The podcast title is already a thesis: it all starts with yourself. You do not decree a team's engagement, you create the conditions for it, and that assumes you have first looked squarely at your own relationship to fear and risk. That is the thread of this conversation with Domitille Kiger, and it is also the base of her keynote “De l'Audace” : the daring you carry in front of an audience starts with the daring you tamed for yourself.
Tout part de soi · Domitille Kiger
A podcast about management that starts with yourself
Greg Arvis and his co-host open their fourth season on a theme that suits their guest well: engagement and risk taking. Freefly world champion and keynote speaker, Domitille now helps managers create the conditions for engagement and risk taking inside their teams. An objective that comes straight from what she does in the sky, where organizing a record is, she says, fully a matter of management and leadership.
Fear, taken as a compass
The void that frightens people so much, she explains, does not really exist: you are carried by the air. What remains is the fear beforehand, and Domitille gives it a precise usefulness. In her view there is a proportionality between the apprehension felt before the action, the joy experienced during, and the pride that follows. The more something is frightening, the more likely it is to make you proud of having done it.
That reading is not an invitation to charge ahead. It is a marker for deciding: recognizing in the apprehension the sign of something that counts, without confusing that useful nerves with real danger, the kind that has to be cleared away. The same dividing line she carries on stage.
Creating the conditions for engagement
The core of her transposition sits there. For a record to be validated, the entire team has to succeed on the same jump, at the same instant: sixty, two hundred people executing perfectly, together. The real difficulty is no longer the fear of jumping, it is handling stress and emotion, keeping a cool head and running a plan designed upstream but followed to the letter.
She built that role on instinct, through trial and error, watching what works on human beings and what does not. Putting a team together, supervising it, giving it the means to reach an ambitious objective in a tense environment: that lived experience is what she now puts at the service of leaders and managers.
Daring, a value that starts with yourself
If she had to keep one thing from her career, it would be daring, learned very young thanks to this sport and useful for the rest of her life. But a daring anchored in knowing yourself and your limits, the kind that lets you know where to set your cursor on the scale of risk. That is the promise of “De l'Audace”: performing together by telling the risks that destroy from the risks that propel, starting with your own.
- Managers who create the conditions for engagement and risk taking, instead of decreeing them.
- A reading of fear as a compass : what frightens you most is often what makes you grow most.
- A plan followed to the letter even under pressure, because the collective's success depends on it.
- Daring that starts with yourself : knowing your limits in order to set your cursor better.
This episode illustrates one of the five topics of the “De l'Audace” keynote: Employee engagement →