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Erin Keating, an executive analyst at Cox Automotive, spent five seasons performing improv comedy at the DC Improv Comedy Club — not to become a comedian, but to deliberately put herself in situations where she could fail in public. On March 14, 2025, she talked about how that midlife experiment reshaped the way she communicates, listens, and handles awkward moments at work.
Keating's day job is all about making complicated things simple. Cox Automotive — the parent company of Kelley Blue Book, Autotrader, and the Manheim auction network — depends on her analysis to explain what's happening in the U.S. auto market. Her audience includes automakers, dealership groups, lenders, and journalists. The material covers everything from EV adoption curves to inventory gluts to pricing pressure, and it can turn dry fast if the person presenting it doesn't bring some energy. The analysis also feeds decisions that ripple through the industry — which models get marketed heavily, how dealers stock their lots, what lenders underwrite.
The settings are unforgiving. Small conference rooms. Stages with hundreds or thousands of people. Live TV hits. Product unveilings. Podcast appearances. Keating, who describes herself as an introvert, didn't always feel at home in those rooms. At her first major corporate presentation, she sweated through the whole thing. The feedback was kind and precise: "You did fine. Slow down."
She got better with time. But in 2018, in her mid-40s, after leaving a marketing communications job and casting around for what to do next, she wanted more. She was hosting a successful podcast about books and genuinely loved to talk. She was honest with herself, though: loving to talk isn't the same as being good at conversation. So she walked into the DC Improv and signed up for a class. Her goal had nothing to do with comedy. She wanted a challenge with a real chance of failing — and she made it scarier by scheduling performances when her family would be in the audience.
Her first class was a strange little ensemble. There was a biology teacher, a German woman with sharp comic timing, an older actress with serious stage credits, and a handful of quiet people like herself who mostly stayed seated at the start. To her surprise, most of them stayed for all five seasons.
One exercise cracked something open early on. In "Die, not today," performers mimed throwing hammers and spears at each other. If an object came your way, you had to invent a survival scenario on the spot. Most people reflexively shielded themselves. One woman played out a dramatic scene in which a spear nearly pierced her nose before she snatched it out of the air at the last second. "It was amazing," Keating recalls. Not because it was funny — because the woman committed completely to the moment.
That commitment is the engine behind improv's most famous rule: yes, and. You accept what your partner gives you, then build on it. In everyday work conversations, Keating says, too many people block a colleague's idea or let it die in the room. "Yes, and" keeps the exchange moving.
She now uses that principle before big conference presentations. Instead of working from a script, she talks to audience members ahead of time, tries to read the energy in the room, and listens for comments that are "begging for a 'yes, and.'" A script might feel safer, but it's too prescriptive. It closes off the unexpected — which is exactly where the best moments come from.
Improv also changed how she sees power dynamics. Every scene runs on status: one character drives, the other supports, and the roles flip in the next scene. The worst scenes, she says, are the ones where two people compete to be the funniest person in the room. Nobody is listening; everybody is performing.
That maps neatly onto office politics. Keating learned to spot an awkward moment, gauge the reaction, and apologize when she misread the room. When she knows her words didn't land the way she intended, she's comfortable saying, "Thank you for receiving that with the intent it was given."
The biggest lesson arrived in her third season. Keating has always been able to do a New York Jewish-grandmother voice, but she refused to use it on stage, telling herself, "This is not acting. I'm not supposed to do that." Then she entered a scene where her partner needed exactly that character. She went with it. It worked. A classmate asked why she'd never done it before. The question unlocked something: she could bring her whole self onto the stage — and that's not a weakness in any room she walks into.
Her instincts line up with a lot of workplace research. LinkedIn's Global Talent Trends reports have repeatedly placed communication, adaptability, and collaboration among the most sought-after skills. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 lists analytical and creative thinking as the fastest-growing core skills. And improv has matured into a corporate-training tool: Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade both run programs for companies like Google and Apple, teaching the same lessons Keating practiced — listening, status awareness, and quick recovery from awkwardness.
That matters even more now that AI is entering the workplace. Machines can memorize a script faster than any human. What they can't do is read a room, relate to another person, or recover gracefully when things go sideways. Those are human skills, and, as Keating learned, they can't be faked by memorization.
Her advice to other professionals is blunt: do the thing that scares you. Get onstage, take a class, give the speech. You'll probably sweat. You'll probably talk too fast. You might even bomb. But you'll get through it — and learn something about how you show up for the people around you.
Keating is taking her own advice again. She starts her first stand-up comedy class on Tuesday. "I'm terrified," she says. After five seasons of improv, that's exactly the point.
