Built to Last: A Resilience Course for Western Conservationists

This course is designed for conservation practitioners, agency staff, and supervisors at any level who want to strengthen their own resilience and build the skills to support resilient, high-functioning teams — particularly those navigating high-pressure decisions, shifting priorities, or sustained organizational change.

Agency supervisors and staff who interact with teams and partners are increasingly asked to lead through shifting priorities, limited resources, and high-stakes decisions — often with no playbook for the specific situation at hand. This course equips staff with skills that directly support that reality:

• Team performance under pressure: Energy, outlook, engagement, and team cohesion are some of the most valuable resources a person executing leadership has in high-stakes situations. Participants gain tools to actively manage and strengthen these factors within their own teams.
• Staying grounded under stress: Effective leadership means owning the situation, learning from setbacks, and staying forward-focused — but the body’s stress response (fight, flight, freeze, or fawn) can hijack that ability in the moment. Participants learn to recognize their own stress triggers and use practical techniques to regulate their nervous system, so they can return quickly to clear thinking and sound decision-making.

Adapting when the rules change: Leadership is not a fixed skill set or a fixed playbook — it requires ongoing flexibility as directives, conditions, and team needs evolve. By understanding the basic biology of the stress response, participants build the adaptability to meet new and unfamiliar challenges as they arise.

• Self-paced pre-work (approximately 2 hours), completed during the two weeks prior to the workshop
• Three in-person training days, 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
• One evening learning session on the second day

1. A clear understanding of resilience as a trainable set of skills
2. Practical strategies for managing stress and adversity
3. Greater self-awareness and emotional agility
4. Stronger relational skills and social connection
5. A personalized resilience plan for sustaining well-being and growth
6. Foster a supportive learning community that continues to encourage and strengthen one another long after the course has ended.

The course combines presentations, experiential exercises, guided reflection, small-group dialogue, a personal Insights Discovery profile, and community-building activities.

The curriculum draws on several established research traditions, translated into practical, workplace-ready tools rather than theory alone including:

• emotional intelligence (Daniel Goleman & Joshua Freedman), which focuses on recognizing and skillfully managing emotions in high-pressure moments;
• polyvagal theory (Stephen Porges), which explains how the nervous system drives stress responses like fight, flight, freeze, or shutdown, and how to recover from them;
• positive psychology (Martin Seligman), which identifies the conditions that help people and teams thrive, not just cope;
• interpersonal neurobiology (Daniel Siegel), which examines how reflection and self-observation create space for more intentional choices under pressure;

and the Insights Discovery model (built on Carl Jung’s work on personality), which helps participants understand their own communication style, strengths, and stress patterns.

Participants build four core, trainable capacities — drawn from the Healthy Minds Framework developed by neuroscientist Richard Davidson and Cortland Dahl — that translate directly into workplace effectiveness.

Awareness — Staying present with openness and curiosity under pressure, and skillfully relating to thoughts, emotions, and experiences.

Connection — Strengthening trust and communication with those that surround you by cultivating attunement, appreciation, gratitude, and empathy.

Insight — Understanding your own stress patterns, communication style, and decision-making tendencies — and how they affect your team. Developing reflection and inquiry practices to understand beliefs, expectations, emotions, and patterns of thinking that shape your experience.

Purpose — Connecting with the values, motivations, and aspirations that provide meaning, direction, and fulfillment in life and work, especially during periods of uncertainty.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

• Recognize their own stress triggers and apply practical techniques to regulate their response in real time
• Use tools to improve their team’s energy, outlook, and engagement during high-stakes periods
• Apply emotional intelligence skills — self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and intentional decision-making — to lead more effectively under pressure
• Adapt their leadership approach when plans, directives, or conditions change
• Build stronger working relationships through improved communication and self-understanding (via a personal Insights Discovery profile)
• Leave with a personalized resilience plan for sustaining performance and well-being going forward

The Bottom Line
Staff who attend this course return with practical tools for managing their own stress response, supporting their team’s energy and engagement, and adapting their leadership approach when the situation demands it — skills that apply directly to the day-to-day reality of conservation leadership.