We recently sat down with Yumi Stynes on our latest podcast episode, and within minutes it was clear: she’s the kind of person who has always pushed against the edges of where life might take her.

Before the television career, before the books, before the public platform, there was a younger version of Yumi who felt completely adrift.

Her solution?

Stick out her thumb and see what happened.

Hitchhiking towards possibility

“Before I started working at Channel V in the year 2000, I was someone who used to hitchhike,” she says.

Yumi would hitchhike from Byron Bay up through northern Queensland, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres with truck drivers and strangers who stopped to offer a ride.

“It was pretty fun, but it was also incredibly freeing,” she says. “There was this feeling that my destiny was literally in my thumb. I could go somewhere completely different based on who picked me up that day.”

At the time she had just finished university where she volunteered at a radio station and felt completely untethered.

“I had a part-time job as a bartender, as a kitchen hand. I was partying too much, and I didn’t really know what I was doing with my life.”

Hitchhiking gave her a sense of perspective.

“I just had this real sense of freedom,” she says. “I think there are moments in time when you’re pre-children and you don’t have a serious job where you can take those risks. There’s not much on the line.”

And in hindsight, that mindset would become a defining theme in her career.

Auditioning when you don’t feel invited

Despite always wanting to work in creative spaces, Yumi didn’t believe media was somewhere someone like her could belong.

“There weren’t many Asian people in media at the time,” she says. “So it didn’t feel like something that was available to me.”

The turning point came when a friend spotted an ad for auditions at Channel V and suggested she try.

“For a long time, I was extremely wary of doing anything cringey or embarrassing,” she says. “So, auditioning meant being humble enough to say, ‘I want this job badly enough to line up with hundreds of other hopefuls and try.’ At that point I thought, what have I got to lose? If I can’t give it a go now, I probably never will.”

That willingness to put herself out there ultimately opened the door to her career in youth media.

Preparation over panic

In the early days of music television, preparation wasn’t exactly a formalised process.

“We were flying by the seat of our pants,” Yumi says. “Trying to remember some Smash Hits article we read three years ago and hoping we remembered the band members’ names.”

Over time she realised that the key to confidence wasn’t personality or charisma. It was simply: preparation.

“I eventually realised there were a couple of things I needed to do,” she says. “I needed to be sober, I couldn’t be hungover or stoned, and I needed to do as much preparation as I could.”

Once she started approaching interviews that way, something shifted.

“When you arrive fully prepared and your body is good, I don’t think there’s any need for anxiety. You just feel quite psyched and joyful to be there.”

It was a simple revelation which she now applies across every part of her professional life.

Walking the fine line of authenticity

Authenticity is often celebrated in media, but living it can be complicated.

“It’s tricky because there have been times where being fully myself has got me into trouble and gotten my shows axed or in jeopardy,” Yumi admits.

Working in youth media meant constantly navigating the line between being authentic and being too provocative.

“You’re often asked to be edgy,” she says. “But sometimes you walk that fine line between edgy and, ‘Oh, I’ve crossed the line and I’m getting fired now.’ There have been times where I have been suspended from work, which wasn’t publicly known at the time. I had to take leave and just stay home and rot while pregnant with my first child.”

More recently, she found herself stepping into a very different challenge: emceeing the Feminist Roast at the Sydney Opera House’s annual All About Women festival with only two days’ notice.

“I thought, okay, I know how to work a big room,” she says. “I know how to talk feminism really fluently, and I’m just going to be very present and react according to my truth and my spirit.”

When one speaker delivered a heartbreaking story that left the audience in tears, Yumi had to guide the room through the emotional moment.

“You have to show a lot of sensitivity and be a really good listener and know what to say to move on to the next phase of a big show like that. I allowed them all to breathe and allowed them to see that I was having an emotional reaction too,” she says. “If I’m allowed to cry, that gives them permission to cry.”

Then came the reset.

“I said, ‘I want you to leave this room with your DNA re-arranged. I want you to be a different person when you get home to the person who left home this evening’… And then we wrestled the whole entire room towards a joyful finale.”

Learning to ask for help

One of the most transformative lessons in Yumi’s life came to her during her divorce.

“I’d get a lawyer letter or email and I’d freeze, unable to understand or process the words,” she says. “I had a group of friends who were good at analysing and would just translate it to me.”

The situation forced her to do something she always found herself resisting: asking for help.

“I never wanted to be the needy person, or the person who was a bit broken or was having a crisis and needed to ask for help,” says Yumi.

This discovery surprised her.

“I realised that asking for help isn’t weakness,” she says. “It really strengthens the bonds that you have with your existing peer group of friends. People feel really loved and special if they can help you.”

It also changed the way she thinks about relationships.

“I just fell wildly in love with my friends during that time,” she says. “And I realised that the whole partnership and coupling thing that had been sold to me all my life wasn’t necessarily what I needed.”

Instead, she began prioritising friendship in every part of her life, including work.

“I think every workmate is a potential friend,” she says. “I think it’s a really great place to make friends and the thing I have learned is to be courageous and make the first move when building friendships at work, home, or at the gym. I just really enjoy people.”

Feeding people who need it

While much of Yumi’s public work centres around broadcasting and writing, one of the things she imagines most vividly for her future has nothing to do with media.

“One of the things I can visualise for my distant future is I want to work in some sort of space where I feed people who are hungry,” she says. “Not fine dining, just feeding people who need to be fed. I have such an urge in me to work out how to scale nourishment to reach as many people as I possibly could.”

It’s an idea she’s carried quietly for her entire life.

“My entire life story is going to be leading to that, I hope,” she says. “Can you imagine? I’ll be 70 and so busy working trying to feed people who are hungry.”

Not just a broadcaster

For someone who has spent decades behind microphones and cameras, Yumi’s greatest skill might not be what people expect

When we asked about her hidden talent, she reveals, “I’m a really good listener.”

It’s a skill she believes many aspiring podcasters, authors, broadcasters and TV presenters underestimate.

“You can be a great talker, have the gift of the gab, but firstly, you need to be a really good listener. And that’s the foundation of everything — podcaster, author, friend.”

Beyond broadcasting, beyond books, beyond the public platform, it’s Yumi’s curiosity about people, and her ability to truly listen, that continues to shape how she moves through the world.

To hear more of Yumi’s story in her own words, watch the full episode on our YouTube channel.