Meet Erin

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.

My “it” as we like to say at improve it! (re: purpose) is to help others transform into the highest versions of themselves. Thank you for meeting me here. I See You, and can’t wait to watch your “it” unfold. Let’s werk!