Cedric Dumont
Under sustained pressure, leaders default to harder work rather than better judgement. Performance erodes at exactly the point where it matters most. The capability was never missing. The conditions under which it holds were never built.
Cedric Dumont helps organisations build leaders who hold their judgement under sustained pressure, drawing on three decades as a Red Bull athlete and high-performance psychologist.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Cedric Dumont
- His performance model comes from environments where a lapse in judgement is fatal. More than 11,000 skydives and 2,500 BASE jumps sit behind what he teaches about decision-making under pressure.
- A degree in High Performance Psychology gives him the mechanism behind the experience: what a fear response does to attention, and what conditions restore it.
- In wingsuit flight, flow is the operating condition for survival. He teaches leaders the attention and emotional-regulation practices that produce it.
- The Courage, Focus and Trust framework he speaks on has been in print since Dare to Jump in 2020, so organisations can embed it in a development programme rather than treating the keynote as a one-off.
- He works in English, French and Dutch, which makes him practical for European leadership events that cross language and market.
Biography highlights
- Red Bull athlete since 2000 and a pioneer of BASE jumping and wingsuit flying, with more than 11,000 skydives and 2,500 BASE jumps, three X Games appearances, third place in the Skysurfing World Cup and a win at the Brazilian Open of Skysurfing
- Records include the first BASE jump from the Vilnius TV Tower, Lithuania’s tallest structure, in 2009, the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado (384m) and the Jin-Mao Tower in Shanghai (431m)
- Flew the first wingsuit flight witnessed by the Great Pyramids of Giza in January 2015, filmed by Red Bull as Leap of Wonder
- Degree in High Performance Psychology, with over a decade coaching elite athletes and advising organisations
- Author of Dare to Jump (Lannoo Campus, 2020) and Defy Gravity (Lannoo Campus, 2025, distributed in the US by Simon & Schuster)
- Clients include PwC Belgium, Brussels Airport, Le Pain Quotidien, Spadel and Groupe Mestdagh
Biography
Vilnius TV Tower had never been BASE jumped before 2009. Cedric Dumont went off it with a toilet roll as his only means of reading the wind, falling for four seconds before the parachute opened. Shanghai’s Jin-Mao Tower at 431 metres and the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado followed, and in January 2015 he flew the first wingsuit flight witnessed by the Great Pyramids of Giza. More than 11,000 skydives and 2,500 BASE jumps sit behind those records.
He has been a Red Bull athlete since 2000 and holds a degree in High Performance Psychology. Three decades in environments with almost no margin for error have gone into working out why some people think clearly there and others do not. In wingsuit flight, flow is the condition under which the jump is survivable.
Dare to Jump, published by Lannoo Campus in 2020, sets out three skills he argues are trainable: a boundless mindset, sharp focus, and trust inside a team. Defy Gravity followed in 2025, distributed in the US by Simon & Schuster. The claim across both books is that emotional regulation and sustained attention under stress are built deliberately, the way an athlete builds them.
He has taken this work to CEOs and senior teams across Europe, including PwC Belgium, Brussels Airport, Le Pain Quotidien, Spadel and Groupe Mestdagh. His TEDx talks are “You flow or you die” at TEDxUHasselt and “When Women Succeed, We All Win” on TED.com. He works in English, French and Dutch.
Key speaking topics
- High-performance psychology under pressure
- Flow state and peak cognitive performance
- Fear management and intelligent risk-taking
- Decision-making under pressure
- Resilience and emotional regulation
- Attention management and deep focus
- Energy management and sustainable performance
- Trust and team performance
Ideal for
- Senior leadership teams carrying an organisation through transformation or prolonged uncertainty
- CHROs and L&D leads building performance and resilience capability across a leadership population
- High-potential cohorts in executive development programmes
- Intact leadership teams where trust and candour are the constraint on performance
Audience outcomes
- A model of what stress does to attention and judgement, and what reverses it
- Emotional-regulation techniques for use in high-stakes meetings and decisions
- A working definition of flow and the conditions that reliably produce it
- Language for building trust inside a team so that problems surface early
- A clearer view of the gap between knowing what to do and doing it under pressure, and methods for closing it
Talks
Sets out the three conditions that produce flow under pressure and what leaders and teams have to do to create them.
Key takeaways:
- Courage: how to move towards discomfort deliberately, and what intelligent risk-taking looks like when the consequences are real
- Focus: attention management, inner dialogue and metacognition as the basis of decision-making under pressure
- Trust: how teams build the conditions to speak up, challenge assumptions, ask for help and learn from failure