5 January 2026 By Alison Maitland

This was my most-read LinkedIn post of 2025, so I’m posting it here too.

SOMETIMES a speaker makes your heart brim over. For me, this was Sarah de Lagarde, who spoke movingly yesterday (18 Nov 2025) about what helped her to survive, physically and mentally, after a life-changing disaster on the London Underground.

Sarah’s accident happened in 2022 as she headed home late from work, slipped and fell between the platform and the train door and was severely injured by two trains, losing her arm and her leg.

In conversation with Clare Mahon at the annual Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants (AESC) conference, she shared lessons that have meaning for all of us:

• Making the choice to focus, not on her pain, anger and disappointment, but on what she was grateful for.
• Seeing in new ways. On day 2, her children gave her a drawing of their mother with bionic limbs, seeing what she was not able to see at the time.
• Asking for help. From being strongly independent, she suddenly had to rely on others to support her and believe in her: “When other people believe you can, you start believing that you can.”
• Finding new purpose in raising awareness of the need for better safety procedures, and campaigning to make the cost of bionic limbs more accessible.
• Learning that vulnerability builds connection. Sharing her story invites others to open up about their deep personal challenges, she said.

Amazingly, Sarah has since become the first woman to climb Kilimanjaro twice, the first while able-bodied, the second time with bionic limbs.

To me, she personifies the concept of Active Hope, which Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone describe in their book of the same name. By developing practices of gratitude, honouring our pain, seeing with new eyes, and ‘going forth’, we can find new purpose and motivation in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges.

We definitely need this in these troubling times. Thank you Sarah!