What Sparks You?

Did you write out your Ideal Day yesterday? And then compare it to a typical day? What did you learn? Today I am sharing a fun tool that will help us hone in on what makes each of us tick, another piece of understanding ourselves and why we function the way we each do. This is about what sparks you – what gives you purpose in your work, hobbies, life. What makes you feel alive?  Knowing this might help hone in on the Ideal Day.

Lewis and Jonathan

Lewis Howes hosts one of my favorite podcasts, “The School of Greatness” and Jonathan Fields hosts another, “Good Life Project.” Yesterday they came together on Lewis’ podcast to talk about Sparked, Jonathan’s upcoming book.

Sparked

“What were you meant to do? Jonathan Fields is here with the answer — and it might surprise you. Read SPARKED to understand yourself more deeply and to plan a future of impact and meaning.”

– Daniel H. Pink, #1 New York Times bestselling author of WHEN, DRIVE, and TO SELL IS HUMAN

Sparketypes®

Here’s the fun part and you don’t have to wait for the book to be released! You can go to his website and take the Sparketype® Assessment right now and start to get an understanding of what sparks you. Then, (brilliant marketing, Jonathan) a whole host of other learning tools open up afterwards.

I did mine and learned that my Primary Sparketype® is The Maven and my Shadow Sparketype® is The Maker. Read the descriptions and tell me if you don’t think those sound like me.

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The Maven

Your Primary Sparketype reveals the essential nature or “driver” of the work you’re here to do (whether it’s the work you get paid to do, or not). When you do the work of your Primary Sparketype, you come alive with purpose and, fully-expressed in a healthy way, deepen into meaning, flow, connection and joy.

As a Maven, fascination is your call. You latch onto a topic, field or industry and devour everything you can know about it. Staying “surface level” just isn’t an option for you. It’s no fun. You are driven to learn, to discover, to ferret out information, wisdom, knowledge for no other purpose than the joy of learning and knowing something as fully and deeply as you can.

Your Maven’s fascination and yearning to learn might be expressed more generally, as a perpetual curiosity about everything and everyone. Or, it may be more focused on highly-specific topics or fields of interest that evolve over time, often because your ceaseless yearning to learn has largely exhausted what the topic has to offer. So, you find the next area of fascination to move on to.

For Maven’s it’s not necessarily about what you “do” with your rapidly-accumulating reservoir of wisdom. What you learn may be useful to the others, or not. When it is, you enjoy sharing it. It is a beautiful potential “by-product” that also is essential if you want to turn your Maven-ness into your living. But, when you’re really being honest, it’s not the essential reason you do it. The fact that it has value to others is more a measuring stick of the depth of your knowledge and ability to fully-express what you’ve learned than a true expression of your reason for being. Either way, the deeper driver is the quest to learn, to satisfy your perpetual, insatiable fascination.

The Maker

Remember, your Primary Sparketype (above) represents the essential nature of the work you’re here to do. Your core driver of purpose, passion, expression and flow in work and life. Your Shadow Sparketype, on the other hand, is also a big part of you. Some may feel its call nearly as strongly. Your Shadow Sparketype most often reveals the work that you may well enjoy and have developed a high level of skill around, BUT it is also largely taken up in service of doing the work of your Primary Sparketype better.

Your Shadow Sparketype is The Maker, which means you have a strong drive to create, to make things. But, for you, when you’re really being honest, that drive is almost always in service of doing the work of your Primary Sparketype at the higher possible level. It’s more a means than an end.

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What Sparks You?

Of course, there’s much more to this than I am sharing, leaving room for you to go discover on your own. Go take a peek, do the assessment, and then share your results with me. I’m so curious to know more about what makes you tick, what sparks you!

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