How to find “your thing” (or your many things) – (w/ Constance Hockaday)
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You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Because of the nature of this show, where it's an interview with mostly just one person, we tend to feature a lot of people who have very clear ideas about what they do and who they are. They've accomplished something big and they're here to share about it. And that's great. And I think there's a lot to learn from people who are so focused. But I've been thinking about how that can also skew our understanding about what's normal.

because most of us don't have just one thing that we've always known was our thing. There's only so many people who can be like, "I'm the world's most talented base jumper." In fact, there's only one person who can say that, and they're probably currently throwing themselves off a cliff right now. The rest of us

juggle a bunch of identities all at once, or we might be fuzzy on exactly what it is that we want to devote our free time or our careers to. We might not know what our identity exactly is. For a lot of us, it can feel like our thing is just getting through the day. And that's why I think that today's guest is really special.

Constance Hockaday helps people to come up with new visions of leadership and success to strive for. But she also helps broaden ideas about what your thing can be. And she's doing it for everyone, not just the single-minded, passionate-sense-birth type people. I also love that Connie is still figuring this out for herself. She describes herself in a lot of different ways, and how she sees herself professionally and personally is always evolving. Here's a clip from her TED Talk.

I work in organizational and leadership development, and I'm an artist. I believe artists are leaders in expressing things that humankind often doesn't know how to say yet. So that's why I invited a bunch of artists to do a leadership makeover. They wrote public addresses,

They made leadership portraits. I call them the artists in presidents. Since 2020, over 70 artists in presidents have contributed to the Digital Archive. They're North American, indigenous, international and stateless. They're artists with disabilities, they're queer. They made beautiful attempts at embodying inclusive performances of leadership and power.

Some sung, others looked to repair the past, one person used artificial intelligence to write her speech, and one person just straight up wrote a curse. And so many more. But what really surprised me was that a lot of us struggled to say something new, to articulate what we want with authority.

We're going to talk with Connie a lot about that struggle to say something new and how to articulate what it is that we want. But first, we're going to articulate some podcast ads. Don't go anywhere.

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I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. We're here with Constance Hockaday talking about art, organization, and figuring out who the heck you are. Hi, I'm Constance Hockaday. Most people call me Connie. I have a really hard time introducing myself at parties because I'm

Some weird things have come together in this life that make me who I am. I'm an artist. I make large-scale public interventions, usually socially engaged artwork. And I also work in organizational development and leadership development. So that means I'm a facilitator, a coach, a mediator, a culture builder.

Yeah, that's who I am. I think it's really fascinating how you have all these different parts of yourself and you've had a career where you've reinvented yourself a bunch of different times. And I think when I talk to people in the real world, one of the biggest questions they have is about like figuring out who they are and like what are they going to do next and what –

What is their passion? It's less about like, how do I accomplish my passion? More like, what is it? So I wonder how you think about those questions, because you have had this life of an artist and you've had a corporate job and you've been a speaker and a leader and all these different things. How do you think about it for yourself? At moments, there is like the clouds break and there's a clearing of vision of like, oh, yeah, all of that stuff is me and lives inside of me.

And all of that stuff supports the other stuff, right? It's all the same expression. It's all my expression. But it's really hard. I grew up in a house, middle class family with, you know, my mother is an immigrant from Chile. My dad is like a good old boy Texan. And, you know, I grew up like with the expectation that I would go to college and that I would become a

a professional, hopefully one that could support my parents in their old age, right? Like doctor, lawyer, architect, you would be such an amazing art. You know, my dad, even in my early twenties was sending me books on like social marketing, you know, just like trying to get me to like think about a job. And it, but, but I've never done that. I really have never,

been able to do that. And that doesn't mean that I haven't tried and that it hasn't kind of been a painful struggle the whole time, you know? I think all of this is interesting because it also in your work, I a lot of times have seen people

your artwork as causing us to have opportunities to think differently about maybe the goals that we have or what society tells us we're supposed to want. A lot of your projects play with those ideas of like what it means to be prepared or what it means to be successful. Those are themes that it seems like you explore in your work. So I grew up in South Texas.

