Sarah Marquis
Resilience that holds under sustained pressure is different from resilience that performs well in controlled conditions. Most leadership teams can describe what it looks like; far fewer know what they actually do when plans fail repeatedly, conditions worsen, and no external support is available. The gap between knowing resilience and practising it under genuine adversity is where decisions, culture, and performance diverge.
Swiss explorer and National Geographic Adventurer of the Year Sarah Marquis helps organisations build resilience that holds under real pressure, drawing on the mental frameworks she developed walking alone from Siberia to Australia across 20,000 kilometres and three years.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Sarah Marquis
- Her resilience framework is built from 20,000 kilometres of solo survival across six countries – not organisational theory or athletic competition, but multi-year immersion in conditions where poor decisions had direct physical consequences
- The mental tools she teaches – anticipating failure, adapting without external support, maintaining decision quality under depletion – are documented in Wild by Nature, her Macmillan-published account of the Siberia-to-Australia expedition, giving audiences a framework they can return to and apply
- National Geographic’s formal recognition of her as Adventurer of the Year 2014 and resident explorer in 2015 is a credibility anchor that travels across cultures, sectors, and geographies – rare in the resilience speaker category
- Her human-nature connection argument gives organisations a sustainability and purpose narrative grounded in decades of firsthand field evidence – a usable complement to ESG conversations that otherwise rely on data and policy
- With 500+ talks delivered in English and French to audiences ranging from the Swiss Army and Tetra Laval to the Olympic Museum, she brings a track record across defence, corporate, and cultural institutions that few speakers working the resilience topic can match
Biography highlights
- National Geographic Adventurer of the Year 2014; named resident National Geographic Explorer in 2015
- Author of Wild by Nature (Macmillan), the English-language account of a 20,000 km solo expedition from Siberia to Australia
- European Adventurer of the Year 2013
- TED speaker (2011); has addressed the Geographical Society
- 500+ talks delivered in English and French globally, including the Olympic Museum, Tetra Laval, and the Swiss Army
- Profiled in The New York Times Magazine and by National Geographic
Biography
The most honest test of resilience is not how people respond to a single crisis. It is how they function when pressure extends for months, the plan has failed more than once, and there is no team behind them. Most organisations have no direct experience of what that actually requires – and their resilience frameworks rarely reflect it.
Sarah Marquis has that experience in documented form. From 2010 to 2013, she walked 20,000 kilometres alone from Siberia through the Gobi Desert, into China, Laos, Thailand, and across Australia. Her book Wild by Nature, published by Macmillan, is the detailed account of surviving dengue fever in the Laos jungle, temperatures of -49°C in Mongolia, and over 1,000 consecutive nights in a tent across six countries. The mental tools she describes – failure anticipation, adaptation without support, instinctive decision-making under physical depletion – are specific, practised, and written down.
National Geographic named her Adventurer of the Year in 2014 and a resident explorer in 2015. She has given more than 500 talks in English and French to corporate and institutional audiences including Tetra Laval, the Swiss Army, and the Olympic Museum, and has spoken for TED and the Geographical Society. The New York Times Magazine has profiled her work.
Her more recent expeditions – a survival traverse of the Kimberley in north-west Australia in 2015, a solo three-month crossing of the Tasmanian primary rainforest in 2018, and a return to the Great Victoria and Gibson Deserts in 2023 – mean her material is current. It is not a retrospective account of one significant achievement. It is a body of evidence that continues to grow.
Key speaking topics
- Resilience under sustained pressure
- Mental tools for extreme performance
- Adaptive decision-making under adversity
- Solo survival and self-reliance
- Human-nature connection
- Overcoming adversity and fear
- Sustainability and environmental awareness
Ideal for
- Senior leadership teams preparing for high-stakes transformation or extended operational pressure
- C-suite and board-level audiences focused on organisational resilience and performance under uncertainty
- HR and L&D leaders designing resilience and peak performance programmes
- Corporate sustainability teams seeking a purpose narrative grounded in firsthand environmental evidence
Audience outcomes
- A specific, practised framework for building resilience that holds under sustained pressure – not just acute crisis
- Practical mental tools for maintaining decision quality when plans fail and external support is unavailable, drawn from documented multi-year field conditions
- A reframe of fear and discomfort as navigable data rather than obstacles, grounded in expedition experience rather than theory
- Greater clarity on the gap between conceptual resilience and practised resilience, with concrete starting points for closing it
- A credible, experience-based narrative for connecting organisational purpose to sustainability and the natural environment
Talks
Drawing on specific moments of physical and psychological crisis from multi-year solo expeditions, this talk delivers a practical framework for moving through fear and sustained adversity – and the mental tools required to keep going when conditions offer no obvious reason to.
Key takeaways:
- Mental tools for maintaining decision quality when conditions are hostile and support is absent
- A method for converting fear into directional information rather than a reason to stop
- A framework for sustaining performance past the point where most people consider stopping – what Marquis calls “going the extra mile”
A talk connecting first-person immersion across the world’s most remote ecosystems – Australian desert, Tasmanian rainforest, Mongolian steppe – to a concrete organisational argument for reducing environmental impact, delivered by one of National Geographic’s named resident explorers.
Key takeaways:
- A first-hand account of how human activity registers in environments with no human infrastructure, drawn from decades of direct field observation
- Practical framing for organisations seeking a sustainability narrative built on lived evidence rather than values statements
- A reframe of human-nature connection as a source of organisational purpose, not only environmental obligation