Not your Father’s Personality Test

This week, Matt and I are joined by Registered Life Planner and former guest Andrea Miller, to delve into the fascinating world of Sparketypes. You’ve probably heard of the Myers-Briggs personality test developed in the 1920’s or the DISC assessment that followed two decades later, but the Sparketype tool is the first to come along in almost a century designed to help you identify “your unique, source code for work that makes you come alive, whether that gets deployed in your job or career, in your personal life, or on-the-side.” 

Andrea explains the essence of Sparketypes— a concept developed by Jonathan Fields, author of the 2021 Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive. Unlike other personality assessments, Sparketypes focus on understanding what truly energizes and fulfills you, steering away from the complex jargon that often accompanies psychological frameworks.

Start by taking the free online quiz to discover your Sparketype. This 10 to 15-minute survey provides you with two out of ten Sparketypes, your primary and shadow. Each Sparketype represents a unique aspect of your core nature. 

Why am I talking about a personality assessment on my finance podcast? Anyone who has worked with me knows that my approach to helping people set and obtain financial goals is about more than just numbers. Learning that I am a Sparketype Advisor allowed me to articulate why I love my job as much as I do, and I want to share that discovery with others. Learn your Sparketype today and let’s use that insight to create your ideal life.

Hey, it's financial life planning. I’m Matt Robison with my co host and our resident in house expert on everything, both financial and life wise, you are a living person. So you know a lot about this, Mike Morton what’s going on.

Hey, Matt, good to see you.

What are we doing today? This is a little different.

This is a little different today, Matt. We actually have another friend of the podcast on the podcast today, so it's going to be three people. This is going to be really bizarre, man. I don't know how we're gonna help. Wait, how are you going to get in all your words edgewise. If there's another person that's speaking as well Matt,

Our listeners are delighted to hear that I don't expect to get in as many words.

That’s right. So on the podcast today, is our good friend Andrea, she was here a few months ago, talking about attention, I love that episode and thought I would have Andrea back because if you haven't listened to the episode, which of course as Matt would say, you should go back in the feed and get that episode. We ended on this Sparketype and Andrea is an expert on this, which I had no idea I just brought it up out of nowhere. And so I definitely wanted to have her back to talk to us more about this. So Andrea Miller, she is a registered Life Planner. CFL, CPA, PFS she has too many acronyms too many letters after her name. She's done way too many things. She started in tax prep went into financial planning and now does life planning transition coaching. Andrea, welcome back to the show.

Andrea 1:30

Thanks Mike. Good to be with you and Matt today.

We're absolutely going to have fun because it is a Friday afternoon, and it's beautiful out for the first time in like forever. And I'm excited to dive into the topic today, which is getting to know your sparketype. So Andrea, give us an intro into this what is sparketype? What are we talking about?

Yes, as we'll come to find out as we go into this and what are different spa archetypes are I am not a detailed, complex, all the weeds person. So we're just going to keep it simple. We talk about what this is because the body of knowledge of this is like two giant textbooks deep that Jonathan Fields who created this archetype has put together. So you would think it's pretty simple, but it's actually very deep. So the essence is, though it helps you understand yourself from your inner self rather than from a lot of times we go to seek the things external to us that we think we're meant to do. We live our lives by the shoulds, you get you stirred in school, you're trying to get your good grades, your parents plant seeds in your head about what would be a good career. So you can make good money and all this stuff, then you get into your career, and then you're climbing the ladder and do so because it's easy for life to get taken over. And whatever path you go on, you just keep going down that path. But what I love about this tool is it helps you get super clear on what energizes you most what is most meaningful to you. And a lot of times we do stumble into it. But this guide helps open it up to you and guide you and helps you see clearly then it also gives you your anti, what depletes you most and that's what's really interesting, because I had spent my whole life doing financial planning and tax work. And I liked it. I was good at it. But I didn't know why I was so tired on the weekends although half the time it was hard and boring to me.

