Resilience Gone Wild (WinWinWin Mindset) cover art

Resilience Gone Wild (WinWinWin Mindset)

Resilience Gone Wild (WinWinWin Mindset)

By: Jessica Morgenthal & Kai M Sorensen
Listen for free

Explore how nature’s most adaptable species can inspire you to overcome challenges, lead with purpose, and create lasting change in yourself, your organization, and your community. Resilience isn’t just about bouncing back—it’s about evolving, learning, and thriving in the face of adversity.Join Jessica Morgenthal, a positive psychology trainer, teacher, author, speaker, coach, and consultant, as she uncovers stories of nature’s remarkable adaptation and survival. Learn from the resilience of sea turtles, parrotfish, banyan trees, and more, and discover what these incredible examples can teach us about building a win-win-win mindset.Each week, we’ll dive into awe-inspiring stories from the wild and follow up with expert insights, offering practical lessons on resilience that you can apply to your life, leadership, and organization.When nature wins, we win. Subscribe to “Resilience Gone Wild” wherever you listen to podcasts, and let’s grow stronger together.Produced by BLI Studios in partnership with a Win Win Win MindsetConnect with the host Jessica via email: jessica@winwinwinmindset.comOr on the web: winwinwinmindset.comConnect with producer Kai via email: kai@balancinglifesissues.comOr on the web: https://balancinglifesissues.com/podcast-bli/Copyright 2025 Resilience Gone Wild (WinWinWin Mindset) Biological Sciences Science
Episodes
  • Follow Your Current: Rivers, Resilience, and When to Swim Upstream

    Follow Your Current: Rivers, Resilience, and When to Swim Upstream
    May 25 2026
    Follow Your Current: Rivers, Resilience, and When to Swim Upstream With Matthew Best & David Stormer of Riverkeeper Jessica Morgenthal travels the long arc of rivers — from the chaotic, sediment-laden flows of an early Earth to the great waterways that built civilization, to the modern story of dams, levees, and recovery. To navigate these waters, she's joined by two river champions from Riverkeeper, the organization that helped bring the Hudson River back from the dead: Matthew Best, a fish biologist whose love of migratory species reveals rivers as living circulatory systems, and David Stormer, Riverkeeper's Habitat Restoration Director, who is literally returning rivers to the courses they've always sought. Together they offer a vision of a river that remembers her path — and a resilience practice for the parts of us that remember ours.
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 9 mins
  • Coffee’s Powerful Nudge: Caffeine, Crisis, and the Regenerative Solution

    Coffee’s Powerful Nudge: Caffeine, Crisis, and the Regenerative Solution
    Apr 28 2026
    Guests: Etelle Higonnet (Director, Coffee Watch) • Sebastian Nielsen (CEO, Slow Forest) • Andrés Montenegro (Sustainability Director, Specialty Coffee Association) What if your daily cup of coffee is actually a masterclass in resilience? In this episode of Resilience Gone Wild, host Jessica Morgenthal takes us deep into coffee's origin story — back to a plant that learned to survive through a brilliant strategy: the nudge. Coffee's caffeine was nature's quiet genius: a molecule that repels what harms, attracts what helps, and shapes an ecosystem through subtle influence. From the Congo Basin to the mountains of Yemen, from pirate seed heists to "penny universities," and from industrial monocrops to regenerative agroforestry, this is a sweeping story about biology, behavior, and the choices that shape the world beneath our rituals. Joined by three powerful voices — from human rights advocacy to regenerative supply chains to specialty coffee leadership — Jessica explores how the coffee industry got pulled into extractive, short-term systems… and how it can be nudged back toward resilience.
    Show More Show Less
    55 mins
  • Evolving Your Armor in an Ever-Changing World: What Pangolins Teach Us About Updating Protection and Accepting Help

