Failure is a part of the process. You gotta get it wrong to get it right. This showed up in a variety of different failures, but mostly during the time when I was pivoting our business, I mean, it was fail, after fail, after fail. Ultimately, all those failures, or what I deemed as “failures” have turned into some of our greatest successes because we set ourselves up for a virtual and in-person platform. And now we’re able to thrive in this hybrid work environment as we reach people both in-person and virtually.
As part of my series about “authors who are making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Erin Diehl.
Erin “Big” Diehl is a Business Improv Edutainer, Failfluencer, and Professional Zoombie. Through a series of unrelated dares, Erin created improve it!, a unique professional development company rooted in improv comedy, that pushes leaders and teams to laugh, learn, play, and grow.
She is the proud host of The improve it! Podcast, a Top 1% Global Podcast, which helps develop leaders and teams through play, improv and experiential learning, and first time author of the Amazon Best Seller & Top New Release: I See You! A Leader’s Guide to Energizing Your Team Through Radical Empathy.
Among her many accolades, Erin is most proud of successfully coercing over 35,000 professionals to chicken dance.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
Shouting just underneath our daily lives is a cry to be liked. To belong. To have someone turn to us and say, “Wow, good job. I See You.” We bend over backwards to make this happen, leaving our truest selves behind in our pursuit to be recognized. Sometimes we bend over so far that we crack and fall. On the ground we pause and think: How did I get here?
My cry to be liked started at eight years old when my family began moving from state to state because of my dad’s job. I bent over backwards for the girl who sat beside me in the new classroom, the neighbor who made me play softball when it was my least favorite, and the dance team coach who told me that my body didn’t look like it should. I always started with, “Hey, I’m Erin!”–but inside I had no idea who I was anymore. I continued bending over backwards, with people-pleasing and perfectionism as my chosen training methods, and continued this pattern throughout my childhood with little to no awareness.
As I grew older and climbed the corporate ladder, Blackberry notifications and zero-boundary work schedules filled my day-to-day, and it was during this phase of my life that I discovered a space where I saw the highest version of myself come to be. A space where I could let go of people-pleasing and perfectionism as my chosen training methods and adopt a new one: improv comedy.
Through improv’s play therapy, I could transform myself into someone who didn’t care about being liked. On stage, my only goal was to be fully present and “yes, and” my scene partner. I knew that if improv had the power to transform me in this way, that it also had the power to transform others. In 2014, I founded an improv-based professional development company called improve it!. This company started as a seed of two people signing up for an event I’d been planning for months and grew into a whole damn forest of working with companies like The Obama Foundation, Uber, and Amazon.
Despite the success of improve it!, I fell back into old patterns of people-pleasing and perfectionism that I tried to justify as empathy and hard work. I bent over backwards again and cracked at age 39. I cracked and I fell. Hard.
It was from my reawakening that I wrote I See You!: a book that I was guided to write so I could share my hard-earned lessons of self-love (for real this time), radical empathy, and magnetizing cultures that stick. Because above all else, I’ve learned this: the only way we can give to others is if we give to ourselves first.
When you were younger, was there a book that you read that inspired you to take action or changed your life? Can you share a story about that?
In my twenties, I read The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. It was all about how small actions every single day lead up to your big, hairy goal. I specifically remember a component called “The Daily.” It was basically a report card that you did every week that kept you on track. You could create small actions that would lead up to whatever your large goal was. This is what really helped me stay on track with building a business. It helped me prioritize my time and understand what I wanted out of work and out of life. Reading The Compound Effect at 27 years old helped me form my business, which I started at 30.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
It’s kind of a mistake that I didn’t realize was a mistake at the time. My team and I worked at the lower level (not to be confused with basement, LOL) office of a co-working space in downtown Chicago. There were no windows, and it was definitely meant for one or two people. So naturally, we stuck like five of us in there. We had gnats in the summer because there was no air conditioning, and we were freezing in the winter, so we worked in our winter coats. We had to put our printer in the maintenance closet because it didn’t get good internet access in our office space. It’s funny because for us at the time, we were so happy to just have an office that made our business seem super legit. But I would say that we probably weren’t in the best working conditions. That office space truly made us who we are today. Now, we have a lot of jokes about the gnats, musical knowledge from Show Tune Fridays, and memories from quarterly team outings.
