A personal reflection, not a highlight reel.
Four and a half months overseas. That's how long I was away last year, and it was wonderful. Coming home was the part I didn't expect to be hard.
I'd decided, somewhere in those months, to make a change. Not a small one. I was going to step forward as myself, rather than continue standing behind Your Time Matters, the community I'd built and run for over a decade. It sounded simple when I decided it. It was not simple to live.
Who Am I Without the Name on the Door
For years, people have known me as the woman who ran the business networking events, where education, conversation cards and wonderful WHY dinners were offered.
I understood why. The dinners, the workshops, the WHY Awards nights, they were visible, and they were good. But when I think back, they were never really the point. The point was always what happened inside them. The confidence that was boosted. The conversation that gave someone clarity they didn't have an hour earlier. The connection that turned into an opportunity neither person saw coming. And, creating connections to knowledge from experts, helping participants make informed decisions. That was the work. The events were just where it happened.
Without the name of the organisation to stand behind, I had to ask myself a harder question. Who was I, if not the woman who ran the events?
We are more than our job title.
Building the Space I Needed
There were stretches this year where I felt properly alone. Family overseas, the familiar structure gone, no room to walk into that already knew my name and my history. I've spent years creating spaces where other people feel less alone. I hadn't expected to need one myself, quite so much, quite so soon.
So I built one. Catalyst Community is still taking shape, still in formation, but it exists because I needed it to. Not for people who are missing something. For people who are experienced, capable, and still genuinely open to exploring what more might look like. I think that's an age thing, in the best sense. There's a particular kind of professional who has already achieved plenty and is still curious. That's who I built this for, because it's who I am.
What a Paintbrush Taught me as a Facilitator
I also picked up a paintbrush again this year, properly, for the first time in a long while. And, of course had made the most of my camera while travelling. It might seem unrelated to any of this. It isn't. Painting taught me something I didn't expect a canvas to teach a facilitator. I used to care almost entirely about the finished piece. This year, in class, I found myself caring more about what I noticed while I was making it. The colour that surprised me. The mistake that turned into the best part of the painting. Connection with other people has always been my work.
This year I learned that connection with yourself is a path too, and it's just as necessary.
Alignment, Falling Into Place
Here's where alignment comes in. My word for 2026 was alignment, chosen back when it was still a hope rather than a description. It's taken most of the year, but it's falling into place. Not as a finish line. More as a consolidation, a settling into what a year of repositioning was actually building toward.
Going forward looks like this.
Another month of travel in October, allowed me to reconnect with family, while the business keeps running without me standing over it. I learned that lesson properly during COVID, that presence doesn't require a desk.
Another dinner to be held to closwe out the year.
Continuing to build out the Catalyst Community to meet the needs of the members, and open membership for 2027.
Establishing a portal of material from the Your Time Matters - Learn Grow Achieve material for my mentoring clients to help fill any gaps they might have from real lived experience and conversations and repurposing everything I've gained and built across years of collaborating with other people, the strategists, the community builders, the changemakers, rather than starting over as if none of that happened.
The opportunity is only a conversation away, but often it is a conversation you have not had yet.
Nowadays, I think of myself as a catalyst, and a catalyst doesn't just take part in a reaction. It changes the conditions so the reaction can happen at all. That's what I want for the people I work with. To explore. To be excited by what's possible. To expand beyond whatever bubble they've been operating in, including the bubble of their own job title.
What I'm Still Sitting With
Which brings me to the part I haven't fully worked out. I know what I've learned this year. I have a clear sense of where I'm going. What I still need, going forward, is the one I'm genuinely still sitting with. Not because I'm avoiding it. Because I think it deserves an honest answer rather than a tidy one, and I haven't finished living my way into it yet.
I'll be exploring what others need, including myself at the table on 19 November, at this year's Catalyst Dinner, and in the conversations I have between now and then.
If you've ever asked yourself what you've learned, where you're going, and what you still need, and found you didn't have a space to sit with all three honestly, I'd love to have that conversation with you.
Start it at kerryn-powell.com.au
