THE POWER OF ONE: how Kath Koschel is inspiring kindness in others
Kath Koschel has faced injury and heartbreak, but she wouldn’t change a thing about her incredible journey, she tells Tiffany Dunk.
Walking on stage to deliver the opening speech at a packed conference in Los Angeles last April, Kath Koschel wasn’t feeling particularly nervous. But as she started to share her personal story of love, loss and recovery – which had led her to found not-for-profit charity, Kindness Factory – she stumbled for a minute when she realised who was in the crowd.
“I looked off centre and thought, ‘Wow, she looks a lot like Michelle Obama’,” Kath, 31, recalls of the opening minutes of the 2018 PTTOW! Conference, an annual gathering of inspiring CEOS, CMOs, entrepreneurs, artists and thought leaders aiming to change the world.
“And then I went, ‘Oh yes, it must be because that’s Barack sitting next to her.’ Then I looked to the left and I saw all this yellow and red and I’m like, ‘That’s the Dalai Lama. Holy sh*t, where am I? I’m from a small place in Australia – what am I doing here?’ I had no idea of the calibre of people who would be there.”
It had been a long journey from her humble start back in Oatley, a small suburb in Sydney’s south, where she grew up with three older brothers who shared her passion for all things cricket. Back then, says Kath, she only had one ambition – to play professionally. And in 2010, that dream came true when she was not only recruited to the NSW Breakers, but in a blistering national debut in Adelaide in January the following year, was named player of the match. At 24, Kath was at the top of her game at the only thing she wanted to do in life. But while all the applause was raining down, privately she was facing a terrifying battle.
Desperate to take part in her debut match, Kath had been training through some major back issues. And by the end of that fateful game she had not only lost sensation in her left leg, she’d developed “foot drop”, a condition which left her unable to move her toes or flex her foot, dragging her leg behind her.
A shock diagnosis
In March 2011, Kath had the first of many operations to fix what doctors determined to be a broken back. A self-described “Aussie battler”, Kath was sure that, with some hard work, she’d be back to her promising sporting career in no time.
Months later that dream was once again shattered when she woke up having lost, not only all sensation in her left leg from the hip down, but control of her bladder and bowel.
Somehow managing to drive herself to hospital (“I didn’t want to wake anyone up,” she says), Kath heard devastating news. “The blood pressure in my leg was so low that they told me they would have to amputate,” she recalls.
The athlete in Kath resisted, begging for one more chance to try and fix things her own way. Given a two-week deadline to attempt to exercise her way back to health, “I would go to the gym in the morning, rehab, work, back to the gym,” she recalls of her quest to beat the odds. “The gym at Cricket NSW was open 24 hours so I would go when I couldn’t sleep and just strap myself to the bike and ride.”
Despite her best efforts, nothing was working and finally, Kath resigned herself to her fate. However the night before her scheduled amputation, she was once again rushed to the hospital. Surgeons discovered a small internal bleed which was inhibiting blood flow to her left leg. Against all odds, stemming the bleed returned enough blood pressure to the limb that Kath could keep her leg.
“But for the best chance of recovery I had to go into full-time rehab for a year,” she says. “I was 24 and they put me in with geriatric patients. Rehab is a really hard place: it’s depressing; it feels like there are bars on the doors and you’re never going to get out.”
Once again, Kath put on her bravest face, until the arrival of Jim Punter, a 25-year-old rugby player who had damaged his own spine during a Tough Mudder obstacle challenge, turned her despair to joy.
Surprised by love
“Having two athletes in that sort of environment changed the whole dynamic of the place,” Kath recalls of their mutual relief at finding a like-minded friend in their darkest hour. “Like glue, we stuck together – just as mates at the start, but then it turned into something really magical.”
Soon, they not only fell in love but started planning a post-rehab future together.
“Instead of long walks on the beach, like normal people our age, we’d have wheelchair races in the corridors,” Kath smiles. “And we made plans. We were going to move to the Gold Coast to be near his mum. We were going to have four kids – three boys and one
girl, just like my family. I dared to dream like I never had before. It was incredibly special.”
After a lifetime of a singular focus, Kath realised it wasn’t only her heart opening for the first time, but also her eyes to a world of opportunities.
“Jim’s ethos in life is that you treat the cleaner the same way you treat the CEO,” she says. “He opened my eyes to kindness, to understanding what is good in the world and realising that life didn’t have to revolve around a bat and a cricket ball – people are the foundation of what we are living for. He turned my perspective on life a 360.”
Almost 10 months after that fateful meeting, Kath finally left the facility as an outpatient. While Jim remained in the centre, she busily prepared for their life together, which would begin when he was discharged as an outpatient himself on Monday, November 14, 2012.
Heading in for her daily visit the afternoon prior, Kath was excitedly thinking of what they would do together the next day. Opening the door to his room, she opened her mouth to start a conversation only to be faced with Jim’s lifeless body. The popular, bubbly, energetic, soon-to-be26-year-old had ended his own life.