Can you describe how you aim to make a significant social impact with your book?
For starters, this book is all about love. It’s all about bringing love back, not only to yourself, but to the people around you in your life, the people you lead, your families, your communities, and your organizations. And if we can all learn to believe in ourselves, to love ourselves more, we will have so much more love to give outwardly. The magnetizing effect of that is unreal. We start to attract the people, the organizations, and the communities of our dreams because we’re putting out what we’re wanting to receive back. I think socially, if everyone were to do this experiment, to give as much love internally to themselves as they possibly could so that they have so much more love to give to others, it would be an incredible world to live in!
Can you share with us the most interesting story that you shared in your book?
It’s definitely from the chapter called “Interning to an Interview with A Former President.” It’s the story of former intern-turned VP of Client Experience, Jenna McDonnell. Jenna started off as a timid intern here at improve it!. She really didn’t know how wonderful she was, but I knew that she had so much potential and was ready to start stepping into her power. Rewind back to 2017 in Chicago, where we were facilitating the first ever training day with The Obama Foundation. Jenna had the opportunity to be a participant in the audience, and each audience member formed a small group. Each small group created a project that could make positive change in the city. Jenna was the one that came up with the idea for her group. She presented their idea not only to the former president, but also in front of media and 250 other participants. Jenna and Barack Obama had a back-and-forth conversation for about 10 minutes which she crushed with ease and with grace. And from that moment on, I knew that her life had changed forever. She grew in her confidence. She started to really see herself for all that she is. Jenna really is the case study of what we hope to do here at improve it!: to help people see their fullest potential and guide them to reach that through play.
What was the “aha moment” or series of events that made you decide to bring your message to the greater world? Can you share a story about that?
The Aha Moment for me was right after a healing journey — and I mean HEALING journey of all sorts. This healing journey came in 2022 after living what I like to call The Three Ps: pivoting, people pleasing, and pain. The pivoting came from the pandemic, transforming our completely in-person business into something completely virtual. The people pleasing was a lifelong pattern that had just reared its ugly head at the height of all of this pivoting and all of the restructuring that had to go on. The pain was physical pain that manifested itself in my back and shoulders since I was holding on to all of these emotions, and I was carrying weight that wasn’t mine. I was clinging to other people’s baggage that I needed to let go. So, after I realized that these Three Ps were causing me to lose myself, I went on a healing journey. I meditated, I journaled, and I went to therapy. I found many different types of energy healers to help me really get back to the core of who I am. It was a special kind of homecoming to myself. And in that homecoming, I received a message from a deceased loved one to write my first book: I See You! A Leader’s Guide to Energizing Your Team through Radical Empathy. The message was adamant about writing it NOW. Write it for the burnt out leader who is in need of tips and tricks. Write it for the caregiver who gives to everyone else except themselves. I took that message and ran with it. I knew that I had to bring it to other people to help them heal themselves.
Without sharing specific names, can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
I think about this all the time. I See You! has only been out for about three weeks and I have received so many messages from people already. Some readers latch onto my fertility journey as they are experiencing fertility journeys of their own. Some readers are dealing with a boss who does not have an ounce of empathy in their body. Some readers are on the verge of burnout. Some readers are chronic people pleasers and all they want to do is give, give, give, but they haven’t focused as much on how to start giving to themselves. I knew before I started writing that if this book could help one person, then I would’ve done my job. But to see the ripple effects it’s had so far moves me beyond words. I cannot wait for the day when the messages from the book reach people far beyond my network and community, and conversations surrounding the book lead to insights that I would’ve never conceived myself.