Yes, take your children and multiply by infinity and there you go. That’s why you're so tired on the weekends. Yeah, yeah, Andrea, it sounds like for one thing, you got all this interesting, insightful knowledge. Maybe it came too late to you. But maybe it'll be a little earlier for your kids. You alluded before to the fact that there's two textbooks worth of information backing this up. We don't have to go way into the weeds but give me a sense of this is research base. What was that? What what are the research insights that led to the development of this framework? The sparketype?

Yes, I will not do it justice, because this is Jonathan Fields work. He is somebody that loves these complex things and going deep to figure things out. He has a book on how to live a good life which I highly recommend for anybody trying to figure out it sounds so simple, doesn't it? But it's not easy. So he took it upon himself, he was an attorney and he got burned out to the point that he landed in the hospital. And then that just took him on a life journey of ‘there's got to be something better than this way of living’. And so he started to get really interested in how do we have our best lives? How do we reach our human potential? How do we come alive, a lot of us are just surviving and getting through all the grind. And I will just look at this just to make sure that I'm saying it right. But at the highest level, this is an evidence based approach. He's collected tons of research, the last time I looked at it was in January 2022. And at that time, he had 625,000 people who had taken the spa archetype assessment, and 30 million data points. So you can imagine it's a lot higher now. And the preliminary data showed that 92% of those people said the results were extremely accurate to identify what really lit them up and made them come alive and get lost in the flow and feel purpose and to have a strong statistical correlation to the work that you do and the markers for the meaningfulness flow, engagement, and all of that. And so this just keeps building and then the anti sparketype that got built in 2022, I think, because I retook it when he was just adding on to this research. And that also correlated to where people just weren't there, were just feeling just that burnout. Because I think, we talk about burnout a lot. And a lot of times we think it's because we're so busy, and things are moving so fast, and we have so much to do. Oftentimes burnout is because you're not doing what really lights you up, what energizes you and so then you're burned out because it was ‘that's why I was burned out’. So draining the stuff I'm doing now,14 hours a day, and I wouldn't be burned out.

Yeah, that's awesome. I love the anti sparketype, when I first took it, and it must have been right when they released it, because it was about a year ago or more. And they had that as part of that. So let's roll it back. So there's an assessment, right that you could take. And so I did this a while ago, and I did it again recently. So there's an assessment that you can take, and you're given your sparketype, both kind of a primary and a shadow. And then you've mentioned the anti spark, and this is really, as you've mentioned, a few times what I found about it was it's what energizes you. So these are the sparketypes, when you're aligned with knowing what it is the kind of type of person you are, what internally motivates you, brings you energy. It was really amazing. When I read you know what I am it was so true, right? Just like you said that 92% really aligned with what brings them energy. So how many different, what is the assessment like, and how many different sparketypes are there if you could explain that briefly. And then I will dive in and reveal where I am and get some more insights from you on those types.

There are 10 sparketypes, do you want me to go through the very high level of what each one of those are?

We don't have to go through all of them. I think we'll leave some of that out. We'll mention a few of them as we get into what mine are. Maybe Matt has taken the assessment as well that'd be interesting so we'll do that. But so there are 10 different types and what is the assessment that you take?

It's just online at sparketype.com. I know you'll have that on the show notes. But it just has a series of questions that takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes to take, I would say if you're taking it, make sure that you're maybe after meditation or something where you're most aligned to yourself, because if you take it and you've just gotten, you've just been busy and you're scattered and whatever, you're not going to get accurate results. So you need to do it when you're most center within yourself, you're answering truthfully, you're not answering from what you think you should do, as we said, truthful responses. And so then when you get the result, it just takes 10 or 15 minutes, the series of questions to see what resonates most and not with you. And I'm not good at talking about this, because I'm in the anti-scientist that we'll talk about, but it's just gives you the it's I'm not even going to try.

