The Truth Is with Kathryn Flaschner

Corey Thibodeau: When You Stop Forcing It

Episode Summary

I met Corey Thibodeau on the first day of freshman year, and she's been one of the central truth tellers in my life since. Over the last decade, she built three yoga studios, brought two new humans into the world, and spent a decade building a corporate career quietly questioning if there was another path — if the life she was building outside of it could become her whole life. And then, the universe pushed her to it. This conversation is about that journey. About what it cost along the way, and what it opened.

Episode Notes

Corey Thibodeau is the co-founder of West Side Yoga — three studios in Providence, Rhode Island that have become something rarer than a successful small business. A place where people find each other, and sometimes, finally find themselves.

She will not dress it up for you. What it actually takes to build something real while straddling a corporate career. What it feels like to give a decade of yourself to a company and have it end the way it ended. What patience and trust — not hustle, not forcing — actually produce when you finally give them room. And what it means to build something so rooted in a community that the community starts to heal because of it.

That is what this conversation is. The honest version of a story a lot of people are living but not saying out loud.

We talk about:

• Running a half marathon ten years after swearing off running — and why this time felt nothing like suffering
• Building West Side from a single studio to three locations, a teacher training program, and a waitlist
• A decade of doing both — and what that duality actually costs
• The truth of what it feels like to be laid off after ten years — and the honest reckoning with never having left on her own
• Her husband Joe — business partner, balance, and the person who nudged her toward a half marathon at 1am in November
• Santosha — contentment — and how hard it is to live a practice you teach
• The third space that sat empty for months, and what shifted when she finally said yes
• What happens when you stop forcing and start trusting — and what that produced
• The impact of building something truly local, truly communal — and why that might be exactly what the world needs right now

ABOUT COREY THIBODEAU

Corey Thibodeau is the co-founder of West Side Yoga, a studio community with three locations in Providence, Rhode Island, which she runs alongside her husband Joe Thibodeau. She has been teaching yoga since 2015.

Corey on Instagram

West Side Yoga on Instagram

West Side Yoga Website

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CREDITS

Hosted by Kathryn Flaschner

Production & Editing by Anton LaPlume

 Music by Will Savino — wsavino.com

 Visual Identity by Sarah Gainor & Jonathan Bush

 Advised by Natalie Tulloch

Topics: women and work, reinvention, building a business, yoga, community, corporate to entrepreneurship, trusting yourself, identity, truth