That’s truly the beauty of putting something out into the world — its impacts become fueled by the audience, not just the author.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
Yes, there is. The community can do three things to help solve the problem, and they’re pulled directly from the book. Part One is all about self-love. Part One teaches you how to give to yourself first because it is the only way you will have the capacity to give to others. Part Two teaches you how to be a selfless leader, ie, someone who loves themselves first and is so rooted in empathy that they can really see others for who they are and what they need. This leads to Part There: magnetic cultures. If you’re able to love yourself first and allow this self-love to overflow as selfless leadership, then you will begin to create these magnetic cultures–whether it’s a community or an organization or something else, you start to attract people who vibrate at your frequency.
When you start to attract like-minded people who really care about giving to others in an authentic way, you start to create positive change. And that’s ultimately what this is all about, positive change.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
In my early career, I had the privilege of being led by a selfless leader, someone who really taught me what leadership is at its core: encouraging those you lead to lead themselves so you can collectively achieve something you couldn’t as individuals. Her name was Jennifer D’Angelo. She taught me how to love myself at the nexus of my professional and personal lives. When she encouraged me to bring my full self to work each day, to exercise during my lunch break, and to feed my passions after work with improv, I knew she was guiding me to lead myself so that I could operate from a place of overflow rather than lack. Jen guided me to become a professional that I didn’t even know I could become because she saw me for me. She celebrated my strengths and didn’t undermine my weaknesses. I wanted to show up for her because I wanted to show up, period. I started to become productive and good at my job. And because I became productive, we as an organization started to thrive. Now, I have Jen’s leadership to thank not only for how I show up for my team, but how I show up for myself.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why?
1. Failure is a part of the process. You gotta get it wrong to get it right. This showed up in a variety of different failures, but mostly during the time when I was pivoting our business, I mean, it was fail, after fail, after fail. Ultimately, all those failures, or what I deemed as “failures” have turned into some of our greatest successes because we set ourselves up for a virtual and in-person platform. And now we’re able to thrive in this hybrid work environment as we reach people both in-person and virtually.
2. Support others no matter what’s going on in your life. Clap until it’s your turn and when it’s your turn, keep clapping. You want people there for you on the way up, and if you have a way down, you want people there for you on the way down. Supporting others cultivates community, and ultimately that’s what we’re here to do.
3. Lead with love, not with control. It’s so much easier to flow through your day as a leader than to push and try to control. When you try to control things, you end up in a scarcity mindset. I find that when I’m in a scarcity mindset, nothing seems to work. We don’t book clients. I’m frustrated and my team is frustrated. But when we work from a place of love and trust–always holding in the back of our minds that there’s enough for everyone and more is coming our way–things begin to flow to us, and they flow so easily.
4. Set boundaries or limit time with what I like to call “energy vampires.” Energy vampires are people who consistently try to rob you of your light, whether they realize it or not. They’re likely triggered by something inside of you that they wish they had inside of them. So, put in the work to really keep your distance from energy vampires because life is short and you have so much to give, so it’s imperative to surround yourself with good energy.
5. Have fun. My personal key to success has and always will be fun. What if we measured our success by how much fun we’re having? Because we know we’lll never be satisfied with the destination, it’s up to us if we want to make the daily effort to enjoy the journey. So, have fun and play along the way.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I have no idea who said it, but there’s this quote that says, “Pretend that everyone you meet has a sign around their neck that says ‘make me feel important’.” This is so relevant to my life in every way. It’s essentially what I See You!’s core message is: to give to others in such a way that makes them feel seen, heard, and valued because you believe in how important each of us is to the world, and the 100% unique contributions we are here to make.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I would love to have breakfast or lunch with Gabby Bernstein, who is an author, a speaker and a spiritual thought leader. And while we’re at it, Oprah Winfrey as well. I have loved Oprah since I was 13 years old and was able to really grasp what the Oprah Winfrey show was all about. While writing I See You!, I have always seen Oprah as my North Star and Guiding Light. And Gabby Bernstein created the Bestseller Masterclass that I took to learn how to write this book. Aside from the masterclass, Gabby has also really guided me on my spiritual journey.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find me on Instagram @itserindiehl and at my website: itserindiehl.com. There you’ll find the link to purchase the book, some other fun stuff, and all of my social handles.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!
Social Impact Authors: How & Why Author Erin Diehl of improve it! Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.