take the fight out of him in order to stop the fight as fast as possible. But that was sort of illegal gray area, right? Like you don't want to. You don't want to overdo it. As a bouncer, you're meant to deter people. You're not actually a cop. You're not actually like a security guard. There is a security guard, like license in New York State and we didn't have it. I got it later, but we did not have it. So there was. There's no real training. You're just. You're bigger than the average person. So you get to be the guy in the black shirt with the flashlight. But he ended that sort of fight. And I say that to say this. Sometimes there is a challenge in front of you that you cannot surmount directly. Sometimes there is. There is just no matter how much force you put into a particular thing, how much brute power, you cannot overdo, you cannot do this, you cannot win. This little man that came against the head, the lead bouncer was never going to win that fight, but he still stuck around long enough to get his eye socket broken. That moment stuck with me because it made me think about how we approach all of our obstacles. Right. Not then, right. I was. I was 19. I was already a pastor, but I wasn't exactly thinking about that. But eventually, right? We try to muscle through a lot of things, but sometimes in life, things aren't meant to be overpowered. We have to out think them. Now, obviously, some challenges can be conquered for that lead bouncer. He could bulldoze through most of his situations that he would find in that job, but that doesn't mean that that's everything. That's not his whole life. After that, he had to deal with the legal system, and he definitely couldn't bulldoze through that. We have to remember there's a difference between power and influence. Right. A human. No matter how much power a human being can generate, we cannot fly. But through ingenuity and the intelligence of generations before us, we learned to soar. We learned to get into the sky, even though our bodies will never generate the amount of effort it would take for us to take off. That's not brute strength. That's us borrowing wisdom, standing on the shoulders of giants. And that that is a kind of power that you can't live into. You have to learn into it. In real life, in our everyday life, that looks like leveraging community and mentors instead of forcing everything alone, instead of trying to make the world yours just by pulling yourself up by your Bootstraps. It means adapting instead of trying to push harder and harder until you burn out. It means asking, what if there's a smarter way to get there? Instead of how can I make myself better so that I can get there? There's a million books on this subject. Sometimes it's not about the how, sometimes it's about the who. Right? You, you can get there. You just need either the community support or the knowledge to get to where you want to be. Now, obviously, restraint and wisdom are both kind of quiet forms of power. You don't need to overpower the world around you when you understand how to work with it. I'm sure you've heard it somewhere before that life doesn't happen to you. Life happens for you. And so I ask you, you don't. I'm never going to hear from you, right? You can totally send me an email at sort of surepod gmail.com but I challenge you to look at one area where you're just relying too much on force, on willpower, on grinding, on arguing, on pushing to get more money, to get that promotion, to be closer to someone around you. What would it look like to make the smart choice to the easy choice? And so much more than that. Look around you to see who already solved the problem you're trying to muscle through. Obviously, you know, there's. There's another way that people often say that. I'm sure you already heard, don't reinvent the wheel. Somebody already did that. So there's no reason for you to come back again and again to try and reinvent that. It's already invented. So don't go back, don't start over. Stand on their shoulders and see what kind of additions you can make to the solution already in progress. The restraint is going to equal inner discipline, but wisdom is collective discipline. We're using the knowledge of others to multiply our effort. Every generation builds a little more wisdom into the world. Every act of restraint, it adds strength. Real power is almost never loud. It's the quiet kind. It holds steady. It stacks the deck. It soars with little help. It goes and. And collects with its group in. In. In the dark. It goes and collects with its group in quiet in private and then is rewarded in public because it just works. I want to thank you for joining me today on the sword of sheer pod. It has been fun to kind of talk through these things and, you know, let me know if you want to hear more of these. Feel free to send an email to sort ofsurepodgmail.com. that's s o r t o f S u r e p o d mail.com and I will happily engage with you there. And you can tell me a story of self doubt or imposter syndrome, or tell me you want to be on the po, or you can tell me something that you want me to tell people, or you can just tell me that the show is great or terrible. I am happy to hear anything. I'd love to hear from listeners. So by all means, shoot me that email and I will happily engage with you. Well, that's it for me. Once again, Happy Halloween. And as I always say, later days.