We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Emily Haydel a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Emily thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you share a story about the kindest thing someone has done for you and why it mattered so much or was so meaningful to you?

Frankly, every boss I’ve had has done the kindest thing of hiring me lol. Every job/position I’ve taken, I’ve felt unqualified for, and each of my bosses took a risk in bringing me on. For whatever reason, they saw potential I think, and moreover, they were patient, thorough, and encouraging in guiding me when I messed up, which was many a time. I’m so thankful to all of them from Jeremy Kelch with Michigan Baseball to Greg Taylor at the Dodgers to Dana Mayeron at UCLA Athletics to David Kung at VenewLive to The Suhs at Choice Music to Charlene Pae with the podcasts we used to do to Jenny Zha at Infinitize. Not just my bosses, but everyone who I’ve worked with that are veterans and way more experienced in their roles have, for the most part, been so kind taking the extra time to also be encouraging giving advice, being patient, and allowing me to grow. I attribute a lot of my self-worth to how I am doing in my career, and I have to constantly move up and forward. Thankfully, people at each step of my career have supported me in order to continue to move upwards and onwards.

Emily, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Over the past ten years, I’ve established myself as a presenter, podcaster, facilitator, and consultant within the sports and entertainment industry across the US and South Korea.

I grew up surrounded by sports. My family are big football fans, and my grandfather was a professional baseball player. These influences naturally led to me to becoming a sports enthusiast competing in gymnastics and cheerleading at school and pursuing a degree in sport management.

While completing my bachelor’s in sport management at the University of Michigan, I worked hard to establish myself as a valued member of the school TV station. During my time at Michigan some of my most notable achievements were establishing the all-female sports talk show “Wolverine Women” and being appointed the first female sports director of Michigan’s TV network while volunteering as a recruiting assistant for the Michigan Football Program and student-manager for the Michigan Baseball Team. Each summer, I interned at sports, entertainment, and news media companies in New York, New Orleans, and Atlanta.

After graduating, I went on to be the host for the LA Dodgers and UCLA’s Football and Basketball games. During my time in LA, I became involved in K-Pop as a fan, event organizer, writer, and podcaster. My interest in K-Pop led me to Korea, where I became a podcast host for a live concert, online streaming platform company interviewing Korean music industry professionals and artists.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I was once so focused on my career that I would tell coworkers of mine that if I didn’t get married before I die, that was okay because dating and emotions were pointless, and I had better things to do. Lol looking back on that now – I’m like chill out bro. This was actually around the time that Shoutout LA reached out to me back in 2018. I had the mentality that everything I did had to lend to my career. All of my relationships with family and friends took a backseat if it didn’t have anything to do with my work. That mentality/mindset lasted until the end of 2020 I’d say? I started dating a bit and doing things to just enjoy myself in 2021 and realized that living life is just as, if not more important, than grinding everyday just for your career. If anything, having life experiences makes you able to connect more with other people and strengthens even work relationships too. I definitely do think it’s important to work very hard at the beginning of your career – or really for however much you feel comfortable with – especially to get ahead/get a jumpstart, but in my case, I started to value my work relationships and new people I was meeting because of work more than the people who had always been there for me. The work hard, play hard lifestyle is more my speed now. I love chilling out, traveling, reading, and hanging with friends and family just as much as diving into something that I’m passionate about.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Many friends and even family members ask me “So what do you do” or say “I don’t understand what you do,” which is funny and frustrating. In this digital media, hybrid world, I feel like you would only understand it if you do the job haha, as pompous as that sounds. Since I used to and still sometimes do on-camera work, sometimes I host, and a lot of my work is behind-the-scenes in various ways. With that, sometimes my role involves managing social media, creating action plans for musical releases, media training, finding vocal coaches, a lot of reaching out to influencers and creators for collaborations, email marketing ideation, coordination, and segmentation, helping with website development, distributing this information amongst coworkers, finding thumbnails for MVs, writing press releases, communicating in the fandom community, subtitling Youtube videos, monitoring content, and more. Essentially communications mostly relating to entertainment entities, musical acts, and the like. I think that the creative industry, especially in the digital, physical, integrated media space is not a straight line nor is it an easily explainable occupation space haha.

Contact Info:

• Website: emilyhaydel.com
• Instagram: @emihaydel
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-haydel-6ba45485/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/emihaydel?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCV5FWEZCSKp8fdT7eYzXyCw

Image Credits
Xander Dana Mayeron Brackit