Success To Significance: Exploring Multiple Levels Of Breakthroughs In Life

Have you broken through your glass ceiling already? What do you want to achieve after doing so? Making your life more significant by having another goal can be your next path. Today, Jen Du Plessis welcomes you to the very first episode of her Success To Significance podcast, which tackles multiple levels of breakthroughs from different people across all walks of life. Breaking her own glass ceiling, Jen shares the lessons and failures she has learned along the way and incorporates them to the tips she shares for attracting clients and breaking through other achievements. Get to know Jen and this exciting new journey she is taking in this episode.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Success To Significance: Exploring Multiple Levels Of Breakthroughs In Life

My name is Jen Du Plessis and I am delighted that you have joined me on this first episode of Success to Significance: Life After Breaking Through Glass Ceilings. Let me share with you a little bit about myself and why I decided to release this particular podcast. This is not my first podcast. My first one is called Mortgage Lending Mastery. I have been a podcaster for a little over five and a half years as of the date that this was released in 2020. I’m one of those veteran podcasters that have been around for quite some time. I absolutely enjoy podcasting and sharing stories from all over the world. That’s what’s so great about it.

First, let me tell you a little bit about me. I had a 35-year career in mortgage lending in the financial sector. After many years of being one of the top people in the country, I decided that it was time for me to share how I got to my success. As well as how I broke through glass ceilings, all the failures I had and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I began speaking many years ago. I have been speaking all over the world and on great stages.

I have shared stages with some wonderful and powerful people like Magic Johnson, Darren Hardy, Tony Robbins, the list goes on and on. It’s been absolutely wonderful. Some of the people that I’ve had the opportunity to share the stage with are going to be people that I’m interviewing here as well. Stay tuned for that because those interviews are heading your way. After a while, it was being on two boats. They’re fine when they’re sitting there and they’re not doing much of anything but when both of them start rocking because both were doing so well. I had to make a decision as to whether or not I was going to stay in mortgage lending or I was going to go ahead and take the leap and go into full-time speaking, podcasting and mentorship, which is exactly what I did a few years ago. That’s a lot about me.

Let me tell you what else I’m passionate about. I’m blessed to have all these wonderful opportunities, but I’m also passionate about seeing my clients have major breakthroughs in the coaching that I do for them. That’s a big passion for me watching my clients attract clients, rather than chase clients. There are all kinds of great passions that I have in what I do now and it keeps me going every day. I am married to my high school sweetheart. We’re called Danny and Sandy from Grease. If you ever get the chance to get my book, Launch!: How to Take Your Business to New Heights, there’s a reference in there, “To Danny from Sandy.” For those that are not reading and have no idea what that means, now you know. You’re the insiders and you know.

[bctt tweet=”Watch your clients attract clients rather than chase them.” via=”no”]

We’ve been married for 37 years. We have two grown and beautiful children both married. One of them has three children and the other has no children yet, but they got married. We’ll give them a little bit of time. Not a lot, but a little bit of time so we can continue to be happy grandparents. We live in Northern Virginia. We live on a 21-acre farmette, which means it’s not a farm and it’s not a grandiose house. It’s a small farmette. We love it and being out in the country. We’re right at the base of Mount Weather, which is on the Blue Ridge Mountains where the Appalachian Trail is.

If you ever want to look up where Bluemont, Virginia is, that’s where we’re at. We’re in the heart of Virginia’s Wine Country. We’ve now been ranked worldwide internationally as the fifth-best destination place to go to from the Wine Magazine. We call ourselves the East Coast of Napa. We’re wine connoisseurs. A couple of other things about me is I’m a competitive ballroom Latin and Swing dancer. I love dancing. I love music and on the other spectrum of that, I am also an expert markswoman. I’m on a shooting and competition team and that’s why we’re out here in the country so I can do that. It’s crazy on both sides.

Why this podcast when I already have a podcast? The day that I “retired” from mortgage lending, I was out networking and someone said to me, “What do you do?” I don’t know what I do anymore. I didn’t have this identity because the identity I had built was this success. That was my identity. I knew I was making a transition in my life. I talked to many of my girlfriends who are major business owners as well and I said to them, “Are you sleeping and losing sleep at night wondering what’s next for you?” All of them were saying, “Yes.” One owns a big event company. Another founded the third largest or however they rank that in the country for limousine services here in Northern Virginia. They are powerful women.

