Your Life in One Word? This Could Change Everything | Erin Weed
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2026
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Somewhere in the last few years, a lot of us started asking a version of the same question: who am I now, and what am I actually here to do? The answers don't come from a quiz or a vision board. But they just might come from the one word that has been running your life all along, whether you knew it or not.
Erin Weed is a speaker coach, keynote speaker, and the creator of the Dig, a purpose-excavation method she has used with over a thousand leaders, founders, and changemakers across every stage of life and reinvention. Her new book, Just One Word: The Surprisingly Simple Method to Discover Your Purpose and Unleash Your Power, is the culmination of that work. She also spent over a decade as head speaker coach for TEDxBoulder, helping people find the one true thing they need to say and the courage to say it.
In this conversation, you get to watch the Dig happen in real time, because Jonathan sits down in the chair and lets Erin guide him through the full process.
What you will explore:
- What the Dig is and why close to 100% of people who think they know their word are actually wrong
- How your life story, all of it, from childhood to present day, contains a 10-word operating system that explains exactly how you tick
- Why your deepest violations, the things that make you genuinely angry, point directly toward your core word
- The difference between the word you think defines you and the one that actually does
- How knowing your word changes the way you make decisions, support the people you love, and build the things that matter most to you
- What Jonathan's word turned out to be, and the moment in the conversation where it landed
If you have ever felt like you were circling your purpose without quite landing on it, this conversation is for you.
You can find Erin at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript
Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Dr. Lucy Hone to talk about something most of us are carrying without ever calling it what it is: the grief that comes without a funeral, the losses that do not count as real loss in our culture but may be driving more of our suffering than we know. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The dig is a method to unearth that one word that is your entire purpose. And I think of as a |
| 0:06.4 | frequency. It's not so much of a descriptor word. It's more about a feeling, a way that we carry |
| 0:11.9 | ourselves through the world. And also the thing that we're here to learn and also the thing we're here |
| 0:15.8 | to teach. Usually people don't like their words. Usually when it starts to land, it's like, oh, it's almost like it hits a little too close. |
| 0:24.1 | So that's kind of part of the process. |
| 0:27.1 | So there's a version of you that you already know is real. |
| 0:30.6 | You can feel it, you know, the way you want to spend your time, the kinds of problems that let you up, the moments when you look back and think, that was really me at my truest. And yet, and yet, most of us spend years, sometimes decades, |
| 0:44.7 | circling that person without being able to live that life, that truest self-life, let alone |
| 0:50.8 | even name what's at the center of it. Well, what if you could distill that essence, |
| 0:56.4 | your essence, into a single word that became kind of like the unlock key for your most |
| 1:02.3 | authentic real self in all parts of life? That's the provocative claim that today's guest is |
| 1:08.8 | making. And she's backing it up with a process she has developed, |
| 1:12.1 | she calls the dig, that she has conducted over many years with over a thousand people to |
| 1:18.4 | help them figure out their defining word and then build everything from their business to careers |
| 1:23.5 | and relationships around it. And what really surprised me is also a second statement that she |
| 1:29.2 | shared with me that 100% of people who come into this process thinking they already know |
| 1:34.9 | their word, they're wrong. Every single time in her experience, the real word, it lives |
| 1:41.3 | kind of like one layer deeper. Erin Weed is a speaker coach and keynote speaker. |
| 1:46.5 | She's a creator of something she calls The Dig, which is this provocative kind of purpose |
| 1:51.3 | excavation method that she has spent 13 years refining with founders and leaders and change makers |
| 1:57.2 | across every stage of life. She has spent over a decade as a head speaker coach |
| 2:03.0 | for TEDx Boulder, helping people distill enormous messages down to the single, truest thing that they |
... |
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