Part Two.Erin Diehl dreamed of being the next Oprah but ended up becoming the queen of corporate improv instead. Now the founder and CEO of Improve It, she helps teams laugh their way to better performance. A self-declared “failfluencer,” Erin turns every faceplant into a feature. In this two-part series, we dig into her journey, her joy-first philosophy, and why bombing on stage—or in life—might be the best thing that ever happened to you.Key Highlights of Our Interview:WTF: Worst Terrifying Failure“2020 was my crash course in failure. The pandemic forced our in-person business to pivot entirely online overnight. At the same time, I juggled new motherhood, supporting a recovering parent, and trying to keep my business afloat. It was my WTF moment: my Worst Terrifying Failure.”This breakdown captures the essence of the MOVE ON methodology:1. Marinate: Sit With It, Not In ItFailure isn’t something you can brush off overnight. Take the time to sit with your worst terrifying failure—your WTF story. Reflect deeply. Walk, journal, or simply allow yourself to process. It’s about feeling without rushing to fix.2. Own It: Forgive and Face the Thought Worms“Own your part in the failure, but more importantly, forgive yourself. We repeat 80% of our negative thoughts daily, so break that cycle. Recognize those thought worms for what they are and stop letting them dictate your story.”3. Verify the Lessons: What Will You Take With You?“Failure comes bearing lessons—two or three takeaways that you can carry forward. Identify what you’ve learned and how you’ll avoid the same pitfalls in the future. This step transforms failure into wisdom.”4. Evaluate: What’s the Plan?5. Observe the Growth: Prepare for the Next Chapter6. Embrace Failure as Part of ChangeConnect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Erin Diehl --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Erin Diehl and what is her journey to corporate improv?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Erin Deal, founder and CEO of Improve It, a company that uses improv to help teams grow and thrive. Like me, she's also a top podcast host.
From a young age, Erin dreamed of becoming a talk show host. Why did she choose that path? And how did her journey lead her to combine improv and business? I told Erin, you are in the business of joy. But beyond joy, we also talked about failure. Erin calls herself a failfluencer. a blend of failure and influence.
This two-part series dives into her unique approach to joy, failure, growth, and learning. No more waiting. Let's get started. I understand one of your key workshops focuses on failure, and you even coined the term Belfluencers, a blend of failure and influencers. I'd love to dive into this topic, but from a personal perspective, could you share your own experiences with failure?
Not so much the workshops you facilitate or the lessons you teach, but your personal journey. How you've dealt with, navigated, and grown from failure over time. If you like, feel free to share specific stories and give us an overview of your journey with failure. Either way works.
Chapter 2: What is Erin Diehl's perspective on failure and being a 'failfluencer'?
Yeah, so this is actually a keynote that I do called F-Words at Work. And there's no swearing, Vince, okay? There's no swearing. Spoiler alert, the F-words are all about failure plus the frequency of failure equals the fundamentals of success. And truly, the reason I even created this is because I was living a crash course myself in failure.
Chapter 3: How did Erin Diehl navigate her 'Worst Terrifying Failure' during the pandemic?
I created this content in 2021 and it was coming off of the pandemic in 2020. I'm sure you can remember. I'm sure our listeners can remember where they were in March of 2020 because it was a global pandemic, right? No matter where you were in the world. You were affected by COVID-19. And so at that time, myself, I was going through a period of time which I call the three P's.
And I could also call them the three P-U's because it was the stinkiest period of my life. I had just delivered and had given birth to a miracle baby boy. And when I say miracle, then it's a miracle. There was a lot of science involved, if you will. My husband and I went through many years of infertility. We also had a shared genetic mutation. And...
