The Lawyer’s Well-Being Brief. . .Building Something From the Ground Up: What Teresa Resch and the Toronto Tempo Teach Us About Creating a Well-Being Practice
“Choose the next right thing.”-Glennon Doyle
Welcome (back) to the Lawyer’s Well-Being Brief! Each week, I share insights and practical strategies to help us cultivate well-being and flourish — both personally and professionally. Live well! Lawyer well!
The launch of the Toronto Tempo is about far more than basketball. It is about vision, leadership, culture, patience, and building something meaningful from the ground up. At the center of that effort is Teresa Resch, whose work in helping bring the WNBA to Toronto offers valuable lessons far beyond sports.
Building a professional franchise from scratch requires more than excitement and momentum. It requires clarity of purpose, relationship-building, long-term thinking, adaptability, and the willingness to continue moving forward before all the results are visible. In many ways, those same principles apply when building a well-being practice.
One of the most interesting aspects of Resch’s journey is that she is not simply inheriting an established organization with systems already in place. She is helping create an identity, a culture, and a vision from day one. That means every conversation, every hire, every partnership, and every decision contributes to the foundation of what the organization will become.
The same is true for anyone building a coaching, consulting, or well-being practice.
When people first begin building a practice, it is easy to focus only on outcomes:
How many clients do I have?
How quickly am I growing?
Am I visible enough?
Am I successful yet?
But sustainable growth rarely happens overnight. What often matters more in the early stages is building the infrastructure that supports long-term impact:
Trust
Relationships
Consistency
Reputation
Values
Systems
Community
Those things are harder to measure, but they are often what determine whether something lasts.
The Toronto Tempo represents a long-term investment in growth, opportunity, and culture. Successful organizations are rarely built through one major moment alone. They are built through thousands of smaller decisions made consistently over time.
That can be frustrating when building a well-being practice because progress is not always immediately visible. There are seasons where it may feel like you are putting in tremendous effort with limited external validation. You create content, have conversations, network, learn, improve your skills, and continue showing up without always seeing instant results.
But that is often how meaningful things are built.
One of the most important lessons from sports organizations is that culture is created intentionally. It does not happen accidentally. Leaders shape culture through the behaviors they model, the standards they reinforce, and the environment they create for others.
The same principle applies to a well-being practice.
If your goal is to help others build healthier, more sustainable lives, then your own practice must reflect those same values. That does not mean perfection. It means alignment. People are often drawn not only to expertise, but also to authenticity, consistency, and presence.
In many ways, building a practice is an exercise in patience and resilience. You may not see the full impact of your work immediately. Sometimes the seeds you plant through one conversation, one workshop, one article, or one coaching session continue growing long after the moment itself has passed.
That is true in sports as well. Expansion franchises are not built only for opening day. They are built for what they can become years from now.
Another powerful lesson from Teresa Resch’s leadership is the importance of believing in possibility before everyone else sees it clearly. Bringing a WNBA franchise to Toronto required vision — the ability to see future opportunity before there was proof of success. Every meaningful endeavor requires some version of that belief.
Building a well-being practice often requires believing in your mission during uncertain stages:
Before the audience grows
Before the referrals increase
Before the opportunities arrive consistently
Before the impact becomes visible at scale
Vision often comes before validation.
There is also something meaningful about the connection between sports and well-being itself. Great teams understand that performance and well-being are deeply connected. Athletes cannot sustain excellence without recovery, support, trust, mental resilience, and healthy culture. The same is true for professionals, leaders, and organizations outside of sports.
That is why well-being work matters. It is not simply about helping people feel better temporarily. It is about helping individuals and organizations build environments where sustainable performance, fulfillment, and human connection can thrive.
The Toronto Tempo is still in the early stages of its story. But perhaps that is what makes it so inspiring. Building something meaningful always begins before the full picture exists.
Whether you are building a sports franchise, a business, a career, or a well-being practice, the process often requires the same things:
Patience
Consistency
Vision
Relationships
Adaptability
Courage
Trust in the long game
The foundations we build quietly today often become the platforms for meaningful impact tomorrow.
Forward Always!
