I'm standing outside a café, phone in hand, rehearsing my first question for the tenth time.
Just go in, Jocelyn. He already said yes.
My thumb hovers over his number… then chickens out.
Okay, confession. I used to be genuinely scared of talking to strangers. Like, properly scared.
And then, somehow, I became a student journalist. 😅
🎙️ The job was literally my biggest fear
At Lianhe Zaobao, my days went like this: walk up to people I'd never met (founders, business owners, people way more impressive than me) and get them to tell me something real. Every. Single. Time. my heart did this little dance. Step forward, panic, step back.
But here's the thing I didn't see coming. The second I actually asked, and then properly listened, something shifted. People softened. They'd tell me stuff they hadn't planned to. We'd look up and twenty minutes had just… vanished.
I kind of got addicted to that. The click. That moment two people stop performing and just meet.
🎤 Turns out, that was hosting all along
Years later, someone handed me a mic at an event. Different room. Exact same feeling. The little panic, then the click.
Because here's what nobody tells you: hosting isn't the talking. (Everyone thinks it's the talking.) It's the listening. You read a room the way you'd read one person across a café table. Who's gone quiet. Where the energy dipped, half a second before anyone else noticed. And then you lift it back up.
The newsroom taught me that if you actually listen, people give you more than they planned to. Turns out a whole room does the exact same thing.
🫶 The shy kid never fully leaves (and honestly, good)
I still get the flutter before I go on. I just stopped reading it as "you can't do this" and started reading it as "you care about this." Same feeling. Way kinder story.
So if you're the person who rehearses the text before sending it, who hovers before hitting call… hi. Me too. 🤍 Maybe the thing you're a little scared of is quietly the thing you're meant to do loudly.
These days I host. I emcee, I run rooms, I make strangers feel a little less like strangers. And I trace all of it back to one nervous kid with a notebook, who learned that the bravest, warmest thing you can do is just ask. And then actually listen.
💭 A little something to sit with: what's the thing you're scared of… that might secretly be your thing?