The purpose of this paper is to begin that journey by reflecting upon my past, present and prospective roles as a leader, as well as my observations of leadership, in a variety of settings. 
	I was born in August of 1968 and spent the first ten years of my life on a small goat farm in a very rural part of eastern Ohio. My parents and two brothers and I lived close to the land and worked hard. Although my father also worked a regular full-time day job at an airport, farming was clearly such an important part of my parents’ being that they maintained this extra workload for well over a decade. Both of my parents come from south-central Pennsylvania dairy farming families. Those years on the farm impressed upon me ideas and values that would not become a conscious part of my identity for some years: The dignity of work and physical labor, the importance of working with nature and the land as a good steward, being in close relationship to the ecological systems upon which all life depends, fulfilling individual responsibilities to maintain a system, and seeing the connections of our family to other families in the wider rural community as we bartered with one another for various goods and services. My brother Jim is five years older than me, but Joe is only 20 months older, so he and I spent most of our time together. We were very imaginative in our play, spending copious amounts of time outdoors pretending to be superheroes. We both collected superhero comic books, and often drew our own as well.
	The first major turning point in my life journey came at the age of ten, when my family moved to Pennsylvania. My father had obtained a position with the Federal Aviation Administration, maintaining the radar site that keeps track of planes between Cleveland and New York City. At that time Clearfield, located slightly west of the middle of the state, was a town with a population of approximately ten thousand. The setting was no longer rural isolation as we lived just outside the borough, and the farm was reduced to a robust garden that occupied a small portion of our two acres. I believe that this change in location forced the values instilled during the farm years, unconscious to begin with, to an even deeper level of dormancy throughout my adolescence. It is only at this point in my life that I become aware of class differences. I was entering the fifth grade at the Third Ward Elementary School, and because there were two distinct fifth grade classes, I was given some sort of reading test to determine in which class I would be placed. I recall feeling that I had been placed in the “lower” class. I wasn’t sure at the time what this really meant academically, but it seemed to me that my class was made up of children from the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, while the other class seemed better off, both academically and socio-economically. 