It was a really long battle to conceive our son. And he had just been born in July of 2019. And so I came back to work in December of 2019. And then at about two months of work, when T-double hockey broke loose and as a business started to pivot and pivot. So my first P was pivoting and we were pivoting so much. I was legit pivoting.
taking everything that we had done in person, this completely in-person, completely face-to-face, completely human-to-human professional development company had to become completely virtual overnight in order to survive. And so on top of being a new mom and figuring that out, I was perpetually pivoting our business, which led to my second P, which is people-pleasing, which...
is a pattern I've had my whole life. I grew up moving around a lot. And so how I got people to like me was being a giver and a pleaser. And I also use comedy as some of the mechanisms I use to please people. I was the person that was the clown, right? That walked in and made you laugh. And in 2020, I really saw this pattern take over.
And I was at the time giving to this newborn miracle who was my son. I was giving to my family and my mom who was recovering from a stroke, by the way. I was giving to my team who was careful for their jobs. I was giving to my peers who were small business owners who were closing their doors, laying off their staff. I was giving to my clients.
and helping them navigate these contracts that we had with them and how to figure out our next steps. But I was truly giving and giving to everyone except myself. which led to the third P, which was pain. And I'm not talking about, ouch, I stubbed my toe type pain.
I'm talking about chronic pain, pain that lasted for two years, that was in my back and shoulders, that was undiagnosable by doctors, that was undiagnosable through x-rays and blood work and chiropractors couldn't crack. And this pain made me cry myself to sleep at night. It was physical pain like I'd never endured before.
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Chapter 4: How did Erin Diehl's personal challenges lead to growth and healing?
And it was pain that I later realized was due to these unprocessed emotions that I had been sitting with for years, from years of infertility, from the anger I had at the pandemic for taking away my identity and my business, pain from people pleasing and not even realizing that I was doing it.
And so I had to set off on a self-healing journey because this period of time, the three P's was what I call my WTF story, my worst terrifying failure. Again, I'm not swearing here, but that worst terrifying failure ultimately led me to my greatest success. And I was able to heal myself.
through a lot of healing work, which I can get into, but I was able to do that without surgery, without medication, without doctors. I was able to dissolve my pain. I was able to come into a new line of sight for myself, which I call the three P's.
And I ultimately went from pivoting people, pleasing and pain to this life of purpose, which is helping people understand their own failures and how to move on from them. I have a serious toll on my priorities. I understand them. I even have an organizational chart for my priorities now. And I have the third P a deep sense of peace.
And that is something that I've never had in 40 plus years of walking this earth. But it was ultimately that three-piece story that guided me to this place. And that's what I'm here to teach people is that failure isn't the end. It's not a door closed. It's opening you up to something greater. And
I sit here today and say this story without tears and without heartache because I've lived it and now I'm through it. But when I was in that story, it was so hard and every day felt like an uphill battle. And physical pain on top of mental pain is not something I would wish on anyone. So I share that to say you can change. There's such a thing as a mind-body connection.
But you can also be the catalyst and the inspiration for other people. But you have to give to yourself first. And ultimately, that story guided me to write the book that I wrote and released in February of 2024. And I can talk about that too, but it was that healing that allowed me to be in alignment to write that book to help other people live the life they were meant to.
I haven't read your book yet, but failure as a concept resonates deeply. Just before this, I was interviewing another guest and we talked about transitions, not just career changes, but life-changing events. In her case, two years ago, she survived a severe car accident that left her paralyzed.
She shared how she endured the physical and mental pain, learned to walk again, rebuilt her coaching business, and even started a podcast within just two years. Coincidentally, your experiences also highlight how resilience and failure intertwine. I call this lifting human intelligence. That is the ability to reflect deeply on who we are and transform setbacks into meaningful insights.
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Chapter 5: What is the MOVE ON methodology for overcoming failure?
And while these three words like fill, learn, grow may sound simple on the surface. Developing that level of clarity through real experience is far from easy. What stands out is not just the lesson itself, but the process of sustaining pain, making sense of it, and transforming it into a systematic approach others can understand and apply
The pain itself is real and unfortunate, but it often opens doors to growth. As I told my other guest, failure, if managed well, can become one of the greatest opportunities for transformation.
Would you agree? Yes, I'm so with you. I have a methodology that I use, and this is something I teach in my keynote. I'm happy to share it with you that has really helped me, and it's helped me with that story and more what I call WTFs, worst terrifying failures that have come since then. Can I share that with you, Benz?
