• Complexity and high-speed change are increasing in our business and personal lives.
  
  
• We have ever more extreme challenges to deal with today (like how to create a balanced lifestyle amidst exponential change and escalating demands in our professional lives).
  
  
• Extreme challenges invite us to approach solutions in a fundamentally different way.
  
  
• We need to improve and expand not just what we learn, but how we learn, to meet these challenges.
  
  
• We can expand our capacities infinitely.
  
  
• Expanding our capacities helps us become proactive towards change and challenge.
  
  
• When we are proactive, we become more effective, and we enjoy life more.
  
  
• Extreme coaching supports you in meeting extreme challenges with balance, creativity and enthusiasm.
  
  

The Learning Conversations coaches believe that by focusing attention on the processes of learning we can expand our capacity for learning infinitely. We draw inspiration and metaphors from the world of extreme sports where people consistently challenge limitations, expand their capacities and achieve the impossible. We find significant parallels between the demands on athletes engaged in extreme sports and the demands on all of us today trying to navigate the turbulent waters of accelerating change.

Extreme sports take us into the realm of play. And we understand the necessity of recovering and celebrating our wild and playful spirits. There is a saying you've probably heard along the trail...Walk your talk. We have a variation on that theme...We swim our talk. Two of the learning conversations coaches, Claudia and Lorn, met each other playing with the masters of extreme sports...wild spinner dolphins. When not swimming, Claudia is a dedicated hiker. She writes a lot of her poetry on daily hikes in her local canyon. Lorn when not swimming and blowing bubble rings to entertain the dolphins, does yoga and rides his bike 15 miles a day.

We've chosen to call our work Extreme Coaching to evoke a field of dramatically expanded possibilities. Coaching that places a focus not just on accomplishing the tasks at hand with grace and skill, but on improving learning itself, especially learning-how-to-learn, is extreme coaching. We can learn to become more proactive towards change, taking on extreme challenge, even enjoying it. The Learning Conversation offers us a place to practice. The combination of extreme coaching and committed practice provides a framework for extraordinary success.

"Deep play is the ecstatic form of play. In its thrall, all the play elements are visible, but they're taken to intense and transcendent heights. Thus, deep play should really be classified by mood, not activity. It testifies to how something happens, not what happens. Games don't guarantee deep play, but some activities are prone to it: art, religion, risk-taking, and some sports--especially those that take place in relatively remote, silent, and floaty environments..."

Diane Ackerman, Deep Play