Browsing Erin Conlon’s sleek professional website, LinkedIn page, or e-mail newsletter, one could be forgiven for assuming that she has owned her executive coaching business for decades and has a large staff of employees working for her. In reality, Erin is a team of one who began running her company full time in 2019.
Like many entrepreneurs, Erin’s story is a winding one, traversing time as a corporate attorney, political campaigner, and stand-up comedian. But to truly understand how Erin ascended to her current professional success, one must start in Clifden, from where her grandmother emigrated to the United States in 1929, settling in Boston, where she would meet her husband, Erin’s father, and raise their family.
Erin Conlon
https://www.erinconlon.com/
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“My father is first-generation Irish, so growing up, my parents made an effort to honor his heritage, and my Nana,” Erin recalls, noting that she and her three siblings all have Irish names and as a little girl she even picked up her father’s Boston Irish accent.
Erin’s parents met at pharmacy school at Northeastern University before moving to Michigan, when her father entered the pharmacy doctorate program at the University of Michigan, thus beginning a generational connection with the school. Erin and her three siblings grew up near the flagship Ann Arbor campus in what she describes as an “upwardly mobile middle-class community,” and her father continued his education by earning his law degree at night while working full time.
Erin’s parents’ emphasis on education was not lost on her. “By the time I was in high school, the expectation was that I would attend a good college and then become a lawyer, doctor, scientist, or maybe a dentist. This was a direct reflection of my parents’ experience coming from immigrant families.”
Looking back, she recognizes that the American dream was so important for her parents to fulfill for them and their family, and she cannot help but feeling empathy for today’s immigrants hoping to build a better life.
After graduating college, Erin matriculated at the prestigious University of Michigan Law School, but the seeds of choosing an alternative career path had already been planted in her brain.
“Throughout my entire time at law school, I knew that being a lawyer was never going to be the final thing for me. It was a means to an end. My philosophy is to be constantly evolving.”
Erin started her first job as an attorney in 2006, and after experiencing a job loss at the beginning of Great Recession, she traveled to Pennsylvania to volunteer as a political organizer with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.
She eventually returned to Chicago to accept another position in the legal field but could not escape the question that we all ask ourselves in our quiet moments:
Erin and her extended family
What do I want to do?
For Erin, she wanted to be a person who brings joy to the world. She began acting on that vision by entering the field of stand-up comedy, writing a pilot script on her own, taking classes at Second City, and penning stand-up routines.
“Chicago is a great place to start in comedy,” she remembers. “It taught me how to be truthful and powerful at the same time.”
While her experience in comedy scratched her itch to make people happy, she was still not satisfied with her career; as she put it, “I didn’t like what I did 50 hours per week. The demands were intense but boring, not invigorating.”
In 2018, Erin entered a comprehensive training program to become an executive coach and built her own business focusing on coaching for attorneys: Erin Conlon Coaching. In November 2019, she officially resigned from her legal position to focus full-time on the business, where she makes it her mission to “partner with her clients to transform their life to make it what they want it to be, and not the one they ended up with.”
“Coaching is a collaborative process to plan out and achieve the larger goals and dreams that you want. I work with my clients to make their own plan,” Erin shared.
Erin's paternal grandmother Agnes Conlon ("Nana") was
born in Clifden and emigrated to the United States in 1929.
Erin Conlon Coaching offers three primary services: 1) coaching for individuals, which typically entails three 50-minute one-on-one sessions for up to 10 months, 2) leadership development curriculum development for companies, and 3) bespoke coaching programs for law firms.
While Erin can speak to the unique professional challenges of attorneys – burnout, stress, billable hours, among others – and her client base initially grew largely through referrals from her network of law school classmates and colleagues in the legal industry, she also coaches clients from a wide range of industries.
Five years after going into business for herself full-time, Erin happily admits that she feels successful – “I like my life!” – and the client testimonials on her website provide a glimpse into the tremendous impact she has already made. She is now focused on multiplying that impact, noting how gratifying it is to hear from clients who follow up with her years after working together to let her know that they have shared their insights with their friends and colleagues.
While looking forward, Erin also recognizes that in many ways she is carrying on the legacy of her Irish ancestors, including her father and grandparents who lived the immigrant experience.
“As a coach, a lot of the work I do is creating possibilities in people’s lives. I don’t think I would believe in this so deeply if I didn’t come from a culture and community that was based on the idea that possibility existed out there. My ancestors said ‘more is possible.’ What I do feels Irish to me.”
Executive Coach Erin Conlon: “What I Do Feels Irish to Me”
