Jeanine Becker On Purpose Together

Mary Oliver asks:
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

This question is often read as a call to freedom.
Or creativity.
Or bold personal expression.

But from where I sit with leaders, founders, funders, executives holding real responsibility it lands differently.

Not as permission to abandon what you carry.
But as an invitation to tell the truth about how you’re carrying it.

For the leaders I work with, “wild” doesn’t mean reckless.
It means the part of you that is still alive beneath competence.
The part that remembers why this mattered in the first place.
The part that hasn’t been fully absorbed into roles, expectations, or institutional gravity.

And “precious” doesn’t mean delicate.

It means finite.
Your time.
Your energy.
Your attention.
This particular season of leadership.

So the question becomes sharper:
What happens when a capable, responsible leader
builds a life that no longer makes room for what’s wild?

What happens when the work keeps going but the aliveness goes quiet?

I don’t see this as a personal failure.

I see it as a systemic pattern.
We reward leaders for endurance.
For over-functioning.
For carrying more than is sustainable
as long as the results keep coming.

But something else gets traded away in that bargain.

Vision narrows.
Desire becomes inconvenient.
And leadership slowly shifts from creative stewardship to obligation management.

Mary Oliver’s question isn’t asking you to choose between impact and aliveness.

It’s asking something far more challenging:
Can your leadership still belong to you?
Can the life you’re building 
with all its responsibility, consequence, and reach
still feel like a life you recognize as your own?

Not optimized.
Not defended.
Not justified.
Fully lived.

Mary Oliver’s question isn’t asking you to choose between impact and aliveness.

It’s asking whether the way you’re leading
honors your desire, your aliveness, the nudges of knowing deeper than what must get done.

May 2026 be the year of 
Your wild and precious life.

For a long time, leadership has been framed like a puzzle you’re meant to solve.

You’re given a box — a vision, a mandate, a problem to fix — and told that if you’re skilled enough, strategic enough, diligent enough, you’ll figure out how the pieces fit.

Many of the leaders I work with are very good at puzzles. That’s how you got here.

But at a certain scale — when the puzzle gets larger, when the pieces keep changing shape, when some of them belong to other people, other systems, other histories —you can no longer see the full picture from where you’re sitting.

Not because you’ve lost clarity — but because no single vantage point holds the whole.

This is the moment many leaders misread as failure.

But what’s actually happening is that the puzzle has become collective.
Some of the most essential pieces are not on your table.
And no amount of individual brilliance will make them appear.

This is where leadership shifts.
From solving to convening.
From holding the whole picture yourself to creating the conditions
where the picture can emerge between people.

This is why I created The Collective Counsel — a room where leaders bring the pieces they’re holding, lay them on the table together, and discover what becomes possible when no one has to pretend they see the whole thing alone.

If the puzzle you’re holding feels bigger than what one leader or one team can solve — you’re not behind.

You’re at the threshold where collective intelligence becomes the strategy.

Last weekend I turned another year older.
And earlier this week, a piece of writing I poured myself into was released into the world.

Both feel like milestones. Both feel tender. Both feel quietly celebratory.

Not because everything is easy or resolved — but because I’m here. Present. In it.

What I keep coming back to, again and again, is how much this moment asks of us.
The world feels unbearably beautiful some days. And unbearably heavy on others.

There is so much grief moving through the systems we’re part of.
And also so much creativity, courage, and longing to build what comes next.

This is the paradox I live inside.
And it’s the center of my work.

The pause.
The moment of connection.
The choice to be fully here — with each other — rather than rushing past what matters most.

I know, in my bones, that I’m meant to be gathering people in this moment.
Funders.
Founders.
Leaders.

People forging what comes next — not from certainty, but from presence.
Not by going faster, but by listening more deeply.
Not alone, but together.

To sit at the fire.
To tell the truth.
To celebrate what’s alive.
To grieve what we’re losing.
And to remember that this is how humans have always found their way forward.

So today, I’m marking the joy.
The writing.
The people.
The gathering.
And I’m deeply grateful — to be alive in this moment, to be doing this work,
and to be in it with you.

On Purpose Together.

Still landing. 💗

Two pieces in The Legendarium this month — my essay “Mama, Bring Back the Sun” and an interview by Juliet Trnka.

