Simone Heng

Simone Heng was born in Singapore and moved to Australia in 1987. She studied in Switzerland and is of mixed heritage (Chinese, Indian, French, Vietnamese, Thai, Malay, Bengali and Cambodian). During her formative years, and through her work and living overseas, Simone has developed deep intercultural understanding.

She went on to attain a Communications and Cultural Studies degree from Curtin University of Technology. She also studied speechwriting under Tony Blair’s former speechwriter, Phillip Collins.

Prior to being based in Singapore, Simone lived and worked in Switzerland, Australia and the United Arab Emirates.

As a former international broadcaster for 15 years Simone has had to connect authentically. On-air, on-stage, online and one-to-one with people. She worked as a broadcaster for CNBC, CNN, HBO Asia, and Virgin Radio Dubai.  She has also featured on CNN and in Harpers Bazaar, Esquire, Elle, and many more.

Simone is passionate about helping people connect to their metaphorical and physical voice.

And this is the reason why Simone feels the way she does:

“There are so many reasons why Human Connection has hijacked my life but I guess it makes sense to begin at the beginning. I was feeling extremely disconnected at a workplace I was working at. I realized, looking around, that the general shame and fear which was causing this disconnection was resulting in low productivity and was compromising content standards.

How could employees who were disconnected themselves produce content that connected with others? It was a huge corporate blind spot.

One night while I was on air doing my late-night radio show a young, Singaporean girl sent a voice note into the show. I had asked people to WhatsApp voice note into the radio station to win tickets to a superhero movie. I asked listeners “If you could have any superhero power in the world, what would it be and why?

She replied: “to be able to relate to people. It’s not an extraordinary superpower but I feel in modern day everyone is really cold to one another. I really want to be able to connect to another person, one-to-one”. I saved the voice note and it plagued me.

How had it come to this?

How had authentic human connection, something we are biologically built for, how was this now considered a super power?

What was happening to us humanity? It was as all I could think.

The last factor that made me so passionate about learning more about the topic, was that my mother has a rare degenerative illness. Around the time I got that voice note, she had just begun to forget that my father passed away from cancer in 2004. She had also already forgotten the days of the week and times of the day and I was petrified she would forget who I was. All of a sudden, the person who was supposed to connect with me the best in the whole world, the person who gave birth to me, was having blocks connecting to me.

It took this incident to make me feel the same yearning for human connection as the young woman who has sent me that voice note on air. I knew, in that moment, this was a subject that needed to be studied by as many of us as possible and at a speed which could keep up with digital developments. I quit my job. That was it for me and the message and its intention has propelled me ever since. “

She also delivers one-to-one executive presentation skills coaching. Her clients range from senior employees at amazon to Forbes 30 Under 30 awardees.

Simone Heng has a strong social media following of over 100, 000. She lives in Singapore with her partner and Cavalier King Charles, Charlie

• The Power of Human Connection
• The Future of Human Connection
• Human Connection and Resilience