Slow Down and Enjoy the Ride

Television host Nikki Muller says she’s evolved from just wanting to benefit and strong to taking better care of her emotional health.

- Davelle Lee

Nikki Muller simply lights up the room. It is impossible to dislike the Fly Entertainment artiste who beams with so much positive energy and warmth. Arriving at our photo call, the TV presenter and host greets everyone with big hugs and strikes up lively conversations as her hair and makeup are being done. When she’s all dolled up, she exclaims in wide-eyed wonder: “Thank you so much, guys. I feel like a princess!”

Hardly the happy-go-lucky, freewheeling celebrity, Nikki is the typical modern woman with deep commitments to work, family and friends – and trying to juggle it all while staying sane. As a presenter on Fox Sports Asia, she’d sometimes work up to 16 days at a stretch without taking a rest day.

Last year, on top of her Fox Sports Asia work, Nikki co-hosted the Formula 1 Singapore Grand Prix and SEA Games on TV, as well as hosted The Food Files, a series about the real health benefits and risks of our favourite foods, on Nat Geo People.

“I never really rested. I would work myself to the ground so that by the time I got home, I’d just sleep,” she says. The strain and stress got so bad that she found herself crying on public buses or at lunch, and even in between her many appointments and shoots.

It was only on her 31st birthday earlier this year that Nikki asked herself: “What’s the point of working so hard? I thought I’d be married by now. I thought I’d have my own show full-time.”

While she’d made a checklist of short-term goals – including quitting her job at the United Nations headquarters in New York in 2011, where she coordinated high-level global seminars and produced training and promotional videos – to move to Singapore to work in TV, and to do more live shows and theatre work, she didn’t have any big-picture, long-term goals.