Sure. I think that's a great way to wipe things up. I always discourage hard selling on this show. But this isn't about that. It's about sharing the lessons you've distilled from your real, sometimes painful, life experiences. Lessons that listeners can take away and apply right now. So as closing thought, could you share a method or approach from your work that anyone can try?
Some say practical, educational, not just inspirational, that could help listeners facing their own dilemmas, whether they're in career transition, dealing with personal challenges, or simply feeling stuck. What's one step or exercise they could use to figure themselves out and take that first step forward?
Yeah, yeah. And I definitely want to point out, it's not a hard sell. It is a tangible tool that I want to give you for free. That is something that I've used with my human intelligence and life experience to get me through these failures. And I think anybody listening and anyone going through any type of moment where they're beating themselves up, they don't know how to get through it.
They don't know how to see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's a tried and true method. And it's called this. You ready? move on okay and it is an acronym move on and i'm gonna break it down because honestly this method is so easy to remember because obviously you want to move on but the m in the move on stands for marinate
So when you think about your worst terrifying failure, actually, Vince, I'm going to have you do this with me. So I just want you to close your eyes for just a moment and everybody listening, just close your eyes. And I want you to think about your worst terrifying failure, your worst.
worst fall on your face flop, that story that comes up when you think about failure, when you hear the word failure, and it could be one circumstance or a series of circumstances like my three P's story. It could be something where you were at home or at school or at work. I want you to think about who you were with and where you were when this happened. OK, got it.
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Chapter 6: Why does Erin Diehl believe failure can be a gateway to success?
And then what we're going to do is we're going to apply this story to this move on methodology. OK, so take this story now called your WTF story, your worst terrifying failure. And let's start with the M. So the M is marinate. And so whatever this failure that comes up for you is, you've got to take the time to sit with it. Marinating is not like a steak. It doesn't happen overnight.
You're probably going to need days, weeks, maybe even months to process. So sit with it within every way you feel comfortable, whether it's just going on a walk with no music or sitting in a meditation or journaling, but really allow yourself space to feel and process that failure. And then you move to the O of move on, which is own it.
And it doesn't mean that you give full responsibility to anybody else or to yourself. You're just acknowledging that you were a part of this. And you are forgiving yourself for those negative thoughts that you've been thinking. Because here's a really fun fact for you. The average human thinks between 50 to 80,000 thoughts a day.
Of those 50 to 80,000, this is from a study from the National Science Foundation. Of those 50 to 80,000 thoughts, we form what are called thought worms. We form 6,200 thought worms. And of those 6,200 thought worms, what percentage of those would you think are negative? What do you think percentage-wise of 6,200 thoughts, what percentage of those thoughts do you think are negative?
I would say definitely over 50. So should be between 80 to 90%.
Yeah, it's 80%, which is so good. Yeah, it's 80%. And then what's worse is that we are repeating those same negative thoughts 95% of the time. So the O is so important because you have to own it and then you have to forgive yourself because you're a human being. We all do it. It's part of the human experience. And then the V, you're gonna verify the lessons that you learned.
What are the two to three things that you're gonna take with you from this experience? How are you gonna get through that experience? What are the things that you won't do in the future? And the E is evaluate the next steps. So you're going to put together an action plan. It could be two steps. It could be three steps. It could be one step. But whatever that action plan is. And then the O is that.
So it's sitting in the again and marinating on what you just processed. The things that you're going to take away. The action steps you're going to put into motion. Because the N is the next failure step. There will be another one. And this time you've got another tool in your toolkit to help you move on from it. And you've also got the where all and the know all to see that this is part of life.
When you allow failure to happen for you, not to you, you can bring it into the scene of your life and We say this in improv, there's no mistakes, only gifts. You can start to look at failure as opportunity and opportunity for innovation and change is a good thing, which you're listening to this show. You believe in change. So that's the move on methodology. And I hope.
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