Meet Jayna Sheats

 

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jayna Sheats. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jayna below.

Hi Jayna , really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

From what was in my heart.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I grew up in southwest Colorado, on a ranch where our nearest neighbors were an elderly couple three miles away; after 22 miles of often impassible dirt road came an actual town of 500 people. Mail came twice a week. Electricity came when I was ten.

Sixteen years later, following a year at the University of Regensburg in Germany I was pursuing a PhD in Physical Chemistry at Stanford University. Only after another forty years of successful industrial R&D in Silicon Valley, in which I considered myself a failure because it wasn’t ever me, did I muster the courage to let the Real Me come out of her shell. (This is commonly called “transition,” but the only real transition was in the name the world knew me by.

Several years later I began writing my first novel (Hanna’s Ascent), which expressed that story in an artistically transformed manner.

Hanna captured the essence of her journey in these words: “A part of her still dreamed of smooth, unblemished skin and a fashion-model figure. But years of professional acceptance, fond compliments from her husband, and children who cared far more about the freshness of the bread their mother baked than how she looked, had quieted that voice to a background whisper.

Twenty-three years ago, standing in front of a hospital mirror, she’d begun an argument. This isn’t the real me, she’d said, looking at her scars and ungainly figure. But this is the real me. A woman with a beauty of her own, and nothing to be ashamed of. And the world should know that.”

This book launched me on a new career as a writer, and I haven’t looked back. I still have a role in my electronics startup, but creative writing in the pursuit of social justice is my passion.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

Three impactful qualities: shame, inability to believe in myself, and certainty of failure if I did. So the advice is pretty clear: believe in yourself, accept yourself, and know there is a path for you – for you alone, no one to lead, no one to follow. But one that will take you home.

There are many, many thousands of books proffering advice on how to do this (and anything else you want to do). That’s not an exaggeration. Why are there still so many messy rooms despite all of Marie Kondo’s efforts? The answer is that you have to DO it. I think just about everyone can figure out, with a little (okay, maybe a lot of) introspection, what they need to do. That’s the easy part. Ditching the fear that stands in the way is the hard part. And digging into the emotions that can control and beat the fear is best done with media that plumb those emotional depths.

Listen to Alex Honnold’s TED talk on climbing El Capitan without a rope.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

First I’m going to ignore instructions (which I’m very good at doing) and answer the question “Who has been most helpful in helping you overcome challenges?” My mentors have ranged from a Navy diver (and WWII POW) to a psychology professor (who did her PhD with Carl Rogers), with a dozen or more scientists, poets and creative writers in between (conceptually, that is). That tells you my interests: I want to be in touch with people who value yin and yang (“To see a world in a grain of sand… hold infinity in the palm of your hand”); who aren’t afraid to try something new at any age, who care deeply about other human beings in a way that embodies empathy.

Practically, I am passionately devoted to promulgating understanding and acceptance for transgender people, and to expressing our story with empathy and literary eloquence. Since I came to the literary world late in life, I’d love to connect with its denizens who can help me boost awareness of my book. (Maybe I can offer chemistry lessons in return…) I’m also writing a non-fiction book on transgender women in athletics, and would be grateful for inputs from those people about their experiences.

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