My grandfather was the only doctor and one of the first mayors of this like tiny little town that I grew up in. My father is a marine biologist and he's also a sportsman and he also was in the Coast Guard. So hanging out with him was a lot about how to survive a shipwreck. Basically, like all of our activities were if you get fatigued offshore, like do this dead man's float and rotate back and forth so you don't get sunburned like I had.

to wear a whistle around my neck so that if I got hurt, I could blow the whistle and he could come and get me. Like if you land on a sandy shore from a shipwreck, like dig a hole in the sand and the fresh water will rise up and you can drink the fresh water off of the sand. And so he really did teach me a lot about how to survive so many things.

but I don't feel like I ever learned how to get on the ship in the first place. Like I wasn't taught, you know, what ship did I want to get on? How was I going to get on it?

That set me up for this kind of weird paradox where I believed that there were shipwrecks in my future and that I had what I needed to survive this extraordinary thing. But I didn't know how to get onto the extraordinary thing to begin with. So, you know, what happened was, is that I was expected to go away and go to college in the big, big city, you know? And when I got there, I was really, really, it was very depressing to me. Like,

the options that were in front of me were all so, so boring. And I got pretty depressed. I figured out that I was queer.

I like to say, like, I didn't even know what queer was, you know, until Ellen DeGeneres came out on television when I was like 15 years old. And so I just couldn't hang. Like I dropped out of college. I ended up back in my small little hometown, like renting umbrellas on the beach, really just totally lost. Then one day I went over the bridge and I saw a

These floating structures and there were these people living on rafts. That spectacle in the image of it, I can see that you are disturbing the entire order of things here.

It's a different life. And I just didn't have access to a lot of images like that, you know, growing up where I did. I feel like that's often one of the biggest things about finding who you want to be or your own path is just even understanding what is possible. Sometimes you have to have like a vision, right?

of what it could look like before you even imagine it for yourself. And that for you, it sounds like was the floating neutrinos. Can you explain what the floating neutrinos are and who they are? Oh, yeah, yeah. The floating neutrinos are a group of psycho-spiritual warriors who live on homemade rafts. They've lived on homemade rafts for decades. They raised their children on rafts. And the idea being that a raft...

is a place that you can live on the water that is rent free. So on the water, there are different set of laws like maritime laws, kind of in short, allows you to own the space that you're occupying in any given moment because it's a moving landscape, right? Nobody can claim a part of the water. It's always moving. And so the floating neutrinos were on a journey to

to find liberation, like a spiritual journey. And the refs were a tool basically to get out from underneath like rent and the boss and whatever so that they could own their own time and have freedom of movement. I also had beyond the spectacle a lot of very practical, beautiful teachings and information that I took

from that relationship. And this is a group that you've spent a lot of time with and been really influenced by. And then something that's interesting to me is, you know, you've lived in that world and you spent a lot of time in organizational development, too. So you've been in these very corporate spaces where people aren't, you know, psycho spiritual warriors, maybe as much. Or maybe they are. I'm curious to hear how you see those two worlds combining. I mean,

It's all world building. It's all world and culture building. Living in community in small spaces, especially small spaces that are in motion. I did it with the Floating Neutrinos. I did it with Swoon on Swimming Cities projects. I did it in my own projects. And being a leader in that space, the stakes are very, very high.

There's a lot to manage and a lot of group process and a lot of people aligning. I tell executives this all the time, especially when I'm leading like, you know, their leadership retreats or something. I'm just like, working with you guys is so much easier than being an artist. This is a breeze compared to, compared to like,

crossing the Adriatic Sea with like a bunch of fabricators and performance artists and trying to get everybody on the same page and dealing with all the interpersonal dynamics and like helping people understand how we're going to deal with when we land at the Venice Biennale or whatever it is, right? So it is all world building. It's all culture building. It's a lot of interpersonal communication, a lot of group process and facilitation. And I think corporations...

especially like mission-driven corporations, but any corporation, like there's a vision that we're trying to move towards, right? There is a higher power, if you want to call it that. And it's that vision, it's that higher power that will ultimately, if you can cultivate enough belief in it, enough credibility in the thing that you're moving towards, people's behaviors will

conform to that higher power that we're all committing ourselves to. So in that sense, I don't think that corporations are without spirit. And I may regret saying that someday. But right now, I think that moving a bunch of people in a direction towards something that maybe has never existed before, especially businesses that are trying to make the world a better place, whatever, like

It takes a certain amount of spirit, of life force and believing and discipline around how we work together. And those are not very different qualities of living in an intentional community on a raft or creating a large art project in public space. All right, everybody, hold on to your rafts because we are about to take a quick break and then we will be right back with more from Connie.

