Simone Heng on love, loneliness and the importance of the human connection

Simone Heng is a pocket rocket. She is petite at about 1.52m, but is one of those people you meet and never forget. Her pixie face is often expressive, whether lit up in conversation or shimmying to music with people she’s just met.

Peeling open a box of Turkish Delights – she had just returned from a vacation in Turkiye – for the crew on set, Simone scurries around the photo studio and offers it to everyone in her line of sight. “Please take some. If not, the box will just sit there because everyone is so paiseh,” the 41-year-old enthuses in her Australian accent, flecked with Singaporean lingo, which she uses whenever she interacts with Singaporeans.

I realise quickly that she is practising what she preaches on human connection. While most people inadvertently keep to themselves in the presence of strangers, Simone uses that small act of kindness to relate to everyone in that room.

Simone is a human connection specialist, a title she has held since 2020. In a nutshell, she helps individuals build and strengthen relationships through improved communication, understanding and emotional intelligence. Organisations reach out to her to speak at their conferences or run workshops, all for the purpose of hard-wiring connection into their culture to drive performance and improve productivity.

She has since delivered speeches to prestigious companies all around the world, including Harvard University, SXSW, TEDx, Google, Meta, Amazon and Spotify.

“Everyone’s idea of the ultimate dream for a girl, particularly in the Asian context, is to ‘marry well’. I felt like I was an alien, especially in my early 30s, because that wasn’t my dream. That was very lonely, and I had to suppress that,” Simone reveals thoughtfully. “To be [globetrotting secret agent] Jane Bond was the dream. Flying to Abu Dhabi to meet people whom I have to pinch myself knowing I have access to, or being in Switzerland speaking to Swiss private banks.”

Building credibility around her career also led her to write her debut book, Let’s Talk About Loneliness, which was published in 2023 by Hay House, and is the winner of the 2024 silver Nautilus Book Award in the social change and social justice category. She aims to write a book “every 12 to 18 months”, as building that momentum is important. Her second book, Be A Force, is due out in 2026, and touches on the relationship that we have with ourselves. Simone is currently researching her third book, which will focus on charm.

A childhood cemented in loneliness

While Simone possesses an infectious, positive energy, for decades, she held within her a deep sense of loneliness. This was shaped in part by her mother’s no-nonsense upbringing, pressure to succeed and growing up as an immigrant kid to a Chinese father and Eurasian mother in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. Simone was born in Singapore, but moved to Perth, Australia when she was three years old with her parents, Robert and Sandra Heng, and older sister, Tamara.

Her childhood memories are of hot summer school holidays with the air-conditioner blasting and The Golden Girls blaring from the television, while she painted, sewed and made tents out of bedsheets. While the days were fun and idyllic, it was a result of getting creative as a born risk-taker in a completely risk-adverse family. Robert, who ran a news agency, and Sandra, a retired Raffles Girls’ School teacher, were strict and not big fans of sleepovers or physical outdoor activities.

“I am hyper independent, which is a maladaptation to childhood trauma,” Simone explains. “While I could turn the four walls of an apartment to a wonderland, I also felt very smothered and suffocated.”

As a result of Sandra battling her own inner struggles (due to the rare degenerative disease she has), Simone lived on an emotional knife-edge where things were never in her control.

She recalls a time when she topped her class for an English paper, scoring 22 out of 25 – but was told she needed to ask her teacher where she lost the three marks. As mortifying as it was, 14-year-old Simone did exactly that, only to be chided when tears started rolling down her face.

That incident was pivotal. Simone writes in Let’s Talk About Loneliness: “I vowed never to show vulnerability again, and I didn’t for 22 years. In its place, I put ambition, because ambition would put oceans between me and this place, where no one understood me.” 

Changing courses

After university, Simone left Australia to work as an international broadcaster for HBO Asia in Singapore, and then for Virgin Radio Dubai, among others. While she was flourishing in Dubai at the age of 29, she received a call one day from Tamara, saying she should probably think about coming home now.