    Evolving Your Armor in an Ever-Changing World: What Pangolins Teach Us About Updating Protection and Accepting Help
    Jan 14 2026
    Episode 67 Evolving Your Armor in an Ever-Changing World: What Pangolins Teach Us About Updating Protection and Accepting Help Guest: Tim Santel, Retired Special Agent in Charge (SAC), U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Office of Law Enforcement; Senior Advisor & Media Relations Director, Focused Conservation What if the very thing that once protected you… is the thing that’s now keeping you stuck? And what happens when the world changes faster than your instincts can? In this episode of Resilience Gone Wild, host Jessica Morgenthal takes us into the moonlit grasslands of Botswana, following the quiet, deliberate life of the pangolin—a living fossil with nature’s most powerful mammal armor. For more than 60 million years, the pangolin’s perfect defense was simple: curl into an unbreakable ball and wait out danger. Then humans changed the rules. Today, pangolins are the most trafficked mammals on Earth. Their scales—made of keratin, the same material as human nails and hair—are sold under false claims of medicinal power, and their meat is treated as a luxury. In a single human generation, the pangolin’s ancient protection became its vulnerability. Jessica pairs this story with a gripping, grounded interview with Tim Santel, one of the most experienced wildlife trafficking investigators in U.S. history. Tim takes us inside the real-world mechanics of trafficking networks—how wildlife is moved like any other commodity, and why weak penalties and low enforcement capacity make illegal wildlife trade so attractive to criminal syndicates. The resilience lesson is both tender and urgent: we all carry armor built for earlier seasons of life. Some of it still protects. Some of it now constricts. And sometimes resilience means doing the opposite of what we’ve always done—opening instead of closing, seeking new protection instead of relying only on the familiar. Episode Overview The episode opens in Botswana, tracing a pangolin’s sensory world—smell, vibration, memory, instinct—and the intelligence of a creature shaped by time. We learn how pangolins live, how they nurture their young, how they “read” the land, and how their scales evolved into the most formidable natural armor carried by any mammal. Then the story turns: when human trafficking enters the ecosystem, the pangolin’s perfect curl—once a masterpiece—becomes an easy handle for capture and transport. Jessica reframes this as a human mirror: the coping strategies we built to survive earlier threats may not match the threats we face now. Jessica welcomes Tim Santel to explore what it takes to protect species whose defenses can’t keep up with rapidly evolving human systems. Tim shares his path into wildlife law enforcement, the “voice for wildlife” moment that guided his career, and what he’s learned from decades of investigations into trafficking networks—from pangolin scales to rhino horns and beyond. The episode closes with two practical reflection practices to help listeners reassess their own protections, and a call to action to support conservation organizations and on-the-ground enforcement efforts working to keep pangolins—and countless other species—from disappearing. What You’ll Learn Why the pangolin’s greatest protection became its greatest vulnerability in a human-shaped worldHow “armor” shows up in our lives (withdrawing, micromanaging, bracing, overworking) and when it stops serving usWhat global wildlife trafficking networks have in common with other criminal trades—and why wildlife is so profitableThe real cost of treating living beings as commoditiesWhy awareness alone isn’t enough—and why frontline teams matterHow to update your internal protections with intention, clarity, and courageTwo practices for examining what still protects you… and what now constricts youHow attention becomes action—and why action becomes hope Episode Highlights [00:00] A moonlit pangolin in Botswana—and the question of protection [02:17] “A new season is opening…” and why this story feels personal [02:45] Pangolins as living fossils: lineage, mothering, and the world of scent [05:11] Intelligence as awareness: tremors, heat, memory maps, and escape artistry [07:34] The quiet architecture of termite mounds—and the pangolin’s role in soil health [10:01] When humans arrive: trafficking, false beliefs, and endangered collapse [12:22] The resilience lesson: protections that once served us can later constrict us [14:58] Welcome Tim Santel: protecting species that can’t protect themselves [30:48] “When wildlife dies, it doesn’t make a sound…” [39:39] Why wildlife trafficking is low risk, high profit—and the convergence of criminal networks [45:46] Pangolins: docile, ancient, and tragically easy to capture [48:16] The scale of the trade: what thousands of kilos really means [50:06] Operation Crash: how value multiplies through trafficking layers [55:41] What helps most: supporting ...
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 5 mins
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet