Simone Heng spent 15 years in radio across Australia, Dubai and Singapore. Good job, visible job, and one she stayed in far longer than she should have — being bullied by a direct manager, masking daily, in an industry that trained her to care about how she looked rather than what she thought.
She left, wrote Let’s Talk About Loneliness, and now works as an author, speaker and human connection expert. Fortune 500s fly her in to talk to their people about a problem most organisations are paying for without ever naming it.
Why loneliness shows up in attrition numbers before it shows up anywhere else. Why the loneliest people in a company are usually the ones who got promoted — separated from the peers they could be honest with, managing the people they can’t confide in, and often unable to take it home either. Why CEO clubs and peer masterminds exist at all.
Simone’s position on leadership is a sharp one: at work, stop trying to be vulnerable. Be relatable. They’re not the same thing, and confusing them costs leaders credibility.
We also get into why busyness is the most socially acceptable anaesthetic available, and how the wellness internet’s language of boundaries — protect your peace, no bandwidth, trauma dumping — is quietly teaching a generation how not to connect.