This line from the interview keeps reverberating:
“The work you’re inspired to do isn’t just needed in the world. It’s here to evolve you.”

🔥 Link in bio.

She raised $3.5M in a week. The shift wasn't strategy. It was a single question.

For a long time, the question most leaders are trained to ask is:
What can my team do?

How do we stretch capacity? Optimize roles? Move faster with what we have?
It's a good question. And in another era, it was often enough.

But there's a moment — usually when the stakes rise, the ground shifts, or the urgency won't let up — when that question starts to feel… small.

Not wrong. Just insufficient.

This leader was facing an urgent, cascading crisis. The need was massive. Her people were activated — personally and professionally. And she came in focused on what felt feasible.

When we slowed down, something else emerged.
The question quietly changed from What can my team do? to What does this ecosystem actually need?

And with that shift, the field widened.

Other funders came into view. New partners became relevant. Resources that were previously "outside the scope" started to move.

Not because she worked harder. But because she stopped trying to carry it alone.
She raised $3.5M in a week. Three and a half times her original plan.

Donella Meadows — the systems scientist whose work I've been studying at the Academy for Systems Change — wrote that paradigm shifts are the highest leverage point in systems change.

And then she said this:
"There's nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from eyes, a new way of seeing."

That's what I watched happen with this leader. Not a new skill. A new question. A falling of scales.

This is one of the core transitions leaders are making right now — from stewarding a team to stewarding a field. From executing inside boundaries to convening across them.

Because when the question changes, strategy changes. And when strategy changes, what becomes possible does too.

And it's at the heart of my essay in The Legendarium this month — "Mama, Bring Back the Sun" — on what leadership must become when the ground is shifting and you realize you cannot do it alone.

🔥 Read here: https://www.onpurposetogether.co/Legendarium-article

“Mama, mama, bring back the sun.”

Maia was two. The sky went pitch black over Berkeley. Twenty wildfires burning over two million acres. I made jokes about s’mores, trying to ease her terror. And then she looked at me, asking me to fix something I couldn’t fix.

That moment cracked something open.

I wrote about it in The Legendarium — an essay called “Mama, Bring Back the Sun.”

It’s about the myth we’ve been living inside:
The myth that if we work hard enough, lead well enough, build the right strategies, we can keep those we love and those we serve safe. The myth that individual excellence — the contribution of you and your team — is enough.

You are needed. And you are not enough.

That’s not failure. That’s the invitation.

🔥 Link in bio to read the full essay.

When did the polycrisis become personal for you?

Not the news. Not the data. The one moment you remember — when it stopped being abstract and became your forge. For the work. For your impact.

And for the leader you are becoming.

Nearly every funder and systems leader I've spoken with recently has said some version of this:

"There's so much resource being pulled out. We feel like we have to step in."

Federal supports gutted. Core infrastructure collapsing. Customers tightening. Markets shifting.

The instinct is to fill it quickly. To patch the holes. To step in because you can.

But here's what I'm noticing about the most resourced leaders in this moment:
They aren't looking to replicate what was. They aren't trying to patch with their little piece of the puzzle.

They know they can't fill this vacuum alone.
And they don't want to.

Because the vacuum isn't just a loss. It's a catalyst.

It's inviting not just rebuilding what was — but reinvention and co-creation.

This is one of the gifts in this moment: organizations, entities, stewards within ecosystems are looking at each other and saying, "None of us can put it back together the way it was by ourselves. And we don't actually want to."

The question isn't: How do I fill the gap?

The question is: What's trying to emerge that couldn't exist before?

That inquiry — and the capacity to sit in it — is what Fire That Gathers is for.

Join here: https://www.onpurposetogether.co/fire-that-gathers

When we stay at fine, we push down what's actually here.

It doesn't go away. It just goes underground.
It shows up as urgency, as numbness, as disconnection.

It mutes the gentle nudges we need — the insight, the innovation.
The feeling is the intelligence. Not the obstacle to it.

What's the longing, the frustration, or actual grief you've been calling fine?

And what's the nudge, the insight waiting for you there?

That's what we explore in Fire That Gathers — short sparks for leaders navigating this moment.

Join here: https://www.onpurposetogether.co/fire-that-gathers 🔥