Win Harper | Life and Leadership Coach

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  T. S. Eliot

I often tell people, “I am a boy from a small town in Western Pennsylvania.”  I am really proud of my origins.  New Castle, Pennsylvania was an industrial town of about 44,000 people when I lived there in the early 60’s.  I left to go to college and then I joined the Marine Corps.  During those years my town shrunk to about 24,000.  The steel mills shut down in Pittsburgh and the machine shops in New Castle quickly followed suit:  Mesta, Johnson Bronze, two Rockwell Standards, and others.  Previously the Shenango Pottery had closed.  President Johnson chose Shenango Pottery for a set of White House dishes.  The last time I checked the hospital system is now the largest employer in the city and in Lawrence County.

I still enjoy going back home.  My values and my beliefs were formed there, and they have served me well over the years.  While in the Marine Corps for 26 years, I travelled throughout the Pacific:  Vietnam, Okinawa, Singapore, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, and South Korea.  I also went to Paris and London, and lived up and down the East Coast of the United States.  I chose the Marine Corps as a career because its values were aligned with my personal values.

After I retired, I languished for about 1 ½ years.  In 1993, during my third trip to Phil Jackson’s Beyond Basketball workshop at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, two friends recommended that I work at Omega.  I got an application and started in Campus Support in July 1994.  I was there about a week when a friend, Rich Warren, asked me how I was doing.  I said, “If I got any happier, I would burst.”

I arrived at Omega as a 50 year old retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel, and nobody cared about either of those things.  They accepted me as I was in that moment.  Wow!  That “acceptance” or in terms of Omega’s Values, Welcoming, drew me back to Omega for 15 years.  Every year I went back, I felt like I was coming home.  Even now when I visit, I feel like it is my home.

Ironically, I still feel the same way about the Marine Corps and my hometown.  As I look at my values and the values of all three places, I see congruence.  Here are Omega’s:  Service, Integrity, Simplicity, Accountability, Sustainability, Teamwork, Holistic, and Welcoming.  The defining core values of the Marine Corps are:  Honor, Courage, Commitment.  I don’t know if New Castle has a list of values, but I think that they would be:  Hard Work, Family, Honesty.

A few weeks ago I put a Values Clarification questionnaire in my blog.  Did you do the exercise?  Do you know what your values are?  Do the company you work for and your friends have the same values as you?  Are you happy right now?  If you are not, take a look at the alignment of your values with your work and those around you.  What is missing?  Where are you on your “exploration?”