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We're talking with Connie Hockaday about how to figure out who we are and what we want to do. And Connie's not just someone who helps other people do that, she's also figuring those things out for herself as a lifelong process. Here's another clip from Connie's TED Talk. When I was in my early 20s, I met Captain Betsy. I was queer, depressed, feeling totally alone in my tiny South Texas town on the Gulf of Mexico.

And by the time Betsy landed in my town, she had been living on homemade rafts for decades with a group called the Floating Neutrinos. She had captained over a dozen rafts, including one across the Atlantic Ocean. So obviously, I was very taken by this, not because I wanted to permanently live on a raft, but because I wanted to believe in an extraordinary life.

And Betsy was the first person to ever ask me what it is that I wanted. So in my life, Betsy modeled for me what it meant to articulate my desires, and in lending her faith to me, she was also giving it back to herself.

So in the TED Talk, you talk about Captain Betsy as someone who really influenced you and was a mentor to you. And one of the tools that Captain Betsy taught you was this concept of the three deepest desires. Can you explain that concept and talk about what you found by doing it? It's one of the most important things that's ever happened to me. Basically, they were the first people to ever ask me what it is that I wanted from this life. And no one had ever asked me what I wanted. And I didn't believe that I could

live the life that I wanted to live outside of what I understood was what you were supposed to do, right? Get a job, like whatever. And it really, really kind of sent me into meltdown mode. Like I would cry because I couldn't authentically connect to a feeling of desire for this life that was truly mine. And Betsy would be like, look, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Like,

She's like, "You just have to want it." The idea of the three deepest desires is this exercise of defining what it is you authentically desire for this life. They become kind of like guideposts. The game is very much like, "Okay, you're going to die. We're going to die and you could die tomorrow. What is one thing that you need to do before you die? What is one thing that you desire before you die?"

And once you could answer that question, what's the second thing that you want, need, desire before you die? And the idea of the threes is that if you are singularly focused in this life and something gets in your way,

you're sort of, we're thwarted, right? And if it's two things, then you create this polarity or this binary that is unresolvable. And so if you have sort of three guideposts, three desires in this life that are pulling you forward,

then you're not stuck in that binary or in that singular thinking. And so we use the three deepest desires as like, it's like a calibration tool. It's a decision-making tool. It is a way of balancing and orienting oneself. And it's a practice. And so when Betsy's saying, it doesn't matter what you say, when you come back tomorrow and ask yourself this again,

you may be able to find a deeper and deeper feeling of an articulation of desire. And so it's a lifetime practice. And then you realize like, oh, wait, I think something has changed in me. And you can reevaluate like, what has changed? How has my desire shifted? But the point of all of this is like, you could die tomorrow. And so you better be living your life guided by the things that you care about the most and not mortgaging your present for some like future that may never come, right? Yeah.

I'm curious how often yours shift, like how often do your three deepest desires change or are they kind of stable over long periods of time? Well, in the beginning they were, they were ridiculous. Like, I mean, not to be mean to myself or anything, but like, you know, the first desire I was ever really able to articulate was so weird. I was like, I want to see a waterfall, you know, like, cause there, you know, I grew up in a really flat place, you know, whatever. I wanted to see a waterfall and like,

fall in love or something, you know? But at this point, you know, they have stayed really stable and it's moved away from like, I want to see a thing, do a thing, have a thing, and it's moved more into, I want to embody a thing. So today, my three deepest desires are to

have a home and what I mean by that is a relationship with the place that I feel stewardship over. The second one is to live in creative community. So it's a feeling that I'm identifying right now that isn't going to be perfectly articulated, I think, in this moment, but it's a feeling of

of living outside of nuclear family and in play and improvisation with people. And the last one is sort of like a service role. It's like, in the past, I've called it like being a teacher of hope. Hope's not the right word, but it's the closest one. It's like a teacher of

of change, of possibility. I love those. Felt pretty honest. Go ahead. What are yours? And this is the first time I've ever done this. So tell me if I'm either dodging it or need to be more precise or something. Okay. So what I want you to do is picture yourself in your life and hold the reality that you could die tomorrow. You could die next month. You don't know how long you have in this life.

