Choosing to make the big jump, or choice as engagement

Launching into an ambitious project is a jump into the void. The parallel runs through the whole exchange: jumping out of a perfectly working aircraft asks for the same kind of daring as throwing yourself into a new adventure. What Domitille Kiger adds is a grammar of choice: intent as a compass, commitment as an engine, vigilance as a guardrail. It is also, almost term for term, the material of her keynote “De l'Audace”.

Avez-vous choisi ?, a conversation on the territory of choice

Created by coach Oriane Savouré-Lucas, Avez-vous choisi? has been exploring the vast territory of choice since 2018, “to build your life your own way”. This episode, which opens the sixth season, takes the form of a long conversation around a single question: what pushes someone to make the big jump, in the sky as much as in a life project?

Domitille traces it back. A first tandem jump at fifteen, an immediate infatuation with the intensity and freedom of that world. Then, at the end of a master's degree, the real fork: continue in research or try the skydiving route, when the national team opens its doors to her. She chooses to give herself a year or two, weighing the risk. A risk taken on, not reckless: she knows that if it fails, she has a safety net. That is already, in seed form, her way of telling what is worth daring from what would put everything in danger.

Choosing means committing

“Choosing means giving something up”, offers Oriane, picking up a common phrase. Domitille turns it around: choosing means above all committing. The word that guides her decisions, she says, is intent. The clearer the why of a choice, the more precisely the energy concentrates. You move better toward what you genuinely chose than toward what you endure.

That clarity explains why, after thousands of jumps, she keeps choosing the sky. What holds her is no longer the sensation alone, it is the community, that tribe she built for herself travelling the planet for fifteen years. An archipelago of activities and bonds that converges on what has meaning for her. A choice repeated knowingly, rather than a habit nobody questions anymore.

Fear does not fall away while you sit in your chair

In her TEDx, Domitille says the fear of jumping eventually disappeared, after about fifty jumps. Fear was therefore a companion, an element she had to learn to work with. Her conviction fits in one sentence: if you wait until you are no longer afraid to act, you will never act.

Fear does not dissolve by thinking about it. You can spend the day sitting there looking for how to reduce it, it will stay whole. It recedes when you set yourself in motion. That is the first lesson she considers transferable to life and to the projects you carry: dare, and do not wait. Confidence, meanwhile, gets built step by step, jump after jump.

Confidence and vigilance: telling the risks that destroy from the risks that propel

That leaves the most delicate point, the right balance between confidence and vigilance, between daring and rashness. The trap, she says, is not a lack of confidence but an excess of it, and it lies in wait for the most experienced first. She has more than nine thousand jumps behind her, and says she is still learning.

She tells a lesson that mattered. One day, fully confident, she skips a separation rule she thought she could spare herself. A collision follows. The person hit gets out of it thanks to their automatic activation device, with a simple bruise, and jumps again a few days later. Since then, Domitille no longer settles for stating the rule to her students, she explains why it exists. That is exactly the mechanism of “De l'Audace”: some rules are not negotiable, because ignoring them destroys; other risks make you progress. The whole point is never to confuse the two.