We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Erin Diehl a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Erin, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I think that’s a really interesting question because for my entire life, I have just seen failure as an opportunity to get back up and keep going. Anytime I have a setback, my initial reaction is not to process it, which I wouldn’t say is a good thing. But I would say that I’m the first person to take action and to try to turn the situation around. It’s a blessing and a curse because dissociating from emotions that come with failure and diving headfirst into action is not always the best–but the ability to know that failure is a part of the process, to get back up and pivot, try, fail, refine, adopt, adapt, and make things better is just something I think I was born with.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
Erin “Big” Diehl is a Business Improv Edutainer, Failfluencer, and Keynote Speaker. Through a series of unrelated dares, Erin created improve it!: a unique professional development company that uses improvisational comedy and experiential learning to sharpen leaders and teams so they can thrive in ever-changing environments, and do it with a whole lot of laughs along the way.
Erin Diehl is a graduate from Clemson University, a former experiential marketing and recruiting professional, and a veteran improviser from the top improvisational training programs in Chicago, including The Second City, i.O. Theater, and The Annoyance Theater.
Having spoken on global stages with companies, including Amazon, LinkedIn, McKesson, and the Obama Foundation, Erin has an energy and message to share with the world that creates lasting ripple effects for change. As a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business Program and member of The Chicago Innovation Awards Women’s Cohort, Erin is a living testament to the power of life-long learning, and how working to understand ourselves helps others to do so, too.
Erin is the proud host of a Top 1% Global Podcast, The improve it! Podcast, which you can find anywhere you listen to pods! She is also a first time author to the Amazon Best Seller & Top New Release book: 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.
When she’s not playing pretend or facilitating, she enjoys walking on the beach with her husband, son, and eight-pound toy poodle, BIGG DIEHL.
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?
The three skills that were most impactful in my journey come to mind pretty quickly. Number one, tenacity. I had an unwavering confidence about what I was here to do, how I was going to do it, and I would stop at nothing to make it work. Honestly, not building improve it! would have been the greatest regret of my life, so I used that innate sense of tenacity to make it happen despite lots of self-doubt and obstacles.
The second skill is empathy. I’m learning that I can lead with empathy sometimes to a fault, so I’m trying to balance overextending myself with my genuine concern for other people. Empathy has always helped me build teams, relationships with clients, and partners within our brand, so I know it’s vital to my personal core value system and success, but it’s important to recognize its limits.
The third skill is mindset. I take my mindfulness practice seriously, and it floods into the rest of my life. I’m cognizant of how I show up in the world and I choose to see things in a positive way. This is not to say that I’m perfect or that I don’t have bad days. I do have off days just like everyone else, but for the majority of my life, I have made a conscious effort to see things in a positive way and to look at the glass half full. I’ve been able to overcome obstacles with my mindset that I wouldn’t have been able to without it. Those three skills–tenacity, empathy, and mindset–have really carried me far.
And in terms of advice I have for folks who are early in their journey and are looking for ways to best develop the skills I mentioned, I think it’s crucial to recognize that all three are internal–tenacity, empathy, and mindset–all start with you, your own internal work. So, do the work to find the practices that help you dive more deeply into your internal world. For me it’s meditation, journaling, and engaging with the spiritual community and its healing practices. For you, it may be something completely different. But find what helps you enter that space and do the work before you go out into the world, so that you can show up from a place of overflow, not depletion.
Additionally, I think discovering why you are here and what you’re meant to do is imperative to working with passion rather than stress as you move further into your career, the days get longer, and your energy becomes even more sacred.
It’s a very hard question, “What is my life’s purpose?” But when you think about the things that bring you joy, those things that get you in the flow state, the ones that bring this feeling to your body of yes–pay attention to what they are. Lean into them. Those are the things that will help nudge you towards the answer.
Not only will they nudge you towards the answer, but they’ll help you to move through each day with more tenacity, empathy, and mindset because you actually like what you’re doing. A lot of folks skip this step, but I urge you not to as much as you can because it will take you so much further than if you settle on something that you feel lukewarm about.
So in summary, my best advice is to 1) Do the internal work–whether it’s therapy, a journaling practice, or simply grounding yourself by walking in nature–find what works for you so that you can exude the brilliance that exists in your internal world to the external world, and not try to do the reverse. Do the internal work because no one is coming to do it for you. 2) Know what brings you joy and make sure to incorporate that into everything that you do as you develop yourself. This will help you discover your purpose and work from a place of passion, a place of I get to instead of I have to.
Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?
I love this question. At improve it!, we have what we call an “ideal client avatar.” We named them Kimmel. Kimmel is actually a combination of two leaders who we know and love, so we put theirfirst names together and wa-la, Kimmel was born. Kimmel is someone who loves people and genuinely cares about their development. Kimmel operates by the principle that when you develop people as individuals, you develop the collective whole.
Kimmel thinks outside of the box, has a willingness to see (and try) things differently, and genuinely wants to challenge the status quo. Kimmel also has an attitude of play. They see how improv can improve their culture at work as well as their life outside of work. Kimmel goes outside of the norm to find ways for their team to connect so that it brings higher levels of empathy, laughter, learning, and play altogether. Kimmel knows how essential it is to learn soft skills that will carry their team through the rest of their career.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.learntoimproveit.com & www.itserindiehl.com
- Instagram: @itserindiehl
- Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/erindiehl
- Youtube: www.youtube.com/@improveit898
Image Credits
– Lauren McDuffie – Aron Simons