But you have the opportunity to do one thing, find one thing, be one thing before you die. What do you desire? The first thing for sure is to make sure that the people who I love know that I love them. To express that and to make it be felt and seen. You know, I'm in this moment where as we're recording this,

wife and I are about to have our first kid and so like wanting her to know how much I love her wanting my family to know how much I love and I'm grateful for them wanting my friends and community to know that and also like this baby who is not yet there wanting that baby to like start life understanding how much I love and care for them is like the most important thing by far that's so beautiful

Okay, because you were brave and honest about the thing you really desire, you now have the opportunity to choose one more thing. And after you complete this thing, you die. You know, I'm working on this book that's the biggest project that I've ever worked on and the most long term of a project. And it feels like I think if I do it honestly and honestly,

if I actually don't try and think about like what other people will think but just put myself into it I think it'll be the first time that all these different things that I've worked on that feel so disparate come together and so I think having this out there in a way that I'm proud of that feels like that's something I really want to have in the world before I die for sure awesome okay so

And now you have a third. I'll be honest about what is coming into my head, which is that I have a friend here in Los Angeles. Her name is Maureen. She's about to become 102. And I just have so much fun spending time with her. And I really enjoy her. And

partly, you know, because of the nature of being 102, I feel like I'm like, I want to spend as much time with Maureen as I can to like really get all my all my mo time in. And that feels really important, too. I love that.

I mean, it's not about me, but I do love that. Okay. Okay. So now that you have these three deepest desires, you could, if you wanted to, you could write them down. I like to draw a triangle. We call them your triad. So you could... Or...

It is how people use values or how, you know, especially in like leadership development, we talk about values and living your values. Right. So, so yeah, so that is how, how you, and it's also important, I think for your wife and the people that you love to understand that that is what is driving you forward where your heart really is, because at the core of our relationships, at least for me, it's,

That we help each other get what the other wants. The first thing we come together around is supporting each other in our three deepest desires. Something that is really striking me right now is the idea of it being three, right? The idea of not this one singular goal or this kind of binary two, but instead there being three things.

But one thing that it makes me think about is a lot of times when I talk to people who are not artists but want to be, something that really holds them back is this idea of like, but how will I make money? And the idea that art is only valuable if it is your day job.

And something that I've found is that, you know, it not being the one thing. This is where the idea of the three comes in for me. Is that like it actually often I make better work when I'm not necessarily trying to think about like how is my artistic creative work going to make money? But like I'm going to take care of the money in some other way. And then I'm just free to do this. And then I also have, you know, things that are satisfying personally in other ways, too. So like that idea of.

spreading the pressure out rather than having it so singularly focused often really unlocks a lot of creativity for me and freedom to be creative. But I think people often think that that's it like doesn't count. Like if that's not what you declare on your taxes, then you're not really an artist. Yeah, I had that problem for a while, too. I have to admit. And I think that if we're not honest about the constellations that sort of that we're sort of

navigating by, we can get like really lost and sick. If, for example, you are a workaholic, even if you are an artist and it's what you declare on your taxes and it's the only thing that you care about, you may lose a chance at having a family or having intimacy or having a sense of belonging. And so

It's always going to be a constellation. Like those tensions, those competing values are always going to be there. It's how we balance and hold space for all of the things that are actually driving us forward. And when we can name them, then they won't come out sideways somewhere else. You know, does that make sense? Absolutely. Oh, yeah.

So can you tell us about the projects that you've worked on in the past and also what you're working on right now, if anything? Yeah. For people who can't see, we're talking to you and you are sitting in your studio right now. Like that's where we're talking to you. The physical space. Yeah. So my art practice, you know, thanks to the floating neutrinos, a lot of it was born. A lot of it was like waterborne, waterborne. I called them waterborne coping strategies. Like the work was waterborne.

Very much about water as a public space, water as a place that is what I like to call fast land, space that functions under a different

set of laws where we can hopefully find like a relationship to the natural world around us, like a voice, a voice for things that are not able to be expressed on land, blah, blah, blah. So it's convoluted. This is also very hard for me to explain at parties when they're like, what kind of artist are you? I'm like, oh God. So one, here, I'll just, examples. One time I built a hotel, a floating hotel out of,

a bunch of boats that were going to get sent to the dump. It was in Jamaica Bay, Queens, right off the A train. It was a bunch of boats offshore and I rented them out like hotel rooms and there was a stage in the middle and over 5,000 people came to the motel over a period of a summer. And it was all about creating this temporary infrastructure that gave New Yorkers access to

their largest public space, which is the water and which they have very little like designated access to. And this project, like others, is...

There's this idea that the infrastructure of our cities can create our deepest ideas and beliefs about ourselves and where we can and can't put our body. So if there's not a staircase that goes straight from the city into the water, it's going to be really hard for us to imagine that the water is a place for our body. And as opposed to like in Santa Cruz, where there are staircases that go straight into these crazy crashing waves and people are walking down them with their children to go jump in and go surfing.