An anti scientist Yeah, I'm glad I literally was just creating a video about how our new Speaker of the House believes that dinosaurs were saved on Noah's Ark. Before we get into dissecting Mike, that’s a true story. I'm not making that up. Fun times we live in. Before we get into dissecting Mike and finding out like all the things we never want to know about him. Tell me a little bit about just why for our listeners out there, why would they want to do this? What would you expect to change? I had this episode where my wife came home. She's a doctor, my wife came home from work one day, and she was just as one does telling me about her day. She said Yeah, and a patient might have fractured a toe. And I knowingly and that will connect to this later knowingly I was like, Oh, so you x-rayed it? And she was like, No, and I'm like, Oh, great. I married a crappy doctor. She doesn't know what she's doing. Of course you X ray a possibly broken toe. And so I gently asked her, dear, shouldn't you? She said no, because it's not going to change my treatment, it's not going to change what I do, whether it's broken or not, she’s still going to buddy tape it to the toe next to it. Right. And that really resonated with me because it started to make me think there's some life advice and that you should think about things in terms of, is it going to change what you do? So if people out there are listening, or watching this video and thinking themselves, okay, maybe I'll take this sparketype, how's it gonna change what they do? What insights are they going to get that's going to change the way they approach their lives?

Yeah, I think it can be used for a lot of different things. First of all, sparketype is identifying what we've talked about the true essence of yourself. But this can be applied to anywhere in life that you give effort, whether it's your work, whether it's your roles and devotions and causes whether it's your leisure time, or just what you love to learn. And so once you have your sparketype, we talked about the primary, which is the most deep driver for why you do what you do. And then the shadow which is in service of that deepest, essential nature. So it just helps you to see in your life, and assess it right now. So when you get these results, a lot of times you need to do some more awareness, reflection, look at your life. For me, it was obvious, but other people might need to go take a week notice, what do I do? Is it aligned with that? How do I feel when I do this activity or that activity? So I think that can help you see where you are now aligned to what brings you meaning and purpose. And does that resonate? We're all the experts in our own lives, aren't we? So any of these assessments are only as good as does this actually resonate for you? Can you see that in your life, and so when you see it, then if a lot of us go along in life unaware, we're just so busy, there's something else to do something next that we need to focus on. So it can help you back up and see, am I spending my time and energy where I want to in my life right now, this helps show you it's deeper than work when you can see this, you can apply it to all these different areas. Like I have a client who retired recently, and she was a financial planner. So she was what we call the advisor maven. Which is just, is that what you are Mike?

Mike's life, and why it’s dysfunctional. Let's do it.

Let's do it. I will say I'll answer Matt's question. Also, I give this book out in those transition periods. And so we had an episode again, like the logistics of your job, hey, I'm thinking about a new job or making a change. This one's not so great for whatever reason, okay, the logistics matter the commute and the people in the team and the work and all that. Here's a great assessment that you could do very easily. Like Andrea said, 10 or 15 minutes, get some stuff, and it helps self identify. Oh, that's the kind of things that brings me energy. And I will say this, it definitely resonated with bringing me more energy. So when I understood these things about myself, I recognize Oh, yeah, those things that are talked about actually bring me energy, and I could do them all day long. And this is what the book talks about, is that the things that you get out of bed to do anyway, if someone paid you or not. So that's really great to know about yourself. So here we go. My number one spark type was is the advisor. There you go.

You know what I am? It came up as you're the asshole.

Yeah, we're both A's. That's perfect.

I'm also, that may be true, but I'm also the advisor.

Wait, who are you advising?

Oh, that's terrible. No, we’re advising each other? Oh, boy.

So Andrea, I had the advisor. So the advisors, my first one. And my shadow type is the maven. So maybe you could give us a little bit insight. So make this podcast about me knowing that I'm the advisor with a subtype of the maven, what are those two? And how do they work in combination with what I do?

I'll just say it at the highest level of what those two would mean. And then like I said, you're the expert in your own life. So you say whether it resonates for you, okay. So this would suggest that you live to learn and serve and service the guiding others to grow.

