The Practice Space was officially founded by Jenn Bieri in October 2023. That was when we officially pivoted the business to focus on Leadership and Executive Coaching. Since then, we have partnered with organizations, founders, and individuals to support themselves and their people in living and working for sustainable, high-impact change.
The truth, however, is that there was a multi-year lead-up getting to that point.
The story starts here…
This story starts in September 2011. I (Jenn) started as an accountant at Grant Thornton and attended my first yoga class at Hot Yoga Markham. I started feeling like two very different people. Corporate Jenn, this ambitious, corporate climbing, go-getter and Yoga Jenn, this world-travelling, calm hippie type who dreamed of teaching yoga. This continued for ten years, although Corporate Jenn generally had the front seat.
Hello, crazy world
When the pandemic happened and everyone was locked down, my partner Dave wanted to start a YouTube channel. He knew my dream was to teach yoga, so he suggested I could teach it while he handled the filming, editing, and posting. This became our pandemic project, Move with Jenn, kicking off in June 2020. We had fun learning new skills together. It helped us have something to focus on while we travelled to different parks in Toronto to film.
At the same time, I was working at a tech start-up. It had grown from 40 to 400 people over five years. I had been working like a maniac, working weekends and evenings, sometimes even all-nighters. Don’t get me wrong, I loved it, the energy behind it and some of my best memories were over those years. However, scrolling forward a few years, I now realize how burned out I was. It sold for $50M USD in May 2021.
After supporting the integration for a few months, it was time to take a leap of faith to turn Move with Jenn into a real business. I hired Maria Contreras as my virtual assistant and my partner-in-crime, supporting the business from behind the scenes, building the website and content, and so many other things. Together, we built Move with Jenn into an online wellness community teaching yoga classes and group programs around well-being, chakras and manifesting your dream life.
The big pivot
In January 2023, everything shifted for me again with I joined Co-Active Fundamentals. Suddenly it all started making sense. I saw Corporate Jenn and Yoga Jenn coming together in a beautiful way. I had also started missing my corporate life a little bit, missing the energy and the ambition, solving complex problems and developing others. In October 2023, I enrolled in the rest of the Co-Active program and renamed the business to The Practice Space.
I called it The Practice Space because I wholeheartedly believe that we are practicing the habits, life, values and experimenting with who we are becoming it takes a “safe” and courageous space to be vulnerable enough to fail and try again. The Practice Space is about creating those containers for deep change to happen.
Maria continues to grow with the business, not only supporting content and design but also client experience and bookkeeping.
And our story still continues…
Check out our resources section for articles, books and podcasts and the services section to see how you can work with us.