And so then I created a floating peep show. So there were a bunch of queer performance spaces and queer spaces in San Francisco that were all kind of shuttered around the same time. And so I invited people who were performers in those spaces to create a peep show inside the hulls of a bunch of different sailboats. And so we had this situation where these audience members were coming and they were either friends or

friends are associated with the working class sailors that had lent me their sailboats or they were friends or associated with a bunch of drag queens and sex workers. They were all in this floating landscape together, experiencing these performances inside the hulls of boats. That's a taste of the waterworks. I've also moved into a few other spaces really around this idea of preparedness, American ideas of survival, disaster in the future.

Those were installations, usually in inside art spaces at the Headland Center for the Arts. And that kind of veers into what I'm working on right now, which I call Disaster Furniture Showroom. So Disaster Furniture Showroom is a furniture store, you know, on the street.

And you go inside and it's only like finely crafted furniture that is responding to people's ideas or fears about the coming future. And so for me, that's about overriding our normalcy bias. Yeah.

We have a normalcy bias that everything is normal and it's really hard for us to conceptually wrap our heads around this slow motion disaster of climate change. And oftentimes it takes like practice or physical signals to get us out of our normalcy bias, which is why we do things like fire drills.

And so I want to create furniture for people's homes that's like a disaster preparedness side table, like a headboard that holds the ceiling up in case of an earthquake, you know, like that type of thing. And I imagine it being like...

Maybe even slightly like an ASMR sort of sensual experience of like peace and calm that you walk into. And then the salespeople are performers that are bringing you into this conversation about what you fear about the future and how you're responding to that fear so that you're not just stuck in this loop of like laying in your bed at night with that anxiety about what's going to happen, what's going to happen, but never actually taking any action towards it.

It's also a great example of how a sense of humor or a good joke can make us see that the object is absurd in a way, but also the way that we live in our normal life is even more absurd to pretend that this won't happen. Yeah, totally. You talked about how when you first engaged with the floating neutrinos, it was a time when you were figuring out yourself and you didn't even know in some ways about the possibility of queerness. And I feel like

This is one of the things that is...

so important about questioning structures around gender identity, around sexual identity, is that the boxes don't actually fit anyone. There's no one who is just this one set thing that society has built an expectation of. That's not true for anyone, regardless of how they identify. You always have to figure out, who am I? And what does this look like for myself? And who do I want to be with? And what does that relationship look like? Or is there a relationship?

The more that we get away from like the set ideas of this is the one way things are, the more that everyone is forced to reconcile with who they actually are and what they actually want. In some ways, our identity, there is also sort of a set of ready-made identities on the wall.

masks that we grab and we put on and we're like, "Oh, I'm this option. I'm that option." Right? And those masks show up in all parts of our lives, like in our sexualities, in our gender expressions, in the way we show up as parents, in the way we show up as leaders, as neighbors, like whatever. We choose or we are attached, whether we realize or not, to certain identities or certain masks.

And sometimes that stuff gets mixed up, you know, and you believe that to show up as a parent, you have to show up with this mask on. But who you really are and what you truly desire will come out sideways. Just like my queerness will come out sideways if I'm to wear a different mask or the type of leader that you're trying to be. If you're wearing some inherited mask of like,

white, male performances of power. But that isn't really what you are, what your community needs. It will come out sideways. And so I guess that's another way to bring it back to the importance of owning your authentic self.

You know, well, Connie, it has been truly it has been such a pleasure talking to you. I'm so glad we were able to make this happen. And thank you so much for being here on the show. Thank you. I loved that. That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Connie Hockaday. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at ChrisDuffyComedy.com.

"How to Be a Better Human" is brought to you on the TED side by Daniela Balarezo, Banban Chang, Chloe Shasha Brooks, and Joseph DeBrien, who are all currently living together on an art raft. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas, whose three deepest desires all involve easily verifiable facts. On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team who are working in a floating hotel off the coast of Manhattan, Morgan Flannery, Nora Gill, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez.

And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. If you are listening on Apple, please leave us a five-star rating and review. And if you're listening on Spotify, we would love to hear your thoughts. We put a discussion question up on the mobile app. Let us know what you think. We will be back next week with even more How to Be a Better Human. Thanks again. And I hope that your raft stays seaworthy.

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