Ex-offshore scientist. Ex-flutist in an orchestra. Ex-Socio-psychologist researcher. Passionate about human and their brain. Fanatic (nearly :-)) ultra-trail runner. Florence Dambricourt is an accomplished Speaker, Self-Leadership Coach, Team Coach and Company Culture Change Enabler. Her career, in zig-zag spans over 25 years, navigating through various corporate worlds and entrepreneurship experiences. Driven by curiosity and a very strong intention to “make a difference for the better”, Florence helps her clients finding clarity, either through their life or within their business, her approach personalized to what her clients truly need to shape their future. Yes “shape”. Florence finds this verb much stronger than the passive verb often use “face” as “facing our future”.
There are two dimensions in her work. An individual dimension, where Florence will work directly with individual, helping them strengthening their Self-Leadership, through private sessions, cohort programs or mentoring initiatives. A company dimension, where Florence will then work with teams, coaching them that they can build clarity on how to create higher impact. At times, she works at the level of the organisation, partnering with dynamic leaders to shape the future of their business by facilitating the emergence of strong workplace culture, focusing on innovation, positivity, and managing complexity.
With two books published on Self-Leadership, “Swim Like a Fish” and “Speak Like a Fish”, Florence not only champions Self-Leadership, she provides a robust methodology, and with-it tools, to develop or strengthen it. She sees Self-Leadership as a must-have competency for everyone. She often laughs, summarising her work with this simple sentence “My mission? unleashing the power of Human Innovation thanks to Self-Leadership”.
Florence Dambricourt, Self-Leadership Coach & Culture Change Enabler
Who is Florence?
(Laugh) I always find this question a very challenging one (Laugh). I guess, I am more on the Eastern side of philosophy where the self is seen as an illusion, and I can tell you what I do, what I like, but is this really who I am? We will never know, right? Because we are always work in progress. We are in fact amazing learning machines, always in the move, always learning, always evolving. (Laugh)
I see you smiling, right, background and context are important. I agree they are part of our experiences, and part of what can help us decide how to act.
So, I am a European born in France. I have worked in the USA, in the UK, in Ireland and now I am living in Switzerland. I could not resist… some times ago, I had to swap the Hills of Ireland for the Mountains of Switzerland, and the Guinness of Ireland for the cheeses of Switzerland. I love nature. I love animals, dogs, cats, horses, and I used to do a lot of horse riding while in Ireland. I love sports. I love reading. I love taking pictures, and you can find some of my pics on Pixabay under creative common rules. I love writing. I actually published a collection of short stories “The house in Wicklow”, inspired by my more than 10 years stay in Ireland. I love comedy, and humour. I love spending time with people, friends, family, having great meals together.
I see, like a feeling of fluidity behind this “who I am”
You are spot on (Laugh). This is actually something we develop with Self-Leadership, accepting a certain fluidity around this notion of “who I am”. I love this metaphor; the self is like a river. When you look at a river, it always has the same name, at the same time, it is never really the same, the water you are looking at is not the same which was in front of your eyes 5 minutes ago.
You talk a lot about Self-Leadership. You define yourself as a Self-Leadership coach. How would you define Self-Leadership then?
I see Self-Leadership as an umbrella of competencies and abilities going from a simple understanding of who I am as an individual, from my perspective as a person, to a wide range of knowledge about Emotional Intelligence, Attention Management, mental states and mindset strategies development, ability to switch from big picture vision to attention to details, ability to do communication, to apply critical thinking, and more.
I will be very direct here. Self-leadership is for me a must have capability for everyone. I was so thrilled to see it finally listed into a McKinsey report in June 2021, focusing on “defining the skills citizens will need in the future world of work”. If you are interested you can check my LinkedIn feed for the link to the report. Self-leadership is in fact innate to anyone of us, connected to our sense of autonomy. Unfortunately, we are kind of educated out of it, rather than into it.
But what makes self-leadership so important?
