The Driven Podcast With Colt Charlebois

Welcome to the very first episode of the Driven Podcast, hosted by Colt Charlebois. In this pilot, Colt introduces the show's mission: exploring the fine line between drive for impact and ego-driven pride. He shares his own story of chasing success in real estate, accumulating $100K in debt by his mid-20s, and hitting rock bottom in a friend's basement before a radical shift in perspective changed everything. This podcast isn't about business owners promoting their products -- it's about raw, vulnerable conversations that unpack the true motives behind ambition, the cost of climbing the wrong mountain, and what it looks like when faith, purpose, and leadership intersect. If you've ever wondered whether your drive is taking you somewhere worth going, this is your show. Buckle up.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Hi, my name is Colt Charlebois, and I want to welcome you to the Driven Podcast. This is where we look to tease out the fine line between drive for impact and ego-driven pride. See, as business owners and as leaders, we set out to do something good in the world. But often we find ourselves in a situation where we say, How did we get here? How did my life come to this place? A lot of podcasts you listen to, you'll hear business owners coming on and promoting their product or service, telling their story, getting to know them. I want you to know that this isn't that. The stories you're going to hear from some of our guests are pretty vulnerable. They're raw. Sometimes it's the first time they're even sharing them publicly. Because there is a depth of pain, there is a depth of confusion that is very hard to articulate when everyone is looking for you for answers or direction. So the Driven Podcast, we explore motivation by first looking at what are our true motives. Are we working first and foremost for the kingdom of God and all the blessings that He has entrusted us with? Do we seize ourselves as sons and daughters of the Most High God? Or is there something on the inside that we're just trying to feel better about us? See, a lot of that was my story, where at one point in my earlier years, I thought, hey, I just gotta be successful. I gotta make my mark in the world. It was kind of like my whole sum of masculinity. If I could just make a million dollars in my 20s, then I'll have achieved what I think I need to achieve. What I didn't know was behind that ambition and motivation was actually a deep level of insecurity. I wasn't really happy with who I was as an individual, and some of it stemmed from earlier years. Years of not having my dad as present as I would have hoped. We have a great relationship, and I had a lot of fun with him, but the absence of him in those seasons made me look for affirmation from other places. What I did was I took business and said, hey, this is the way I can really make my mark. This is the place that I could become great. All I need to do is study those who've gone before me. So as it turned out, I ended up $100,000 in debt by my mid-20s. And worse than the debt, I mean, some people have good debt. They went to school, they got something to show for it. That really wasn't my story. My story was I borrowed a lot of money to try and become successful flipping houses. I was trying to make my mark as a real estate agent at the same time, earning 100% commission, only to find out that just everything I touched turned to a substance that looked like rust, just call it that. What I didn't know was that my major flaw wasn't the fact that I wanted to do something. I had even tried to help myself by making my ambition about helping others. I created this altruistic lens that when I was successful, I would be generous. When I was successful, I would take time for the little guy, the low person on the totem pole. And so none of that really helped sustainably motivate me, though. Because at the core my motives were off, right? It was truly about me, even though I had disguised it elaborately as something else. I was trying to do something to make myself feel more whole and feel better. And this is where it gets confusing for most people. As a coach and as a speaker, as a mentor, I sit out with a lot of business owners and really unpack, hey, where do you want to go? And why is that important to you? And as we get past the first few answers, I found that for all of us, there's no real true North Star. There's no real true purpose that is the thing that's compelling us forward. As I ended up in my own crises, $100,000 in debt, one of the things that was introduced to me was the gospel. I was shown the character of Jesus. I had been taught to pray as a kid, gone to Catholic school, but I had never really understood what this was all about. And so in desperation, I cried out to God. Are you for real? Do you really exist and are you really in control of my life? Now this was humbling because I was crying out to him in a basement that I had was staying in that a friend let me stay with him. I had sold him the house as a realtor and I asked him if I could just live with him because I couldn't afford my own apartment. Really humbling season, but it's where I cried out to God. It's where I really started to get an understanding of who he was. And in that season, I began reading the Bible. And one of the things that stood out to me the most was that Christ came to serve and not be serve. And this was pretty radical for me at the time because as commission only, in survival mode, most of my existence was how do I get a paycheck? How do I get some attention? How do I get even the attention of a female that might like me? I was always looking to consume. I was always looking to get ahead, to survive. Everybody became a price tag of sorts. So when I thought, wow, all of this accumulated to my devastation, to my owing all this money and living in a friend's basement, I started to deploy what Jesus was talking about. What would it look like if I just showed up and served somebody today? Not having an expectation, not having an outcome, but just gave them advice in the market, gave them support, gave them my free time, helped people in any way that I could. And this was revolutionary because what it did to me was it transformed how I felt about myself. I was giving with that expectation. Here's the crazy part things started happening. It was the first year I really broke through. My business went to 100,000 for the first time, and I was enjoying it. And it wasn't because of the people I was meeting. People were coming from all directions. It was who I was becoming in the process. I was becoming more free stepping into this. That's a little bit about my journey, and just starting to tap where the balance and the blend of the kingdom of God and the principles Jesus came to share with us, how they infiltrated my mind, my heart, and ultimately my business. And as we meet with people on this podcast, what I want to hear is their story. What was the root cause behind their drivenness? What was the cost of it? If anything, if we can achieve together just raising a flag so that when your motive is slightly off, you can catch it early. My hope is that in hearing these stories, you wouldn't spend decades pursuing the wrong thing, climbing the wrong mountain only to be dissatisfied, because that story, quite frankly, is way more common than some would expect it. They say it's lonely at the top, and very few leaders I know when they build successful businesses, if they build successful businesses, really feel great and they feel whole at the end. Some do. And those stories we want to tease out as well. So I hope you enjoy the ride. There's going to be some really heartfelt conversations, some funny ones, some painfully difficult ones to hear. Ultimately, I'm confident that they're going to help us all become better human beings. And probably better sons and daughters of the Most High God. So not everything will be faith based on this, but I know that we're all going to grow in many ways. So thank you for joining us. Buckle up and enjoy the ride. This is the Driven Podcast.