Jovita Jenkins Built One Career for Flight - Then Another for Change

On a spacecraft, every component is allowed its personality only up to a point. It may run hot, vibrate, arrive late, or object quietly to the laws of physics. Eventually, however, it must cooperate with the system. Jovita Jenkins spent more than two decades in aerospace and technology learning how to make that cooperation possible. She began in software engineering, rose into systems leadership, and worked on programs associated with the B-1 bomber, Space Shuttle, Space Station, and Hubble Space Telescope. Then she took the engineer out of aerospace and pointed the engineer at leadership.

The machines changed. The question did not: what is stopping this capable system from doing what it was built to do?

Today Jenkins is a leadership advisor, executive coach, author, speaker, founder of GOOYOW Group, and a founding Los Angeles Guide at Chief, the network for senior women executives. She works from Marina del Rey with leaders facing enlarged jobs, difficult decisions, shifting organizations, and the peculiar trouble of being accomplished enough to hide from your own habits. She does not sell reinvention as a spa treatment. Her language is about awareness, choice, action, and patterns. It sounds less like scented candles and more like a preflight checklist.

The engineer with three business cards

In 1998, a Los Angeles business story caught Jenkins at an unusually revealing moment. She carried three business cards. One belonged to TRW, where she was a systems integration manager. Another represented Ajides International, the consultancy she ran with her husband. The third mattered less than the arrangement: even while holding a substantial corporate role, she was building optionality.

Her explanation was brisk. Job stability was shrinking, so a person had to remain entrepreneurial and keep a hand in more than one enterprise. This was before “portfolio career” became a cheerful phrase on professional networking sites. Jenkins was already treating a career as a system with redundancy. If one circuit failed, the lights need not go out.

The instinct fit her training. Jenkins earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics at California State University, Los Angeles, then completed an Executive MBA at UCLA Anderson in 1994. Mathematics offered structure; business school widened the frame. Aerospace supplied consequences. Software could not merely sound persuasive in a meeting. Systems had to operate together, under constraints, with errors made visible.

Her public accounts place her in the small cohort of women working in aerospace engineering when those ranks were overwhelmingly male. Over her corporate career, she moved from writing software to leading a systems engineering organization. The program list reads like an inventory of late-20th-century ambition: bomber, shuttle, station, telescope. Yet the useful detail is not the glamour of the hardware. It is the long apprenticeship in dependencies. No subsystem gets to declare itself the entire mission.

“Invent the future instead of trying to redesign the past.”Jovita Jenkins

A book written at the hinge

Jenkins left TRW in the early 2000s. By 2004, she had published Get Out of Your Own Way: Create the Next Chapter of Your Life. The timing was not decorative. She was making her own next chapter while writing about how other people might make theirs. A later UCLA alumni note called her the “queen of transformation,” an enjoyable title that risks making transformation sound like a court appointment. Her actual calendar was more practical: author, coach, business owner, lecturer, and soon an instructor at UCLA Extension.

The course she prepared to teach was about managing technical professionals. It was a tidy bridge between careers. Jenkins knew the culture of technical work from inside, including the moment when expertise stops being sufficient. Promotion can reward an engineer with the one problem no equation solves neatly: other people.

Her coaching practice grew around managers and leaders navigating precisely those thresholds. A new title alters expectations faster than it alters reflexes. An executive may know the strategy and still avoid the conversation. A founder may understand the market and remain loyal to an expired version of herself. Jenkins’s work focuses on the internal friction beneath the visible problem: assumptions, automatic responses, hesitation, and inherited beliefs.

There is a pleasing irony here. Systems engineering is partly the art of anticipating how components will interact. Coaching is conducted without that luxury. People revise the specification while the project is underway. They conceal faults from themselves. They may insist the warning light is part of the décor. Jenkins’s advantage is not that humans behave like machines. It is that she learned to look past the isolated symptom and ask how the parts reinforce one another.

The room became part of the method

Jenkins’s second career did not stay inside private coaching sessions. She taught, spoke, advised nonprofit leaders, and joined civic and literary organizations. She served on Los Angeles’s Quality and Productivity Commission. With the Women’s National Book Association’s Los Angeles chapter, she held board and editorial roles. Through Executive Service Corps, she has volunteered as a coach to executive directors, facilitated strategy meetings, and worked on board development since 2003.

At a 2015 conference for entrepreneurs, she distilled relationship-building to an unfashionably human principle: people buy from those they like and trust, and relationships must be reciprocal. At Northrop Grumman’s 2017 Black History Week event, she connected her aerospace history with a talk called “What If I Could?” The subjects were influence and advancement. The title was a question, which is often a coach’s more useful instrument.

Her role at Chief makes the room itself central. A Guide facilitates a core peer group of senior women rather than performing as its resident oracle. The work depends on trust, candor, accountability, and the discipline to leave enough silence for somebody else’s real thought to arrive. Jenkins’s history suits that arrangement. Systems leaders do not succeed by making every component resemble them. They create conditions in which different functions can tell the truth and still move together.

“Getting out of your own way is a process, not an event.”Jovita Jenkins

Twenty-two years later, the title stayed

In February 2026, Jenkins published Get Out of Your Own Way: Be a Future-Ready Leader in a Changing World. It is the second book to use her durable imperative. The first addressed life transition; the new book speaks to leaders whose responsibility is expanding while familiar methods lose their grip. Between editions lies more than two decades of client work.

Keeping the title was not laziness. It was an editorial verdict. The external landscape had changed dramatically, but Jenkins kept seeing the same obstruction in accomplished people: internal patterns operating faster than conscious choice. Intelligence and experience could build the career, then become evidence in favor of never changing it. The expert’s trap is elegant. Yesterday’s success volunteers to manage tomorrow.

Her newer framework centers on awareness, intentional choice, and consistent action. Awareness without choice becomes sophisticated self-description. Choice without action becomes a handsome notebook. Action without awareness can move quickly in the wrong direction. The three belong together, less a slogan than a control loop.

Jenkins’s own loop has taken her through engineering, executive management, entrepreneurship, education, authorship, civic work, and coaching. The occupations vary, but the governing interest is remarkably steady: how people function inside demanding systems, and how they regain agency when the old response no longer fits.

One of her sharper lines advises people not merely to move with the cheese, but to recreate the maze. It improves on the familiar office parable by granting the mouse some dignity. Adaptation is useful; authorship is better. A person who can redraw the maze is no longer waiting for a management fable to deliver lunch.

The systems thinker turns inward

The temptation with a career like Jenkins’s is to divide it cleanly: first rockets, then people. The boundary does not hold. Aerospace taught her to respect complexity, seek root causes, coordinate specialties, and decide under pressure. Coaching gave those habits a more unruly material. Writing forced the method into sentences. Chief placed it in a circle of peers where no one person owns the answer.

Her story also complicates the usual romance of the second act. Jenkins did not wander away from an old identity and discover a new one under flattering light. She built the bridge while still carrying multiple business cards. She added business education to mathematics, entrepreneurship to employment, and teaching to coaching. Reinvention appeared not as rupture but as a sequence of controlled transfers.

That may be why her advice favors verbs. See. Choose. Act. Retool. Invent. These are modest words with consequences. They ask less for a personality transplant than for motion. After a career spent around vehicles built to leave Earth, Jenkins arrived at a grounded proposition: the hardest launch mechanism may be the one between a person’s habits and her next decision.