How to explain that. The easiest maybe is to use metaphors. I tend to use two of them, both giving something interesting about Self-Leadership. The first one, is a notion of anchor. When everything spins around us, self-leadership gives us the capability to anchor ourselves onto our sense of “who we are, and what we can do”. That gives us a strong stability, a stability centre not on our job, our environment, our family, our task, the company we work for, but a stability centre on us, the individual we are, and our knowledge and perception of what is happening around us. The second one would be the cape of the super hero, even though we know capes are very bad ideas for super hero (Laugh). But it’s like Self-Leadership is your action and protection cape that you can become the super hero of your own life.
Wow. I would definitely want one of those.
Would who not, right? (Laugh)
What drives you to become a Self-Leadership coach?
Wow (Pause). I was definitely not expecting that question. Where to start? (Pause again). I am not one who has known from the beginning what I wanted to do. I went rather with a try and error approach (Laugh). But I always had this sensatio that I wanted “to make a difference for the better”; I just had no idea how. So, I started medicine, but it did not do it for me. And I went into Maths and physics. And still, it did not do it for me. I question then, maybe psychology. However, by that time, I had already done several years of study, money was running out, and I had to start making a leaving, so I jump onto the corporate journey. It is there, in 2004, that I did my first training in coaching. I knew that was the tool for me. I had been watching a sister of mine struggling with psychology, trying to understand everything, being rational about her every move, kind of circling like a cat after its tail, and suddenly I had a tool which was focusing more on the future than the past, and encouraging actions rather brooding over over-thinking. From coaching to specialising in Self-Leadership coaching was the easy step. It developed through my interaction with my coachees, as well as my experience as an individual contributor and later, manager in the corporate world. It was all about these two questions “How to truly unleash our human potential”, “How to really use our collective intelligence”.
You are lighting up as you say that? Why is that?
I guess it’s thinking about all the people I worked with. Their smile, and pride at times, when they realize they have the power to increase their choices. I am truly grateful for the trust people share with me when they invite me to be one of their catalysers for change.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
(Laugh) Another unexpected question (Pause). There are many. Some are highly visible. Others were so subtle that it would have been easy to miss them. So (Pause) I am going to pick (Pause), my decision to go and study my master abroad that I could properly learn to speak English. It was an extremely rewarding moment. There was this fantastic feeling to be the first student in my university going abroad for scientific study, and to pioneer the path for others to follow. There was this other fantastic feeling to go onto an adventure, and that indeed the world was my oyster. Suddenly everything was to be discovered. And last, there was this simple fact, this decision, as well as learning English in immersion setting, created many more opportunities and choices that I would have had staying in France. There is true power in experiencing how we can create opportunities.
What about your book “Swim Like a fish”? A bit of an unusual title for a self-development book.
You know that finding the title was the hardest part of this book creation (Laugh). I wanted something not too serious and easy to grasp. I even got a bunch of people together to help me in this creation exercise. That was fun. So, this book is a small guide to help people in developing their self-leadership. You can read it at once or step by step. Each page shares a concept, and then directly an exercise to practice it, yes to put the concept directly into action. Unless you are very serious about setting yourself up for success and a contented life, don’t get that book. (Smile)
What would be then your top 5 tips when it comes to developing self-leadership?
Why 5 when there is so many? (Laugh). Hmmm. They may not be in any right order. Always say things the way you want to see them happening. There is a real reason behind this tip; it’s linked to how our brain process language. Take a moment to extract positive learnings from your experiences. This is the only way, according to what I saw so far, to break vicious circles, and increase choices on how we can react to situations. Be your best partner. This one surprises a lot people, but you are truly the only person who has and will always be there for you, so better make the best out of that. Take actions. Thinking has its place, but often later than you think. Everything in life is about movement. We are alive thanks to movement, our beating heart, our blood flow. The thinking we want to do is more about reflection, monitoring if what we are doing, our actions, are helping us getting closer to where we want to go. And last, look for a sense of direction, like a horizon you want to reach. And if that is unclear, take a white piece of paper, and just draw, draw what you would like your future to contain. You do not have to be precise; this comes after. But having this feel is important, it will start to get your brain working for you.
If you were to choose one word, ok one sentence, to conclude, what would you like to say to our readers?
Go buy my book, and get started. You are going to love it.
