The One Question Every Aspiring Leader Needs To Ask | Constance Hockaday | TED

Most of what we know about performing leadership

is made up of these practiced postures

passed down in the West through a white, male embodiment of power.

These have become so intertwined with actually having power,

that imitating these behaviors

kind of feels like the only way to show up with authority.

We can obviously do better than that.

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.

(Laughter)

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.

Blame it on the millennia of humans colonizing humans,

but it seems like we don't believe we can have the things we want.

The things that we need to live and work with dignity.

So I think as leaders

interested in investing in an equitable society,

modeling agency is one of the most important things

that we can do for our communities and organizations.

But it's hard.

How do you move towards believing in your own agency?

The way that I learned to do this

came in a really unusual place.

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.

In that thing.

(Laughter)

So the Floating Neutrinos believe

that the most important thing a person needs to know how to do

is articulate their own desires.

To break out of being solely in reaction to the systems that contain us,

like the economic system and the education system.

So that we can allow our deepest desires

to be the thing that bring direction and urgency to our lives.

The rafts were a tool that the Neutrinos used

to bring themselves closer to their desires.

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.

And she did this using a practice called the three deepest desires.

She’d say, “Pretend you’re gonna die.”

You’re gonna die, you’re all gonna die.

“Pretend that you’re gonna die tomorrow.

What is one thing that you need to do before you die?"

And then I would have full-on drama meltdowns

around answering this question,

because it was impossible for me to believe that I had any authority

over my own life.

That I could want things

outside of what my parents and our culture had told us to want.

So Betsy finally said, "Look,

all you have to do is answer this question for today.

You could say, 'I want to eat the biggest hamburger in the world.'

OK, great. Whatever, write it down.

Because you're going to answer this question again tomorrow

and it's how you answer this question over time that matters."

And so then I said something super weird, like,

"I want to see a waterfall,"

because there's no waterfalls in south Texas.

And I got much better at it.

Saying what we want out loud

is something that we have to practice.

But the crux of this learning is the believing part.

Believing. Faith.

It's not something that we learn in isolation.

It's something that we learn through imitation.

Like, leadership and language.

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.

But she did another thing.

And this is something that leaders often forget to do.

She listened.

She sat with me

in the pain and discomfort of my process

and it's from that place, my current reality,

that she guided me towards a vision

of possibility and agency in this world.

We can choose to model our leadership styles in similar ways.

It's a commitment to relationality.

It's a process that never ends,

but it pays off because it grows empowered, engaged

and inspired groups of people, focused on a shared vision.

So if what we want is to connect people's priorities

with our visions for the greater good,

we have to commit to mediating between the truth that is in the room

and the aspirational future.

You’re all gonna die.

You could die tomorrow.

What's one thing that you want to do before you die?

What kind of leader do you want to be?

Thank you.

(Applause)