A Word Before You Write

Chapter 2 gives you a framework. This discussion asks you to use it on yourself, or on the real professional relationship or challenge you are currently navigating, not the one that would make for a tidy example.

That distinction matters. Sandra’s three-dial model is designed to surface the gap between where someone believes they are and where they actually are. The most instructive reflections in this community will come from members who resist the pull toward the idealized version and instead describe the dial positions as they genuinely exist today: unresolved, uncomfortable, possibly misaligned, and worth naming precisely because of that.

If you are a practitioner, bring a specific coaching relationship into focus. Not a composite, not a former client, but someone you are actively working with right now. Where are their dials, and where does your read of those dials match or diverge from theirs?

If you are an organizational leader, describe the talent development challenge you are living inside at this moment. Where are your institutional dials, and what is the cost of where they are currently set?

Write from the specific. Abstraction is easier but far less useful here.

Discussion Prompt:

Where are YOUR three dials right now, actually, not ideally? If you’re a practitioner, describe this from the perspective of your most active coaching relationship. If you’re an organizational leader, describe it from inside your current talent development challenge.

A note on community: The Insiders program draws practitioners and leaders who are used to being the ones with the frameworks and the answers. This prompt asks something different: to be the subject of the diagnosis, not the diagnostician. The members who go there first, and go there honestly, tend to unlock the richest conversations in the group.