At that point, Robert had already passed on 10 years ago of a sudden cancer diagnosis. Simone booked the next direct flight back to Perth, and went straight from the tarmac to the hospital. Her mother had suffered a severe stroke, one that would leave her wheelchair bound and in a diaper from that day onward.

“It was really traumatising,” Simone reflects. “When someone becomes paralysed like that, it’s such a constellation of things. It’s not just her – it’s the house, the family politics, the aunties and uncles putting their nose in and passing judgment. I didn’t know anyone else my age going through it.”

Voices in her head told her to move back to care for her mother. She resisted initially, largely due to her tenuous relationship with Sandra, a woman Simone describes as “never giving her the love she needed as a child”.

Six months later, Simone moved her entire life back to Perth, only to be sitting in the nursing home for five to six hours a day. She recalls one particularly harrowing encounter: “The caregivers asked me to pull my mother’s diaper down, and to pull the wheelchair out from behind her so they could put the commode in. Seeing my mother’s legs atrophied like that, with her naked bottom and the lack of dignity in it... I shut the door of the bathroom and sobbed.”

“That was when I woke up to this,” she says solemnly. “This is forever for her. This is the rest of her life.”

Stretching the bow

While that was Sandra’s life story, it wasn’t Simone’s. Simone spiralled further into loneliness with cultural and familial expectations of her as she faced an uncommon plight: her mother becoming her child before she turned 30. She knew she had to get out of Perth once again, and Singapore made the most sense for her. It was home to an extent, and it was closer to Perth than Sydney, which meant she could see her mother often.

“I had to be in Singapore to keep my sanity, but also be there for my mum. I spent every single annual leave on the floor of that nursing home,” she recalls. “I don’t know how I did it. I look back and think, how was that a life? But you know, we all have to go through tough times where we pull on a strength — emotional, physical, whatever it is — and the payoff from doing that is always huge. I call them the stretching of the bow. The further you stretch that bow back, the further that arrow’s going to go.”

Youth and freedom were things Simone gave up over the years of caring for Sandra. Recently, she had to make a “Do Not Resuscitate” decision with Tamara for their mother. “People say to me things like, ‘I want to be closer to my dad and mum because they’re getting older.’ They have no idea about all the things that I know. I’m envious of their innocence in their 40s as they are only starting to think about that journey now.”

I wonder aloud how visits to that nursing home are like for Simone now. “I go every quarter. Surprisingly, it’s even more difficult for me to go there, because I now live a happy life and it’s so depressing there. I dip when I go there, and I’m not the same for a week after. But I know it has to be done,” she says.

She adds with a wry smile: “There’s a lot of good things to be said for grit – you have to do things even though you might not want to. I have a much better capacity to handle things that come my way now. When my mother takes her last breath, I’m going to be glad I did it.”

What really matters

Simone believes that the quest for her mother’s love and eventual forgiveness has been the true love story of her life. “She was not the easiest mother. There’s a constant vacillation between the difficulties with her, filial guilt, and love. Guilt is part of love, and I think the level of guilt we feel is based on how much we love them.”

“The antidote to loneliness is love and connection,” she explains. This adage is what she expounds on in conferences around the world. In October, she will be part of The Gathering in Banff, Canada, a three day business festival held annually that sees high performance leaders engage in conversations on brand building, human performance and cultural leadership.

She also hopes to have a family one day, Simone admits. “The more work I’ve done in human connection, [the more I realise] family is the only thing that really matters. None of the people in the nursing home are talking about what books they wrote or the jobs they had,” she says.

“They are pining for someone they fell out with, someone they love deeply whom they lost, and hoping their children will visit. Everything that leaves a legacy that makes a life worth living has to do with human connection.”

PHOTOGRAPHY: DARREN GABRIEL LEOW, ASSISTED BY: MELVIN WONG
CREATIVE DIRECTION & STYLING: LENA KAMARUDIN, ASSISTED BY: MANDY TAN & KALINA WOJCICKA
ART DIRECTION: RAY TICSAY
FLORAL STYLING: FAWN WORLD
HAIR: ZHOU AIYI (SIMONE)
MAKEUP: LASALLE LEE, USING DIOR BEAUTY