The Doors Along the Way

On quiet impact, the people who shaped what I believe, and the conversations that opened something.

The Story I Have Told More than Twice

When I left teaching, the School Council President shared a story with me and gave me a starfish. I will never forget that moment , or story.

An old man walks a beach after a storm and finds it covered in starfish, hundreds of them, stranded and dying. In the distance, a child is picking them up one by one and throwing them back into the sea. The old man tells the child the task is pointless. Too many. It will not make a difference.

The child picks up another starfish, throws it into the water, looks at the man and says simply: it made a difference to that one.

I heard that story at a moment when I was leaving one version of my professional life and could not yet see the next. It landed somewhere deep. Not as inspiration exactly. More as a door swinging open onto a different way of understanding what impact actually means.

You do not need to change everything. You do not need to be seen by everyone. You just need to show up, again and again, for that one.

Years later, I told it again. At my daughter Olivia's 21st birthday, surrounded by her friends and family, I shared the starfish story and placed a small sterling silver starfish in her hand. She had no idea it was coming.

I chose that story for her because it was the most important thing I knew. That making a difference does not require scale or recognition or a title. It requires intention. It requires caring, quietly and consistently, about the person in front of you.

In giving her that story, I was also passing on a door. One that had opened for me at exactly the right moment, and that I hoped might open for her too, when she needed it.

The impact that lasts is rarely the loudest one in the room.

The People Who Have Shown Me What This Looks Like

That belief, that one person matters, that quiet persistence is enough, is something I have seen lived out again and again in the people I have been most privileged to know.

Throughout my life and my work, certain doors have opened and through them have walked people who have shaped not just what I do, but how I see. Some I have known for years. Some appeared briefly and left something lasting. All of them have practised a kind of leadership I find more compelling than anything loud or performative.

When I was introduced to and later spoke with Ronnie Benbow, founding director of The Carers Foundation, on my podcast, I was struck by the simplicity and the scale of what she had built. Ronnie had cared for her husband after a near-fatal accident left him paralysed. She had cared for one of her sons through serious illness. She had cared for her elderly parents. And out of all of that lived experience, she walked through the hardest possible door and built something on the other side: a healing, nurturing space for family carers who had no-one caring for them in return.

Not a campaign. Not a platform. A place where exhausted people could come and be held for a little while, by someone who genuinely understood.

Sarah Mathews, CEO of the Little BIG Foundation, started with a similarly quiet idea. What if solving loneliness began with giving people a space to connect, and then simply getting out of their way? Jazz bands in courtyards. Yoga classes. Board game nights. Ninety events a month, shaped by volunteers who understood their own community from the inside out.

One in four Australians experience loneliness. Sarah's response was not a grand strategy. It was a willingness to walk through the door before the plan was perfect, and to trust that small, consistent acts of connection become the glue that holds a neighbourhood together.

What Ronnie and Sarah both understand, and what the starfish story has always said to me, is that you do not need to see the whole ripple to know it is worth starting. The door is there. You walk through it. And something begins.

The ripple goes further than we ever see from where we are standing. That is not a reason to hesitate. It is exactly the reason to begin.

The Doors I Have Been Collecting

I have been interested in photograph and art for years.

Wile travelling last year, I took a myriad of doors on my travels, fascinated by the variety, the age, the design and then I connected some dots. I realised that something about a door and it’s threshold draws me because I realised there is a moment before you step through. Unsure what is on the other side and the hidden possibilities you may fin,d from a door, not yet open.

Looking back now, I can see that my life has been shaped by doors. The door I walked through when I left teaching and did not know what came next. The door that opened into a community of small business owners who needed each other more than they knew. The doors held open by people like Ronnie and Sarah, who built something because they understood what it felt like to find the door locked.

And the doors opened by conversation. Because that is what I have learned, above everything else, in more than a decade of bringing people together. The most significant doors in a professional life are rarely an opportunity or a strategy or a perfectly timed email. They are almost always a conversation. Someone asking a question that had not been asked before. Someone listening long enough to hear the real answer. Someone saying: I see something in you that you cannot quite see yet from where you are standing.

Those are the conversations that stay with us. Not because they were loud or dramatic, but because they shifted something.

A door does not have to be dramatic to be significant. Sometimes it is just a question asked at the right moment, by the right person.

What More Than a Decade of Building Community Has Taught Me

I started building a professional community in 2013 because I knew from experience how isolating the journey of running your own business could be. Smart, capable people making decisions alone. Carrying uncertainty quietly. Performing confidence they did not always feel.

What I discovered over the years that followed was something that has shaped everything I do now. The people who grew most, not just in revenue but in clarity, confidence and genuine impact, were almost never the ones who worked hardest in isolation. They were the ones who found each other. Who invested in belonging somewhere. Who let themselves be known, not just professionally useful.

The most intentional leaders I have met through this work are rarely the ones making the most noise. They are the ones quietly creating the conditions for others to thrive. Opening doors. Holding them. Waiting on the other side to make sure the person who walked through felt welcome.

That is the kind of leadership I most believe in. And it is the kind of person I have built Catalyst Community for.

A Dinner Built Around That Question

Rarely do we get asked how we actually got into our business or what was the turnkey. Not the elevator-pitch version. The real one. The doors we walked through nervously. The ones that were opened for us by someone who believed in us before we believed in ourselves. The ones we are still standing in front of, wondering whether to step through.

On 30 July I am hosting a small curated dinner called The Doors Along the Way. It is an evening built around exactly that question, and the ones that follow it.

A small table. A few people. Course-by-course conversation about the paths that have shaped us: a door not recognised as significant until later, a door someone else opened, a door still ahead that has not yet been walked through.

No stage. No spotlight. No pitch. Just people, food, and the kind of conversation that is increasingly rare and increasingly necessary.

If that sounds like the kind of evening you have been looking for, you will find details HERE

Some of the most significant doors in my life have been conversations. I think yours might have been too.

Is There a Door You Have Been Standing In Front Of?

If something in this piece has resonated, if there is a conversation you have been putting off, a door you have been circling but not yet stepping through, I would love to hear about it.

You can reach me at kerryn-powell.com.au, find Catalyst Community there too, or simply reply if you are on my list.

The door is rarely as heavy as it looks from the outside.

Kerryn Powell is The Network Catalyst. She helps professionals, business owners and changemakers build confidence, strengthen relationships and uncover opportunities through conversations that count. Find her at kerryn-powell.com.au

Listen to conversations with Ronnie Benbow and Sarah Mathews on the Kerryn Powell podcast at kerryn-powell.com.au/podcast