AN OPEN DOOR IS NOT AN OBLIGATION.

Hi, it’s Maria!

I used to think getting more opportunities was always a sign that you were moving in the right direction.

More options. More doors opening. More things to consider. More people wanting to work with you. It feels like progress, and when you’ve spent a long time working toward growth, it’s really easy to assume that the goal is to keep saying yes to whatever growth puts in front of you.

I’m starting to realize I don’t think that anymore.

The further I get into building BARE, the less interested I am in how many opportunities I have and the more interested I am in whether they’re actually the right ones.

Because there are a lot of things in life that can be objectively good and still not be good for you.

Bad opportunities are actually pretty easy. When something is obviously wrong, eventually the decision makes itself. It’s the things that are mostly right that get complicated.

The opportunity with a lot of upside but a few things you can’t quite get past. The relationship with a good person that still doesn’t feel like the right relationship. The job that looks great on paper but takes you further from the life you actually want. The invitation you genuinely appreciate but don’t actually want to accept.

Good can be really convincing.

Especially when you know you could make it work.

And I am very good at making things work.

I can problem solve. I can find another way. I can convince myself that the difficult part is manageable. Give me enough time with an idea and I can probably build an entire case for why it makes sense.

For a long time, I think I saw that as a strength in every situation.

Now I think knowing when not to make something work might be just as important.

Recently, I had an opportunity in front of me that I spent a lot of time considering. There were pieces of it that made sense. There were things about it I genuinely liked. It was familiar in ways that made it especially tempting, and there was absolutely a version of the story where I said yes and figured out the rest.

For a while, I thought I would.

But somewhere along the way, I noticed how much energy I was spending trying to convince myself.

Not because it was a bad opportunity.

Because I wanted it being a good opportunity to automatically mean it was the right opportunity.

Those aren’t the same thing.

Eventually I had to ask myself:

If I know I can make this work, does that actually mean I should?

I decided the answer was no.

There wasn’t a crazy ending. Nothing blew up. Nobody did anything wrong. I simply decided not to move forward with something I once thought I wanted.

And strangely, I think those are some of the hardest things to walk away from.

We talk a lot about having the courage to leave things that are bad for us. We don’t talk nearly as much about the courage it takes to leave something perfectly decent because you know it isn’t where you want to put your life.

Because good gives you reasons to stay.

Good makes you question whether you’re being too picky. Good makes you wonder if you’ll regret it. Good reminds you how much time you’ve already spent considering it. Good makes you think about what you could turn it into if you just worked a little harder.

And sometimes you probably could.

But “I could make this work” and “I should do this” are two completely different things.

That applies to so much more than business.

You can make a friendship work by always being the one who reaches out. You can make a schedule work by constantly running yourself into the ground. You can make a job work because you’re capable of doing it, even if you stopped enjoying it years ago. You can make plans work that you never wanted to make in the first place.

Being capable of carrying something doesn’t automatically mean it’s yours to carry.

I think part of getting older is realizing that your life has limited space.

There are only so many hours in a week, so much attention you can give, so many things you can care deeply about at the same time, or so many places you can put your energy before something starts getting the leftovers.

And every opportunity wants a piece of that.

So I’ve started looking at opportunities a little differently.

Not just What could this give me?

But What will this require from me?

Because every yes comes with something attached to it.

Yes to another responsibility means less attention somewhere else. Yes to one plan means you’re unavailable for another. Yes to something that is pretty good can quietly take up the space that something great would’ve needed.

And when you say no, you don’t always know what you’re making room for.

You know what you’re turning down. You don’t know what might eventually occupy that space.

When you say yes to the opportunity in front of you, at least you know what you’re getting. When you walk away, you’re choosing space without any guarantee that something better immediately appears in it.

I’ve had to get more comfortable with that.

I don’t need to know exactly what comes next to know that I don’t want to fill every available space simply because something was offered to me.

BARE has changed the way I think about this a lot.

In the beginning, almost every opportunity felt exciting because everything was new. There was so much I wanted to build, so much I wanted to prove, and so many directions the business could potentially go.

Now, as BARE grows, I’m realizing that growth actually requires me to become more selective, not less.

Because I don’t want to build the biggest version of BARE I possibly can.

I want to build the best version of it.

And those are very different goals.

More locations, more partnerships, more ideas, more projects, more everything could certainly make the business bigger. But if I say yes to all of it, eventually I’m going to have a lot of things and not enough of myself to give any of them what I think they deserve.

I don’t want growth just for the sake of being able to say we’re growing.

I want the things we build next to make sense for where we’re going.

And I think I’m starting to feel that way about my life too.

I don’t want every available weekend filled. I don’t want every relationship maintained simply because it has history. I don’t want every opportunity accepted because someone was kind enough to offer it. I don’t want to keep things in my life solely because there isn’t a compelling enough reason to remove them.

Sometimes “This isn’t where I want to put my energy anymore” is enough.

Something doesn’t have to become terrible before you’re allowed to choose differently.

You don’t need a villain.

You don’t need a disaster.

You don’t even need to regret saying yes to it in the first place.

Sometimes something was right for one version of you and isn’t right for this one. Sometimes the opportunity is genuinely great, just better suited for somebody else. And sometimes you realize the thing you were trying so hard to make work is occupying space you no longer want to give it.

Walking away doesn’t always mean you failed to see the opportunity.

Sometimes it means you finally saw the cost.

I have no idea what will eventually fill every space I choose to leave open. I don’t think we’re supposed to.

But I am becoming much more comfortable trusting that making room is sometimes a decision in itself.

You don’t have to grab something simply because it’s within reach.

You don’t have to turn every possibility into a plan.

And you don’t have to wait for something good to become bad before you’re allowed to want something better.

An open door is not an obligation.

Sometimes you have to be willing to close a good one to see what else opens.

From my core to yours,

Maria Stege

Founder & CEO, BARE Pilates Studio

…and that’s The Naked Truth.