By: Natalie Johnson
Most people assume friendship either happens naturally or it doesn’t happen at all. Jewel Hohman disagrees, and she has built an entire career around proving why. As a Friendship and Social Anxiety Educator working under the name Connection With Jewel, she teaches that meaningful adult friendship is less about luck or personality and more about a set of habits, habits that can be studied, practiced, and taught to anyone willing to learn them.
That premise didn’t come from a textbook first. It came from Hohman’s own life. Years before she was coaching clients or speaking to crowds, she was working through a stretch of genuine loneliness herself, despite what looked from the outside like a full and social life. That gap between appearing fine and feeling disconnected became the throughline of her work, and it’s part of why her coaching and speaking so often resonate with people who don’t fit the stereotype of someone who’s “bad at friendships.” Many of her clients have jobs, routines, and full calendars. What they lack is the specific skill set for turning acquaintances into close friends.
Over the past six years, Hohman has logged nearly 6,000 hours coaching clients through exactly that gap, with a particular focus on high-functioning social anxiety, anxiety that’s often invisible because it’s masked by humor, competence, or sheer busyness. Her work has taken her onto more than 100 podcasts and into outlets like ABC News, along with stages at a major women’s conference in Michigan and college and university conferences nationwide.
What distinguishes her from others offering friendship or relationship advice, she says, is the insistence on evidence over intuition. Hohman holds an undergraduate degree in psychology and sociology, and this December, she’ll complete a master’s degree on her way to becoming a licensed clinical social worker. That academic background isn’t a side credential. It’s the filter every workshop, talk, and framework has to pass through before she teaches it. If the research doesn’t support it, it doesn’t make it into her material, regardless of how popular the advice might be elsewhere.
That same evidence-driven instinct eventually pulled Hohman away from full-time coaching and toward a broader structural question. If isolation is this widespread, why isn’t there a formal system for treating it? Her answer came in the form of social prescribing, a practice in which people are connected to community activities and relationships to support their mental and physical health. Encountering the concept reframed her entire career plan. Rather than working with individuals one conversation at a time, she realized she wanted to help build something closer to infrastructure, a system that could reach people at scale.
Since then, her trajectory has been methodical rather than dramatic. She began graduate school in 2024, added a part-time internship with Social Prescribing USA in 2025, and this year moved into a paid position as a Group Facilitator, leading group therapy sessions for kids, teens, and adults on a rotating schedule. Each step has meant intentionally scaling back the coaching business she spent years building, in favor of speaking engagements and longer-term systems work. After she graduates this December, Michigan will require roughly two more years of supervised clinical practice before she can be fully licensed, a timeline she expects to carry her into 2028, at which point she plans to open a therapeutic clinic built around social prescribing.
In the meantime, Hohman is already applying that same philosophy in her current role as Program Director at PS Society, which she considers a natural companion to her social prescribing work. Under that role, she helped develop Circling, a guided format for conversation and connection that any woman can use to gather friends, neighbors, or coworkers without needing to plan activities, prepare materials, or host anything elaborate. The goal, as Hohman describes it, is to strip away the friction that usually stops people from getting together in the first place, so that a coffee shop meetup or a living room gathering can turn into the kind of conversation that actually builds a friendship.
She envisions PS Society chapters eventually operating across the country, each one giving women a low-effort way to rebuild the kind of community many say they’ve lost. It’s a long-term ambition, and Hohman is candid that the road there, from coaching to clinical training to systems-level work, has often been uncomfortable. But at 30, roughly two years into a shift she began at 27, she says the discomfort has increasingly given way to clarity about where the work is heading.
For more information, visit Connection With Jewel.
