I HAVE A GOOD DAY EVERY DAY.

Hi, it’s Maria, and I have a good day every day!

And before you roll your eyes, hear me out.

That doesn't mean every day is easy, and it definitely doesn't mean I'm in a good

mood every second of it. I own a business. People need things from me all day

long. Plans change, problems come up, I get annoying emails, and I have

conversations I would rather not have. I get overwhelmed, frustrated, tired, and

occasionally pissed off before 8 a.m.

But I still have a good day.

Because somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that something bad

happening automatically meant I had a bad day.

A bad thing can happen on a good day.

You can wake up feeling good, have a great workout, drink your favorite coffee,

laugh with someone you love, get a ton accomplished, and then receive one

shitty email at 3:17 p.m. Suddenly, today sucked.

But did it? Or did 3:17 suck?

I think I've gotten pretty good at not letting one bad hour apply for naming

rights to the other 23.

I don't think having a good day requires everything to go right. If it did, I would

be in trouble. Most of the things that make my days good are actually really

small. I move my body. I drink coffee I actually like. I listen to music in the car. I

call people I love. I make dinner plans. I spend time with people who make me

laugh. I go home to someone I genuinely like being around. I have a dog who is

thrilled that I have returned from the mailbox. I do work that matters to me.

I

give myself things to look forward to, even if the thing is literally just dinner.None of those things are particularly groundbreaking, but put enough of them

together and you have a pretty good life. And when you have a life you actually

like, it's a lot harder for one annoying thing to convince you the whole day was

terrible.

I think for a long time I treated a good day like something that happened to me.

If enough things went right, good day. If too many things went wrong, bad day.

Now I think I have a lot more influence over it than I gave myself credit for.

Not control. Influence.

I cannot control what email lands in my inbox. I can't control whether someone

disappoints me, whether traffic is horrible, whether a plan falls apart, or whether

something at work needs my attention when I really don't feel like giving it. But I

can control whether I let it follow me around for the next six hours. I can decide

not to bring the annoying meeting to dinner with me.

I can go take a class instead of sitting at home replaying something I can't change. I can call someone who makes me laugh. I can put my phone down. Being annoyed at 10 a.m.

doesn't mean I still need to be annoyed at 6 p.m. And I'm certainly not perfect at any of that. There are absolutely days when I give something stupid way more of my attention than it deserves. There are moments when I know I should let something go and instead decide to give it another forty-five minutes of completely unnecessary airtime in my head.

But Ive gotten better. I've also become much more purposeful about the people I surround myself with, and I think that has more to do with enjoying my life than almost anything else.

I like people who make ordinary things fun. People who make plans. People who

have opinions. People who make me laugh when I am trying very hard to stay

annoyed. People I can sit at dinner with for three hours and somehow still have

something to talk about in the parking lot. People who celebrate good things

with me and don't make every difficult thing feel even heavier.

The people around you set the temperature of your life more than I think we

realize. You can have the best job, the nicest house, the perfect routine, and a

calendar full of exciting things, but if the people filling that life exhaust you, it

probably isn't going to feel very good.On the other hand, some of my favorite days aren't particularly impressive.

A good class, a productive morning, lunch with someone I love, something funny

happening at the studio, coming home, ordering food, sitting on the couch, and

doing absolutely nothing worth posting about. Good day.

I think we sometimes make happiness feel like this enormous thing we're trying

to achieve when so much of it is just paying attention to what makes your

regular life enjoyable and then doing more of that. Not someday, not on

vacation, and definitely not once work calms down because I have personally

accepted that mine probably never will. I'm talking about a random Wednesday.

Building BARE has actually made this more obvious to me because my life has

become objectively more complicated as the business has grown.

There are more

decisions, more responsibility, more people depending on me, and more things

that can go wrong on any given day. If having a good day required having a

stress-free day, I would be in serious trouble.

But some of my favorite moments happen right in the middle of the chaos. It's

walking into the studio and hearing everyone laughing before class. It's watching

something we talked about for months finally become real. It's teaching a class

and getting fifty minutes where my brain is focused on exactly what is in front of

me. It's seeing people I genuinely enjoy every day because somehow this thing I

built has filled my life with them.

The stressful parts are still stressful. They just aren't the whole thing.

And maybe that's really what I mean when I say I have a good day every day. I

don't mean nothing bad happens. I mean I've built enough things into my life

that are good that the bad things don't automatically get to become the story.

I've chosen work I care about. I've become more intentional about who gets my

time. I've learned what makes me feel like myself. I've gotten better at leaving a

bad moment where it happened instead of carrying it into every room I walk into

afterward. And I try really hard not to postpone enjoying my life until everything

is perfect, because I don't think that day is coming.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.There will always be something unfinished. Someone will always need an answer. There will always be another problem to solve, another goal to hit, another thing I could be worrying about. If I waited for all of that to disappear before deciding I was enjoying my life, I would be waiting forever.

And I think that's really why I can say I have a good day every day. It's not because I've somehow figured out how to avoid the bad parts. I've just gotten really good at filling my life with things I like, work I care about, and people I genuinely want to be around.

So when something goes wrong, it has a lot of good to compete with.

Good luck ruining my day.

From my core to yours,

Maria Stege

Founder & CEO, BARE Pilates Studio

…and that’s The Naked Truth.