Damon West is not coming to Mansfield to tell people everything will be fine.
He is coming to talk about what people do when it is not.
Before West became a best-selling author and keynote speaker, he was a former Division I college quarterback whose addiction led him into crime, arrest and a 65-year prison sentence in Texas.
He does not tell that part of the story as if something unfair happened to him.
“I deserved to go to prison,” West said. “I did the things.”
But prison was also where West learned the lesson that would become his message to the world.
On Aug. 5, West will bring that message to Mansfield inside the Ohio State Reformatory, the prison made famous by “The Shawshank Redemption.” The event, hosted by the Richland Area Chamber & Economic Development, is open to Chamber members and the public.
West has never been to the Reformatory before. He calls the upcoming visit a “full circle moment,” though he is careful not to compare himself to Andy Dufresne, the fictional man wrongly imprisoned in “Shawshank.”
“Andy was innocent of the crimes he committed,” West said. “I was a very guilty man.”
Still, West understands what it means to walk into a place designed to strip people of hope and choose not to surrender it.
That is part of why local leaders believe his message fits Mansfield right now.
The city is in the middle of a visible and sometimes uncomfortable season of change.
Downtown streets are torn up as the $20.3 million Main Street Improvement Project moves through its final months. Historic buildings are being prepared for new housing, storefronts and hotel space. Former industrial sites are being talked about again as places with a future.
Growth brings orange barrels, closed intersections, trade-offs and hard conversations about what a community wants to become.
Jessica Gribben, president and CEO of Richland Area Chamber & Economic Development, said West’s message landed because Richland County is in its own season of change.
“We’ve certainly seen our share of challenges, and it felt like the right time to talk through, how do we rise to this occasion now?” Gribben said.
Kevin Kimmel, superintendent of Mid-Ohio Educational Service Center, heard West speak about three years ago at a Buckeye Association of School Administrators conference. He did not know West before that keynote. Afterward, he started researching him, bought his books and began working to bring him to Richland County. But scheduling challenges delayed his visit until this year.
MOESC will host West for educational leaders Aug. 4, one day before the Chamber event.
Kimmel said he was careful about bringing a speaker like West in front of local administrators and community members.
“I didn’t want to put somebody phony up in front of my administrators or even the county people,” Kimmel said. “There’s a lot of salespeople out there that have figured a market to target, and the message may be hollow. His message is not hollow.”
West’s story turns on a simple metaphor.
While he was in jail awaiting transfer to prison, he met a man named Muhammad. West knew him for only three weeks. Before leaving, Muhammad gave him a lesson about a pot of boiling water.
In boiling water, he told West, a carrot goes in hard and becomes soft. An egg goes in fragile and becomes hard. But a coffee bean changes the water.
“The coffee bean is the only thing that can change the water because the power is inside the coffee bean to change the water around the coffee bean,” West said.
Muhammad’s final words to him were four words West still repeats everywhere he speaks.
“Be a coffee bean.”
West carried that message into a maximum-security prison in Texas. Years later, he turned it into “The Coffee Bean: A Simple Lesson to Create Positive Change,” the best-selling book he co-authored with Jon Gordon.
Everyone has boiling water.
A business owner has it. A teacher has it. A parent has it. A coach has it. A person in recovery has it. A city trying to reinvent itself has it.
The question, West said, is what the pressure does to you, and what you do inside it.
That is why he believes the prison setting matters.
“There’s more than one way to be in prison,” West said. “You don’t have to be in a physical prison to be in prison.”
He said he has met more people in the free world who are locked up than he did while serving time in prison.
Some are locked up by their thoughts. Some by their past. Some by fear. Some by cynicism. Some by the belief that nothing can really change.
West knows some people may hear “former prisoner” and decide the message is not for them.
He does not avoid that skepticism.
“Why do I want to listen to some ex-con who got out of prison and is going around speaking, telling people about it?” he said, naming the question some people may already be thinking.
His answer is that labels can keep people from learning from someone who has lived through something they have not.
Kimmel said that is part of what makes the message work in person.
“I think Damon’s message allows folks to reflect internally on what it is that we struggle with as individuals, whether it’s personal or professional,” Kimmel said. “Do we have the power to change what we would like to change?”
West’s message is not that life is easy or that people should pretend difficult things are positive. It is that people still have agency inside hard circumstances.
A week later, a month later or a year later, he wants people to remember the story of a man who took a simple lesson into one of the hardest environments imaginable and came out changed.
“If that guy could do that in there,” West said, “then I can do it out here.”
Damon West will speak Aug. 5 at the Ohio State Reformatory. The event is hosted by Richland Area Chamber & Economic Development and is open to Chamber members and the public. Attendees will receive a copy of “The Coffee Bean,” thanks to sponsorship support from the Mansfield Richland County Public Library.
