Welcome. This is A Glimpse Inside. I’m Wendy Perrotti, and today we are wrapping up our four-part series on Living Your Best Life Now. Today, we’re telling a real life story of moving from stuck to happy and how it can happen for you.
My expert guest today is going to offer a little bit of a different twist than we usually do on this number four episode of a series. She is the author of 25 books but not on this topic. Jen is an expert in living your best life now because she’s done it, because she is doing it every single day. I know her story will absolutely inspire you. In fact, it’s going to blow you away, and it’s going to help you see what’s really possible.
In December of this year, I will have known Jen for three years, and what she’s done in that time is absolutely incredible. Rather than reading her bio, and you’re not going to like this, Jen, and telling you that myself, I’m going to ask Jen to really own it and tell you about all the things she’s doing right now. And after the break, we’ll talk about where she was in December of 2017 and everything that she’s done since then to change her life.
And actually, I almost forgot to say this. If you’ve been with A Glimpse Inside since the very beginning, Jen was the guest on my very first episode of this show. So without further ado, I want you to meet or re-meet Jennifer Degenhardt.
Hi, Wendy. Thank you so much for inviting me back to your show. I’m honored above all else.
I’m so excited to have you here and talk about your real life from stuck to happy. So the one little snippet of the before times that I want to just bring in before you start telling us all the great stuff you’ve been up to is that when I met you, one of the first things you told me is that people like you don’t get to be happy. And in our last call together, you were shouting, “I’m happy, I’m happy. I’ve never been happier.”
And that’s true. And that’s the truth. In fact, I woke up this morning knowing I was going to have a conversation of from stuck to happy with you today on the show. And I thought to myself, “This life I’m leading right now, it’s stuff that other people do.” And then I said to myself, “Oh, no, no. It’s stuff that I do too. I’m doing it.”
I know you are. So tell us what you’re doing.
Well, I am an author of 20, I think maybe 27 by now. Because I think since the last time I talked to you, I published another book. I self-publish books in short novels for students learning language. So most of my books are in Spanish, and I have a few of them translated to French, a few in English for English language learners, and I even have one in German. And I am having a ball writing these stories. Just every day, I get new ideas and inspiration from just what’s going on in the world, and I think of how that story can be told for the good of, not only language learning, but encouraging people to have conversations about some challenging topics.
Okay. So before you continue telling us about these great books, I need to just interject here. Sometimes when people hear, “Oh, sure, she’s self-published 25 books or pamphlets,” these books are in major educational catalogs all over the globe. Your Amazon is lighting up with sales. You are earning a living writing these books. These are not just little pamphlets.
Right, they’re not.
I need to throw that out there, Jen.
Okay, you’re right. They’re not little pamphlets. And yes, I do have my books with some major distributors aside from Amazon, which is the vehicle for self-publishing, and they are in classrooms all over the world. I just got a message from a tweet. I was mentioned in a tweet the other day from a woman who teaches Spanish in Japan, and it never ceases to amaze me. And I got another email this morning from a woman in Canada, and it’s the greatest thing ever. It really is so fun to connect with people all across the globe.
You can see her headshot on the show page, but I wish you could get to see what Jen looks like when she talks about these books because her entire face is electric.
And it is now even though we can’t see each other. It’s all lit up.
And you’ve just opened up a new website so that these have been all translated into eBooks so that kids can learn differently now with the pandemic and all that stuff. Is that right?
Yes. And I’m pretty excited about that too, because technology and I are not the best of friends, but I’ve powered through with a lot of help from a good web developer and another friend who is doing the same thing. And I have all of my books as eBooks, and I’m just now getting the audio portions together so that students can read the book and listen to the audio at the same time, which helps with input of language. And we don’t need to talk about language all that much, but it’s a lot more fun.
And it’s also to help teachers too, because I, myself, in addition to being an author, I’m adjunct Spanish professor at UConn Stanford here in Connecticut, and I had a really difficult time myself doing the online learning thing. I mean, not that it’s hard to deliver the content, but it’s hard to get involved with a language when you’re not with people in real life in the same room face-to-face.
So I thought that maybe having another interactive way to get kids involved with the language with these eBooks might be a good idea, and it will be easier for teachers too.
So the cool thing, and we’re going to talk about more of this part of from stuck to happy over the break, what I love about your story, Jen, is that the passion for you behind these books was partially because you love to write and you have all these stories in you. But partially it was driven by your desire to make a difference in the world, to teach kids how to see themselves in one another, even though they’re from completely different places.
That was the impetus for my first book in addition to delivering language. I noticed that the students I was teaching, I was teaching at the time rather, did not have a complete grasp of Spanish speakers in general. So I introduced a diverse character into my first book and just provided both sides. I mean, and very superficial, but at least presenting a diverse character. I mean, I don’t try to appropriate any diversity, stories of diverse characters because I can’t. But I at least want to give an opportunity for students to realize that, in fact, there are other kinds of people in the world and you just need to be aware.
Right, and on the inside, we are all exactly the same. And you have some really cool stories of feedback that you got from kids. But I have not been watching the clock, and my guess is we’re probably close to or past that five-minute mark. So we’ve got to take a really quick break, and we’ll dive right back to talk about Jen’s real life story of from stuck to happy into this. As soon as we come back, I’m going to give you, or Jen actually is going to give you the story of where she came from and how she did it. And I’ll be giving you my peace tool to help you shift your life from stuck to happy.
Before we take this quick break, Jen, our listeners who want to either follow you or look at the books or get the books, how do they do that?
My website is called puenteslanguage.com. You can find me there. And I think I can come up on a Google search too and not for the reasons that I might have suspected three years ago. So absolutely type my name in there, and you can find me on Facebook and Twitter and check the show notes because that’s how to spell my last name.
Jennifer Degenhardt, who three years ago thought she was going to be living under a bridge, now you’ll find her in a Google search absolutely. Stay with us. We will be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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