Launch!: How to Take Your Business to New Heights

I said to them, “I’m losing sleep at night because I’ve been doing this for 35 years and I’m exhausted. What do I need to be doing now?” I’m not sure what I want to do because my skillset was so niched as many of us are. We’ve been in a specific industry for a long period of time. The other part was I’m 57 and I was thinking about my mother. Her goal in life was to be home with us, the kids. I say us because I was an only child until I was twelve and a half. Her goal was to be home with me. Every day when I came home, she’d be home with me. When I went off to college, she started saying, “I need something for me,” but at that time that something was to be a secretary or go do an hourly type of job. She only intended to do that job long enough for me to have kids so that she can quit, come back home and take care of her grandkids.

I realized that’s not this age group that I’m in. We aren’t built that way. I love my grandkids but I have no intention of babysitting them day in and day out, which my mother did, God bless her. She loved it but not me. That wasn’t what we were doing. We’re the first generation of high power and high paying women in business. That’s the last thing that we want to do when we’re done with our career after 35 years. I’ve paved the way for other women loan officers in the mortgage industry because it’s such a good old boy network. It’s a man’s world, but not so much anymore. It’s changing, but paving the way for other women to have great opportunities.

The last thing I want to do is go work for Walmart and be a greeter or go work for someone and be a secretary, an administrative assistant as they call or an executive assistant, or babysit my grandkids. There’s something else out there for me and I wanted to explore that. Through speaking, coaching, podcasting and sharing my story and my mess because our mess becomes our message in everything that we do. Even in this. This was a mess for me, what do I do? What’s next for me? Now, it becomes a message.

That’s where I said, “It’s moving from being successful and having that identity to the significance or the impact I want to place in the world.” I was struggling with that saying, “It’s not always dollar success.” It’s not women only. Men have been in careers for a long time and are saying, what’s next for them? My husband and I chatted about it. He said that there’s something about breaking through glass ceilings, but not the woman glass ceiling necessarily, and not the financial glass ceiling but whatever glass ceiling you’re coming up against. It could be relationships, health, business and spirituality.

There are a lot of glass ceilings that we all breakthrough. Whenever you think about reaching or going to the next goal or the next place in your life, it is a ceiling for you that you have to breakthrough. Once you’ve broken through it, it becomes the floor and you have a new ceiling. There are multiple ceilings that we breakthrough and that’s why I decided to call it Life After Breaking Through Glass Ceilings. What does that look like? What does your life look like after you’ve lost weight or after you have had a divorce? That’s a life change as well. It might be that you were in a bad marriage or life after breaking through financially in your business.

We’re going to explore all of those things in this podcast. The multiple levels of breakthroughs and success to significance. Sometimes it’s not success to significance, but rather just the breakthrough that you had and how has it impacted your life. I find that when we go through these various breakthroughs and a multitude of them over time, it does start leaning into, “What do I want to do to leave a mark on the world?” What I learned I want to share with others. If I were to be someone who broke through alcoholism or drugs and things like that, I want to share with people how I broke through. That’s what we’re going to be doing in this podcast.

[bctt tweet=”Our mess becomes our message in everything that we do.” via=”no”]

I have all kinds of people from all kinds of walks of life that will be sharing their breakthroughs so you know that you’re not the only one. You’re not alone. You’re not an island running, wondering about it, losing sleep over it and talking with people about it. There are lots and lots of people that have had major breakthroughs and we want to share how they did it. Whether they’re still in it now, maybe they’ve come out on the other side or maybe they’re like you and they’re saying, “I don’t know which direction to go to.”

We’re going to explore all three of those, so the entrance, the people that are in it right now, and the people that have come through to hopefully give you the incentive and the inspiration to make the changes that you want in your life as well. As you shift from success to significance, leaving your real job or if you’re making the shift from your mess into the significance of how you can share that with the rest of the world. What life looks likes on the other side of breaking through that glass ceiling.

That’s what we’re going to be all about. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to read what I have to say here and the people that are going to be sharing their stories. I hope you come back again and please don’t forget to subscribe. Please don’t forget to give us a five-star rating and give us your feedback. We love listening to them or watching the reviews. I’m constantly watching reviews. I’m so excited to see them all the time. I hope that you can continue to join us for years to come. I hope that we make an impact in your life and move you from your success to your significance every single day. We will catch you on the next episode of Success to Significance: Life After Breaking Through Glass Ceilings.