“So my overall message when I speak to anyone is that life isn’t dress rehearsal. This is it. This is your life. This is the only shot you get.” — Jenna Wolfe

Jenna Wolfe was the first fitness and lifestyle correspondent on the Today Show, but recently left to start her own live-streaming show on Facebook called The Jenna Wolfe Show. She is also the author of the book “Thinner in 30: Small changes that add up to big weight loss in just 30 days.” When she left the Today Show, it was unexpected and she talks with Commander Divine about the value of the left turn and making unexpected changes. Timing is often not right but the value of keeping your goal in mind even when it’s not the right time for a change is crucial.  Find out how you can focus on your goals and move on even when it’s hard.

This week’s episode is brought to you by The Neurohacker Collective has recently come out with Qualia, an extensively researched nootropic that combines natural ingredients with the best synthetic ingredients to maximize our capacity to think effectively. It is the “Lamborghini” of nootropics, having been researched and held to higher standards than most new nootropics are. When you purchase an ongoing subscription for Qualia at neurohacker.com, enter the code “unbeatablemind15r” to get 15% off the price of a monthly subscription.

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Other episodes of our podcast that you might be interested in are  Mitch Horowitz , Tony Wrighton and Lewis Howes.

Transcript & Shownotes

Hey folks, this is Mark Divine with the Unbeatable Mind podcast. Thank you again for joining me this week. I super-appreciate it. I do not take it for granted. It’s amazing. I know you’re busy and there’s about a hundred billion podcasts out there, probably a hundred billion new ones since last week. So it’s cool that you found this and you’re listening, and like I said, I super-appreciate it. And if you want other people to find it, it is definitely helpful if you go to rate the podcast at iTunes. And then when people search for stuff that is similar we’ll pop up. And if you’re not on our email list, please go to unbeatablemind.com/podcast so you can put your name on our email list and we can let you know about all the cool training that we do, and stuff like that.

Introduction

[01:22 ]
I’m really stoked today to meet Jenna Wolfe, our guest. Some of you might recognize the name, because she’s been in the public sphere as the lifestyle and fitness correspondent on NBC’s Today Show. Huge show, she did that for 8 years. She’s got a new book out that we’ll talk about. “Thinner in 30: Small changes that add up to Big Results in 30 days.” I’m excited to talk about that. And has recently kind of branched out to create her own show, which is going to be called “The Jenna Wolfe Show.”

So Jenna, thanks so much for your time. Super-cool to meet you. How are things going?

Jenna Wolfe: Great to meet you as well. Great. It’s busy, and I’m finding that I have less and less time and I’m also finding that nothing makes me happier. So it’s the way it’s going to be for me, and I feed off of it. It’s busy energy. It’s a lot going on. I’ve got 2 little kids, who each have their own schedules. And I’ve got my own schedule, and a partner with her own schedule. So it’s mayhem, but it’s beautiful chaos I like to call it.

Mark: Controlled chaos. Just in some degree. Cause you’re doing what you love. You’re in alignment, so it feels like you’re probably flowing in spite of the chaos a lot of the time.

Jenna: Most days. Most days.

Mark: Good for you. And you live in Manhattan, you just mentioned. How long have you been out there?

Jenna: So, everything NBC based is centered around 30 Rock, which is right here in midtown Manhattan. So it’s much easier if you’re working from here if you live around here, because television is weird. You’re there for a couple hours, you run off to do an interview, you come back there, you come back home, and you have to steal pockets of free time to come home and, like, introduce yourself to your children whenever you get a chance. So for us, we just thought it would be much easier for us to live close by work. And it’s paid off. We’ve been here… I’ve been in the city, gosh, almost 20 years now. My partner, Steph, moved here from London 5 years ago.

Childhood in the Caribbean and Westchester

[03:26 ]
Mark: I see. It looks like, from my notes from Allison that you actually lived in Haiti? And that you are… you actually weren’t born in Haiti, were you? You were born in Jamaica.

Jenna: Kind of a different upbringing. I was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and then my brother and I, we were raise d in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. My dad has a leather manufacturing company in the Caribbean. And so my mom and dad moved down to Jamaica to start the business and then had us, we were born there. And then the political situation got pretty bad there in 1979, and they moved us to what at the time was a very stable and calm island of Haiti.

Mark: Little did they know what would happen.

Jenna: Which was anything but. Little, little, little did they know. And then in 1989, it got so bad… they overturned the government, there was a coup and this government military force was basically looting everyone, and looting the homes of anyone related to anything government whatsoever. So we needed to get out pretty fast. So we basically left within a week. After being there basically our whole lives, we left within a week and moved up to Westchester, NY. So it’s just about an hour outside of New York City, in 9th grade.

Mark: Like how did that happen? How did you go from Haiti to Westchester? What was the link there?

Jenna: So my grandparents lived in Westchester. We didn’t have much time to make a choice, so we wanted to go somewhere close to the only people we really knew in United States. So my dad’s parents were in Westchester, New York. And we moved about 20 minutes north of there, to Chappaqua, home of the Clintons. At the time when we moved, the high school was in the top 10 or something, in the country. The irony is that in Haiti, we had, like, the worst education. I mean it was as bad as you… it was like a freelance education. They were basically like auctioning off subject matter to anyone that wanted to teach it, so my parents felt it was a good idea to send us to the most competitive high school, just about, in the country. So that was a culture shock for me, across the board.

Mark: I can imagine that was quite transition. How old were you when that happened?

Jenna: I was… it was the end of 8th grade, beginning of 9th grade, and for my brother it was 6th grade. It was a lot easier for him. He was a little athlete, and never had braces, and never had a pimple and always had great hair. And was very popular.

I had the opposite. Anything that could make me seem like an after-school special, basically did. Like the bad frizzy hair, and the acne and the like, getting bullied in school. And not knowing how to dress, and having the wrong friends. It was a really tough 4 years for me, but I was always very athletic. And in the Caribbean being an athlete was cool, was in, you were popular. It was the opposite up here. So I went out for every team, and made varsity really quickly, and I was like the freak, and the standout, so what I thought I was doing something good, finally. It was still, you know, more reason to get harassed by the rest of my high school mates. So it was tough 4 years for me.

Mark: What type of sports did you play, that you liked?

Jenna: So interestingly enough, I played Tennis in Haiti and Soccer in Haiti. And when I came up, they only had… in the fall it was… volleyball and like, field hockey or something. And I’d never even seen a field hockey or lacrosse stick before. I never knew what that was, so that was a disaster. My tennis racket never made it up in the cartons, so I couldn’t try out for the tennis team. This one girl asked me to try out for volleyball. I said if it’s anything like basketball, I guess I know what basketball is. And I tried out and I ended up making the varsity team. Purely based on athletic prowess, not on actual skill. But I learned the skill very quickly. I was always very, very athletic, so I played volleyball, basketball and softball and a little soccer while in high school.

Mark: And then you went