About Jenny

About Jenny |  About Life After College & The Team | For “official” bios and headshots, click here.

The Fun Stuff

I love chocolate, coffee and personal development books. Dogs, dancing, gadgets, yoga, writing, traveling, and long meals with friends all make me pretty happy too.

I’m the proud author of Life After College: The Complete Guide to Getting What You Want, a certified life coach and yoga teacher. Outside of this blog, my other pet project is Geek Yoga, a non-intimidating Vinyasa Flow class for newbies and entrepreneurs to come together.

I’m 29 years old, a true-to-form indecisive but laid back Libra, and I fit the Myers Briggs profile ENFJ to a tee. I’ve been known to wear a zebra-print retainer to bed from time to time, and am guilty of far-exceeding any sane person’s reasonable quota for emoticons and exclamation points.

I’m from Northern California but currently living in my soul-city, Manhattan, loving absolutely every minute of it.

I’m also in the process of launching a website under my own name which I am very excited about! Click here to sign-up for bi-weekly behind-the business updates to follow the progress and stay tuned on launch details. 

The Serious Stuff

I am passionate about helping you wake up to what you really want in this short precious life. I know how easy it is to fall into complacency, sleepwalking through our lives, denial, confusion or just plain “stuck-ness” around how to get where we want to go — if we even know what that is.

That’s why the tagline of the website is “Wake up, live big! and love the journey” — I am deeply committed to helping you figure out what brings you alive, then giving you the tools to get there (and survive the dips) through coaching, speaking, my book, and one of my favorite projects, Make Sh*t Happen – an 8-week course that will take your biggest goal from improbable idea to inevitable success snowball.

One of the most recent defining moments of my life was quitting Google after five and a half years at the company to pursue life as a solopreneur. I absolutely loved my time at the company, but now feel very fortunate to make my living helping others via Life After College (and beyond).

During my time at Google I worked for over five years in training, coaching, career development and on the Authors@Google team. My proudest accomplishment was  helping to build a global (15+ country) Career Guru program (later praised by CNNMoney) which involved training senior-level managers around the world to provide drop-in coaching to employees looking to speak with someone other than their manager. Prior to my time in Career Development, I spent almost 4 years as a Senior Strategist on the Training & Development team, where I delivered AdWords product training and web development training to over 1,000 people.

Coaching Background / Certifications:

• I completed training to be a life coach through the Coaches Training Institute in 2008, and became a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach in 2010.
• I am also a certified coach through David Rock’s Results Coaching Systems program, which focuses on coaching and the brain.
• I served as a member of the Board of Governors for the International Association of Coaches in 2010.
• I am a certified Myers Briggs (MBTI) facilitator and well-versed in Strengthsfinder 2.0 and True Colors

Yoga Teaching Certifications:

• I completed yoga teacher training in October 2010 through the White Lotus Foundation in Santa Barbara, and completed my certification in February 2012.
• I completed Thai Yoga Massage training at The Sunshine School in Chiang Mai, Thailand in May 2012.

Here’s a visual timeline of what I’ve been up to since I started this website (click to enlarge):

Where to Go From Here

If you’d like to know more, check out 100 things about me.

Need a loving but firm kick in the rear-end and a plan to execute something major in your life? Find out how we can work together to get things moving.

First time visiting? Take the Life After College guided tour here. Or, take a leisurely stroll through my shop of goodies.

The best places to connect with me are in the comments of this blog or on Facebook and Twitter. Also, be sure to check out my book, Life After College, and my writing journey.

If you are in New York and love practicing yoga as much as I do, join me at The Yoga Collective for some Geek Yoga….because stretching, folding and bending surely make you smarter *Note: classes are currently on hold due to international travel!

Professional Bio

Jenny Blake is an author, career and micro-business coach, and traveling yoga teacher. She provides thought-leadership for entrepreneurs, Generation Y and beyond through her uplifting blog Life After College and best-selling book of the same name (which was featured in Target’s 2012 graduation display). Her passion is in helping people ditch the rigidity of yesterday’s career ladder, instead treating their careers (and lives) as dynamic as the constantly customizable apps on a smart phone.

Beyond just inspiration, it’s Jenny’s how-to tools and templates and loving kick-in-the-pants encouragement that keep people coming back for more. Jenny is convinced that the only things standing between you and accomplishing your big goal are a generous dose of inspiration, some Ghostbusters-style gremlin taming, iron-clad accountability and a template or two to guide the way.

Jenny has been featured on Forbes.com, US News & World Report, Real Simple magazine, and has spoken at several major universities and top companies such as Columbia, TEDxCMU and Best Buy. Before she left her full-time job to focus on her own business in June 2011, Jenny spent five and a half years on the Training, and Career Development teams at Google.

When Jenny isn’t writing, working with clients or speaking, you’ll probably find her traveling and taking yoga photos in random places, or at home in her New York apartment reclined on the couch reading the newspaper with a nice big cup of coffee. An eternal bookworm and quote junkie, Jenny is always on the lookout for just the right “prescription” for whatever might be standing in your way (or hers) — until she remembers we’ve already got everything we need.