Some conversations are not after a management lesson, they are after understanding. This is one of them. Steven K likes paths that step out of the ordinary, and he lets Domitille Kiger tell hers: where the wish to fly comes from, what freefall really feels like, and what it takes to turn a dream into a discipline. Running underneath, an idea that feeds her whole keynote “De l'Audace”: daring has nothing to do with recklessness.
L'invitée de Steven K · Domitille Kiger
A discovery conversation
The starting point is a childhood passion. At twelve, a horse rider, Domitille reckons she has mastered the earth element and wants to try something in the water and in the sky. It will be diving and skydiving. She will have to wait until fifteen for her first jump, an immediate infatuation that would become an international freefly career, the artistic discipline practiced in teams of three and scored on the precision of the figures.
Freefall is not what you think
Domitille takes the time to undo the received ideas. No, freefall does not give you the rollercoaster feeling, that stomach rising into your throat. You float more as if weightless, carried by air that turns dense, almost solid. In the wind tunnel, those big fans blowing from the bottom up, you reproduce exactly the conditions of flight, and you can repeat short slots at will. Behind the spectacle, there is technique, repetition and teamwork, not a chase for a thrill.
That reframing matters, because it says something about her relationship to risk. The daring she talks about is not the intoxication of danger, it is a mastered, prepared, rehearsed practice. The same distinction she carries on stage when she separates the risks that destroy from the ones that make you progress.
Dare, but be honest about the work
Asked what message she would give young people who want to make their dreams real, she answers first to dare, then corrects herself right away: that is easy to say, much harder to do. Whatever the field, sporting, artistic or professional, it will take a lot of work. The advice she considers most useful is therefore not to dare at all costs, but to be honest with yourself about what you can genuinely see yourself putting that work into.
That is where her work today meets her sport: mental preparation. Visualization, which she has dug into all the way to its scientific dimension, helps her prepare a flight of a few dozen seconds that she cannot afford to miss. A plain tool, transferable well beyond the sky, to turn apprehension into focus.
- Daring without recklessness: preparation, precision, method.
- Clear eyed advice for going for it: being honest with yourself about the work you are willing to put in.
- Visualization as a concrete tool of mental preparation, transferable beyond sport.
- Collective performance that is decided first in each person's precision.
This episode illustrates one of the five topics of the “De l'Audace” keynote: Courage at work →