The Confidence to Subtract
I’ve been thinking a lot about filters lately. Not the ones that smooth your skin in photos. The ones that decide what you let into your life.
I’m a recovering people pleaser. For most of my life, “yes” came out of my mouth before my brain or body had a chance to weigh in. Yes to the meeting. Yes to the favor. Yes to the project I didn’t actually want. Yes, just in case it might benefit me one day. The default was open. Everything got through.
Filters change that. A real filter is a decision you’ve made in advance about what aligns with you and what doesn’t. It saves you from re-litigating the same question every time someone asks for something from you. It sounds clean and simple when I write it like that. In practice, it is uncomfortable.
Because filters require subtraction. They require saying no to things that look reasonable on the surface. They require disappointing people, sometimes people you genuinely care about. They require trusting yourself enough to believe that what you want and what you need is reason enough.
The question I get asked the most about this is, “How do you know you’re not being too limiting? What if you’re missing something?” I sat with that question for a long time. The honest answer is, you don’t always know. You can’t run the experiment of the life where you said yes to everything alongside the life where you didn’t. You just have to choose.
What I can tell you is that my world has, in some ways, gotten smaller. I do fewer things. I go to fewer events. I say no more than I used to, and I say it without the long apologetic preamble I used to attach. And what I’ve noticed is that the smaller world feels more like mine. There is more energy in it for the people and the work that actually fill me up. There is more presence for the things I love.
That doesn’t mean it stopped being hard. I still catch myself letting things through that don’t belong. I still feel the old pull to say yes to keep the peace, or to keep the door open, or to be seen as generous. The filter isn’t a one-time decision. It’s a practice.
And practice is the only honest answer I have to the confidence question. You don’t develop confidence in your filters by thinking about them. You develop it by using them. By saying no and watching what happens. By noticing that the person you were afraid of disappointing is fine. By noticing that the opportunity you turned down was replaced by something better, or by nothing, and that nothing was actually a kind of relief.
There is something I want to name for the leaders reading this. The cultural script says optionality is freedom. Keep your options open. Never close a door. You never know. I understand the appeal. But I’d offer a different read. When everything is a maybe, nothing is a yes. When you can’t say no to anything, you can’t fully say yes to anything either. Optionality, past a certain point, is just a more sophisticated form of avoidance.
So if you’ve been feeling stretched thin or vaguely resentful of your own calendar, I’d invite you to look at your filters. Whether you have them. Whether you’re using them.
Pick one this week. One thing you would normally say yes to without thinking. Run it through a filter. Does this align with what I actually want right now? Does this energize me or deplete me? If I said no to this, what would I be making space for?
Then practice. See what comes back to you.
I suspect, like me, you’ll find the return on filtering is far greater than the cost of the things you let go.
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