By: Natalie Johnson
Jewel Hohman has spent nearly six years listening to people describe the same quiet ache. They have coworkers, acquaintances, maybe even a full calendar, but not the kind of friendships that make life feel steady. As a Friendship and Social Anxiety Educator and the voice behind Connection With Jewel, she has built her career around a simple but often overlooked idea, that friendship is a skill, not just a stroke of luck, and it can be taught.
Hohman’s interest in the subject didn’t start as an academic exercise. It started with her own loneliness. Like many of the people she now works with, she found herself surrounded by activity but starved for real connection, and that experience became the starting point for a body of work that now includes close to 6,000 hours of coaching, more than 100 podcast guest appearances, and features in outlets including Las Vegas Morning Blend segment on KTNV.
What sets her approach apart, she says, is precision. Rather than offering generic advice about “putting yourself out there,” Hohman focuses specifically on high-functioning social anxiety, the version of anxiety that hides behind competence, humor, and a packed schedule. She has spoken to some of the largest audiences in her region, including at Michigan’s largest women’s conference, and has appeared at university and college conferences across the country, working with attendees who often look fine on the outside while quietly struggling to form the kind of friendships they actually want.
“People assume loneliness only affects those who are isolated” is a sentiment Hohman has often echoed in her work. Her talks and workshops instead make the case that plenty of well-connected, socially capable people still feel disconnected, and that the gap usually comes down to specific, learnable habits rather than personality or luck.
That grounding in research is intentional. Hohman holds a degree in psychology and sociology and is finishing a master’s degree this December, which she is pursuing to become a licensed clinical social worker. Every framework she teaches, from her workshops to her keynote talks, is built on current research on social connection rather than on trends or guesswork, a distinction she considers essential in a field often crowded with oversimplified advice.
Hohman’s path has not been a straight line, and she doesn’t present it as one. At 27, after building a coaching business she genuinely loved, a series of difficult developments in her industry pushed her to reconsider what she wanted her work to look like in the long term. That search led her to social prescribing, a practice that connects people to community activities and relationships to support mental and physical health. She describes discovering the concept as something that clarified, almost immediately, what she wanted the next chapter of her career to become.
Making that shift meant slowing down the one-on-one coaching work that had defined her business and gradually shifting her focus toward speaking, education, and systems-level change. In 2024, she began her master’s program. By 2025, she had added a ten-hour-a-week internship with Social Prescribing USA on top of her coursework. This year, she stepped into the role of Group Facilitator, running group therapy sessions for kids, teens, and adults on a rotating basis. She has described the work as deeply rewarding, even as it required her to scale back the business she had spent years building.
The timeline ahead is long. After graduating this December, Hohman will need roughly two more years of full-time supervised clinical work before she can become a fully licensed clinical social worker in Michigan, a process she expects to carry her through 2028. From there, her goal is to open a therapeutic clinic centered on social prescribing, a long-term project she has been quietly building toward since first encountering the concept.
In the meantime, she’s applying the same philosophy through her role as Program Director at PS Society, an organization she sees as working hand in hand with her social prescribing goals. Through PS Society, Hohman helped create Circling, a step-by-step conversation and activity guide designed to help women build meaningful friendships without the usual overhead of planning, prepping, or hosting. The idea, she explains, is to remove the friction that often keeps people from gathering in the first place. No printed materials, no curated activities, just a guide that lets someone invite a few neighbors or coworkers to a coffee shop or living room and facilitate a real conversation.
Hohman describes the vision for PS Society as national in scope, with chapters eventually forming across the country to help rebuild the kind of informal community networks (the “village”) that many women feel they’ve lost. It’s an ambitious goal, but one she approaches with the same patience that has defined the rest of her career shift. She was 27 when she started reworking her path. She’s 30 now, roughly halfway through a transition she describes as uncomfortable but worthwhile, one that has moved her from coaching individuals to shaping infrastructure for connection at a much larger scale.
For more on Jewel Hohman’s work, visit Connection With Jewel.