There was no note, no warnings, no explanations, says Kath. It’s a moment that still haunts her today and for which she was later diagnosed with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).
“It crushed me emotionally, spiritually, physically, everything,” she says simply. “You couldn’t even say Jim’s name without me wanting to run out of the room, I was that traumatised. I was just a broken person and my heart is still quite broken from that experience.”
Characteristically, Kath refused to ask for help. Instead, she focused on her continuing recovery. And she was getting better – physically, that is. But after returning to the rehab centre for a routine test, she walked past Jim’s old room. The next thing she remembers, she woke up in a hospital bed.
“Seeing his room hit me like a ton of bricks and I had a complete breakdown,” she says. “I had to be sedated by four male nurses.
The doctors said to me, ‘Kath, we expected this. We knew you had to break at some point and this is completely normal.’ And I thought, ‘If this is normal then I don’t want to be, because I can’t ever feel like this again.’”
The healing heart
Kath fled to stay with Jim’s mum Wendy for two weeks – someone she’d studiously avoided seeing in the 10 months after his death. It was then, she says, that she finally gave in to her grief and was able to accept the love Jim’s only surviving family member offered her. Life, she recalls, finally started again.
Sitting at a coffee table on her return to Sydney, she pondered the incredible journey she had been on. Thinking about the people who had been there for her along the way, as well as how lucky she was to still be here to tell the tale, Kath started writing on a piece of paper.
“All these people started popping into my head,” she remembers, “and I’d write down their names and contact numbers, before calling each person just to say thanks. It made me feel a bit better about myself. I found gratitude: that thing people take for granted, but there is so much beauty and power in it, and it can build resilience like nothing else. ”
Starting with those phone calls,
Kath soon realised that performing small acts of kindness for others – whether it was simply smiling at someone in the street, shouting a meal for a homeless person or purchasing a wheelchair for a children’s hospital – was restorative.
She got her job back at Cricket NSW. She started raising funds, including $300,000 for Limbs 4 Life, the charity that had offered to refit her house with ramps when she was facing amputation. She began
“Gratitude can build resilience like nothing else.”
writing a blog – “The Kindness Factory” – launched on November 13, 2015, the third anniversary of Jim’s passing. There she recorded the acts of kindness she was performing around the country. And while she was unable to return to playing sport professionally, Kath began training again, determined to compete in an Iron Woman event.
Then, cycling with a group of friends across the Harbour Bridge one morning, Kath was hit by a four-wheel drive, steered by a drunk driver.
“I dislocated my neck, broke my right wrist and part of my left hip,” she says. “I ended up in another rehab centre full-time for six months. For a second time, I learnt how to walk again.”
For most people, it would have been easy to admit defeat at this point. But, as you may have guessed, Kath is not most people. Sure, she insists, she had her dark days but what got her through was taking inspiration from the blog she herself had started. The Kindness Factory had found a grateful audience eager to share their own stories of paying it forward. “They would send me emails and messages and texts saying, ‘Today I bought someone a coffee, or I did this or that and it boosted me so much,” she recalls. “They have no idea the impact that had on my recovery.”
One million acts of kindness
Gradually, the Kindness Factory has evolved. Instead of simply being a personal record of her own journey,
it is now a place for everyone to log their acts of kindness. The aim, says Kath, is to record one million acts by November 13, 2020. At time of going to press, 191,091 acts have been logged.
It’s now a full-time job. Today, the Kindness Factory is “levelling up” says Kath and is working with big businesses, including AT&T, Google and Twitter, to help them incorporate kindness projects and change corporate culture. They are also hoping to start programs in schools. To fund this, Kath relies on the money she receives from speaking professionally, sharing her inspiring story – she has yet to draw a salary from the company of which she is the CEO.
During one of those talks – that fateful April conference – came yet another twist to her story. In attendance that day, alongside the Obamas and the Dalai Lama, was Hollywood heavyweight Reese Witherspoon. And after inviting Kath to work with her media company, Hello Sunshine, Reese had another proposal for the downto-earth Aussie.
“I’m now writing a book with them and there’s a potential TV series as well,” she tells The Weekly. “And while there’s no guarantee they will make it, they bought the rights to my life in a movie.”
Kath is keen to remind people that, while her story may sound like a fairytale now, she still has her bleak times. Jim’s mother Wendy also took her own life in 2016, a terrible moment which occurred while Kath was in her second stint in rehab. Plus she deals with long-lasting injuries which will never heal.
“Someone asked me recently,
‘If you could package up the last six years and remove it, would you start again or choose the life you have?’ Without a doubt I’d have life the same way,” Kath insists.
“If I didn’t break my back the first time, I’d still be playing cricket and that’s a really boring life in my eyes now. If I didn’t break my back, I wouldn’t have met Jim and he opened up my whole world. I’d take the 12 months with him over nothing at all. I’m still not sure what the car accident means or why that happened but it probably made me a bit more internally driven to deliver as much kindness and good as I can. I firmly believe that kindness is the way forward.”
“They have no idea the impact that had on my recovery.”