About — Jenny Doan

Meet Jenny

If you spot Jenny in the wild she's probably somewhere in Melbourne, sharing her record breaking wisdom on stage, meeting with businesses to talk Shh!t Happens with a bag full of pink toilet rolls or running a team building hula hoop session.

But how did we get here?

It started with a bike ride.

Jenny Doan was born in Perth, Western Australia and raised by her Vietnamese parents who fled their country for a better life. (photo: that’s Jenny in pink at their parent’s deli in 1994).

She inherited her parents’ strong work ethic and spent her early career as an intelligence analyst for the Department of Defence.

With a safe and secure job, she was living their dream, but deep down, she knew it wasn’t for her.

She was sensible, she didn't quit dramatically. She had no idea what she wanted to do instead. So she took an overseas volunteer assignment to try something different and got hooked on cycling (photo: and she had the tan lines to prove it).

When she returned home, the only part of her day she genuinely loved was the bike ride to and from work.

So she quit. She flew to New Zealand with her bike. And backed herself.

Then came the hula hoop.

At Canberra’s annual Night at the Museum event, Jenny spotted a hula hooping station and gave it a go. Although it’d been over a decade since she last hula hooped, it was surprisingly easy, like riding a bicycle.

She signed up for a hula hooping class a week later but was disappointed when she realised it was dance hula hooping.

“I don’t want to do tricks, I just want to hula hoop. Hmmm, I wonder what the world record is for the longest time hula hooping.”

75 hours. Undeterred by that number, she looked up a video of the current record holder.

“Dude, relax you’ve gotta flow with the hula hoop, not fight it.”.

Admittedly a little insane, Jenny decided that one day, she’d break that record, in the meantime, she’d get back on her bike.

For four years she alternated between cycle touring and coming home to get a job to fund her next adventure, until she landed her dream job as an analyst at Uber. Eighteen months later the office shut down and she had the option to move to Sydney or anywhere else Uber operated.

She picked Chicago. The Windy City was known for deep dish pizza, gorgeous architecture and brutal winters. But not cycling infrastructure. Cycling was terrifying, so she hung up her bike and traded it for a hula hoop.

It turns out hundreds of hours of cycling touring across 20+ countries built a ridiculously elite level of endurance and focus, perfect for breaking world records.

That 75 hour hula hooping record now stands untouched at 100 hours.

It seemed impossible. Until I backed myself.

Then everything changed.

Jenny was training for her fourth record, the most chin-ups while hula hooping, when she started to feel numbness in her hands and feet.

"Surely it's a pinched nerve or a vitamin deficiency."

Nope. It was multiple sclerosis. Within weeks she was diagnosed and started treatment.

Suddenly her experiences with resilience felt trivial. Hula hooping 100 hours is nothing compared to processing what it means to live with an incurable condition.

She struggled to accept her new reality, the unpredictable fatigue, the body that was no longer an unstoppable force of nature. But then she noticed something familiar.

Every single phase of her life had required her to step into the unknown.

Terrifying? Yes. Rewarding beyond her wildest expectations? Also yes.

So she stepped into the unknown again. Stood tall. And trusted there would be an opportunity, custom made for her.

Today she's the CEO of Shh!t Happens, a toilet paper social enterprise supporting the disability community. She's on stages sharing her journey to inspire people to finally start that impossible goal.