Cyril Blanchard prepares elite athletes mentally. The question he gets asked most often, he says, fits in one sentence: how do I push past my limits? That is the thread of his conversation with Domitille Kiger, and the world champion lays out a conviction that is also the heart of her keynote “Breaking Records, Building Teams” : there is nothing magical about courage, it can be worked on.
Champion de ma vie · Domitille Kiger
A portrait by a mental performance coach
The interviewer is not a general reporter: he trains athletes in performance and in public speaking. The exchange therefore tips quickly toward mechanisms, handling emotion, how to structure your inner state before the effort. Domitille tells her path there, from elite sport to the stage, and above all her way of approaching what many believe is out of reach: pushing past your own limits.
Courage is not innate, it gets built
That is the central message, and it holds well beyond skydiving. Courage is not decreed one morning, it gets manufactured through repetition, preparation, the habit of acting despite the apprehension. Each jump consolidates a little more the ability to act under tension. What looks, from the outside, like natural daring is in fact the result of patient training. The good news for a team is that what can be trained can be passed on.
Neither numb nor reckless: mastered risk
Domitille insists on undoing a stubborn misunderstanding: practicing a risk sport does not make her a numb daredevil. Not every discipline is equally dangerous, equipment and procedures have improved a great deal, and the people who practice them are not reckless. In other words, the daring she argues for is never rashness: it is the ability to tell the risks that destroy from the ones that make you grow, and to take on only the second kind.
Finding purpose in the demand
If she stayed, it was not for the adrenaline. Domitille describes a discipline she experiences as harmonious and creative, a form of choreography in three dimensions. Purpose is not an extra you add to performance, it is what makes it sustainable over time. The same idea she carries in front of teams: you only really push past your limits for something that counts.
- Courage seen as a capacity that gets built, not as a trait reserved for a few.
- Limits pushed through preparation, never through recklessness.
- The clarity to tell a mastered risk from rashness.
- Purpose inside the demand, the engine of a push that lasts.
This episode illustrates one of the five topics of the “Breaking Records, Building Teams” keynote: Courage at work →