Jacks Genega
Wilderness Instructor, Adventurer & Founder of Wildcard Wilderness
Jacks Genega
Wilderness Instructor, Adventurer & Founder of Wildcard Wilderness
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Biography
Jacks Genega is a wilderness instructor, adventurer, speaker, and founder of Wildcard Wilderness whose work explores the intersection of resilience, self reliance, and our connection to the natural world. After surviving profound adversity early in life, Jacks discovered that learning wilderness skills and spending time in nature offered something she had been searching for: the opportunity to rebuild confidence, develop capability, and reconnect with herself.
Her unconventional path has taken her from a career in film and video editing to entrepreneurship, solo wilderness travel, international expeditions, and eventually becoming a full time wilderness educator. She has trained with leading survival and bushcraft schools, traveled and hiked throughout the United States and Europe, and built Wildcard Wilderness around the belief that practical skills can provide people with far more than preparedness. They can cultivate agency, courage, community, and resilience.
Jacks went on to become the only female participant on History Channel’s Alone: World Championship, putting her wilderness skills and mindset to the test on one of television’s most demanding survival challenges. Today, she brings the lessons of her life, wilderness experiences, and personal adversity to courses and keynote presentations focused on resilience, women’s leadership, trauma, nature connection, and the power of learning to face rather than continually escape difficult things. At the heart of her work is the belief that wilderness skills teach us not only how to survive, but how to trust ourselves, embrace vulnerability, and live more intentionally.
Speech Topics
Leading Beyond the Boundaries
Jacks Genega's story is about overcoming expectations, confronting fear, and discovering the courage to lead on her own terms. From building a career and business to moving abroad, solo hiking through remote landscapes, teaching wilderness skills, and ultimately becoming the only woman selected for History Channel's Alone: World Championship, Jacks continually chose growth over comfort. Her keynote challenges women to recognize that leadership doesn't require becoming fearless or fitting someone else's definition of strength. It begins with trusting yourself enough to move forward despite fear, challenge expectations, embrace vulnerability, and become the person willing to go first.
Beyond the Addiction
Addiction is a disease, but it can also exist alongside something deeper: trauma, grief, fear, isolation, shame, or pain that a person has learned to escape or numb. Beyond the Addiction explores what can happen when recovery moves beyond addressing the behavior alone and begins examining what lies underneath it. Jacks Genega shares a message of compassion, accountability, and resilience, exploring how understanding the roots of our coping mechanisms can help us create a life we no longer feel the same need to escape from.
Drawing on principles behind exposure based approaches, Jacks explores the power of learning to safely face what we have spent years avoiding. With appropriate professional support, confronting certain fears, emotions, memories, and triggers can help loosen the hold they have over our lives. As we learn to clear the mind and care for the body, we also create space to reconnect with something beyond ourselves. For Jacks, that path leads back to nature. Away from constant distraction and numbing, the natural world can offer movement, challenge, stillness, perspective, and connection. Recovery becomes more than removing a substance or behavior. It becomes learning to be present again, to experience discomfort without immediately escaping it, and to rediscover ourselves through a deeper relationship with our bodies, our minds, and the natural world.
Survivor to Survivalist
After surviving sexual assault as a teenager, Jacks Genega spent years understanding what it meant to reclaim safety, trust, and ownership of her own life. Unexpectedly, part of that journey led her into the wilderness. Through solo hiking, connection with nature, and learning survival skills, she began transforming fear into capability and vulnerability into strength. Making fire, navigating unfamiliar terrain, and learning to provide for herself became more than outdoor skills. They became tangible reminders that she could trust herself again.
In Survivor to Survivalist, Jacks shares how nature became part of her path from surviving what happened to her to intentionally choosing challenge, adventure, and ultimately a career teaching others how to become more capable in the outdoors. Her story explores resilience without pretending that healing is simple or linear. It is a powerful conversation about reclaiming agency, finding strength through self reliance, and discovering that sometimes learning how to survive in the wilderness can teach us something profound about how we want to live.
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