Remembrance Day 2025 - Rethinking Remembrance: Clarity, Courage, Connection

4 days ago

3 min read

People in a train station interact, exchanging items on a table. Military personnel are present. Blue tablecloths and poppy pins are visible.

Remembrance Day 2025: A Living Practice of Remembrance

Each November, we pause. We stand in silence. We remember.

But remembrance is not just a moment, it’s a movement. At ACSIS Life Coaching, co-founded by Royal Navy veterans Sam Kinsey-Briggs MBE and Lloyd Allen, Remembrance Day is a call to reflect, reconnect, and recommit.

This year, our co-founder Sam took part in London Poppy Day 2025, joining thousands at Leicester Square to sell poppies, share stories, and honour the living legacy of service. The photo below, full of purpose, symbolises our belief that remembrance is not just about memory, but momentum.

Sam, our co-founder, collecting at Leicester Square

Remembrance Through a Modern Lens

At ACSIS, we centre our work around three enduring principles: Clarity, Courage, and Connection. This Remembrance season, we invite you to explore how these values can transform remembrance from a passive ritual into an active responsibility.

🔍 Clarity: Seeing the Cost of Silence

Traditional remembrance rightly honours sacrifice. But it must also confront the cost of silence.

Silence allowed past atrocities to unfold.
Silence still marginalises the voices of veterans facing mental health struggles.
Silence keeps trauma locked in the minds of those who return from conflict.

Clarity means facing these truths head-on. It’s not about blame, it’s about awareness. When we truly see, we gain the power to change.

This Remembrance Day, clarity calls us to speak, support, and show up…..for those who can’t always do it for themselves.

🛡 Courage: Remembering the Unremembered

Remembrance often focuses on names carved into stone. But courage expands the circle.

It remembers:

Colonial troops and conscripted civilians
Nurses, resistance fighters, and LGBTQ+ service members
Those who served silently, and those who served by saying “no” when it counted most

Courage asks us to widen the narrative. To tell the full story. To honour all who served humanity, even when history chose to forget them.

It’s easy to celebrate battlefield bravery. It’s harder, but more urgent, to live out courage in everyday action, dialogue, and leadership.

🌍 Connection: Remembering the Land That Remembers Too

We remember faces. Names. Poppies.

But the land remembers too.

Battlefields become meadows. Forests reclaim trench-lines. The earth, in its quiet way, holds memory just as powerfully.

Connection invites us to honour nature as part of remembrance.

Plant a tree.
Clean a coastline.
Protect the living world veterans once defended.

This is remembrance as restoration, a way of rebuilding forward.

A Living Legacy

Clarity. Courage. Connection.

Three words. Three actions. One vision for remembrance that is both modern and meaningful.

"There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct... These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind." - Hannah Szenes, poet & resistance fighter

As the nation pauses at 11am this Remembrance Day, perhaps we can ask not only: "Who do we remember?" but also: "How will we live because of what we remember?"

Because that’s where remembrance day 2025 truly begins again.

ACSIS: Veteran Life Coaching Grounded in Experience

At ACSIS, our veteran-led coaching team understands the mental preparation, courage, and resilience that service life demands. We offer military-to-civilian transition coaching, confidence coaching for professionals, and mental resilience training tailored for the unique challenges of veterans and their families.