Wait, can you wait, I need to write that down. That was perfect. That was perfect. You just said that the Maven was really something interesting to me that I didn't know about myself before. And it's the Maven it has this attribute of just loving to learn learning for learnings sake just going and adding information. And when I looked around my life and I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm constantly reading self help books, not nonfiction. But I'm reading all this self help. I'm reading the newspaper, I'm just reading stuff all the time. And it just brings me a lot of joy to sit down and read and learn and go deep. I do a lot of running so I'm reading books about how to get better at running and different stuff I'm reading, self help stuff, variety of different material, but just read it and loving it. And then we have the advisor. The other thing that I love is sharing information. Why do you think I have a podcast? Sharing the information that I'm learning with others. And yeah, it was really fascinating to me, that what brings me joy, I would get up in the morning anyway, and read and learn and then have great conversations and do that. And so then it was like, Oh, my gosh, this is what I need to be doing. And knowing that was extraordinary for me to be able to continue on and wake up every day, more and more energized.

Yeah, that's beautiful. But and so that resonated spot on for you.

Spot on. So Matt I’ll turn it over to you before I get, oh, actually, let me go to the anti-spark. Let me go to the anti-spark. So I took this recently. And my anti-spark was the advocate.

Me too. This is getting weird. This is like getting married. I was stalling on the big reveal about what I was, now I'm going to have to make it up. It's going to be like, I'm the cleric. And I have 20 hit points when I'm confronted by an orc, okay, yes or no? Andrea, please tell us more about this. It sounds creepy. I felt like I was being stalked by my anti-spark, who was like waiting there just kill my energy and my give me a bad buzz. So advocating not our jam.

And that's championing a cause, leaving a cause, I have a client who she went from being an employee to being a partner in a firm. And she was alongside another partner who was older than her. And they kept talking about their succession plan. And what she realized from this is no, I don't see how you can apply this however, that resonates for you. So with her, she was an anti advocate. And she decided, I do not want to do anything where I'm just leaving, and I'm responsible for the whole thing of the champion, I want to do it alongside someone and with other people, and be part of a team who's doing this rather than being the lead the spokesperson for a cause out there rallying the troops. So it's just all of this, when you take the assessment, you actually get a lot of of information back that you can just look and see, does this resonate with me? And then see how you want to make tweaks and it's, it can be pretty obvious all of it was spot on for me. But as I said, the evidence based approach 92% of people say it's spot on.

Are you ready to create your ideal lifestyle? Let's discover what's most important to you and design a plan to have more of that in your life. Go to meet Mike morton.com. All one word meet Mike morton.com.

Let me ask a little bit if there is a Rorschach test quality to this? Because, as with any type of, for example, the famous one is the Myers Briggs, which I've always thought was bad honestly, and it also falls a fool to the bunny tape principle, which is, I found out I'm an ENTJ, but I don't really believe it. And I'm not going to do anything different because of it. So good for me. Good for us. Yeah. So it's okay. Now I know in this case. There were parts of this that resonated with me, it said I was the advisor. And interestingly, two weeks ago, Mike and I got together IRL, at a soccer game and I was telling him the last couple years, I've taken up coaching my daughter's soccer team and basketball team. And I love it. I love it. I get a lot of energy out of it just like I it turns out, I really enjoyed coaching kids, and I enjoyed coaching sports. And so I'm reading this thing about your the advisor, and I'm like, wow, that makes a lot of sense. And then my shadow sparketype the sage. Oh, I do like that. I’m a know it all. It actually gave me a little bit of an insight into okay, maybe there's a tendency that I'm not always proud of myself, I can take it too far. But you know, that makes sense. But then I was reading this anti sparketype about the advocate, and I'm like, it's true. I don't want to like go out and be like a lawyer for a public interest group and be Erin Brockovich. On the other hand, I like being the leader in an organization. I do like that like like being out front in a coaching capacity. What's the tension between these kinds of things? Are you meant to see some of it in yourself and maybe not other parts?

I think what the bottom line is what it’s is in service of. So I'm guessing when you lead, you're doing it in service of awakening insight and others so that you can guide them to grow. Is that true?

I have to think about that. Yeah, I think that's definitely, when I think about myself in a coaching context absolutely. And I always used to enjoy it. I used to work on Capitol Hill and one of the things that happens is, you get like dozens of people per year asking for help getting a job on Capitol Hill. And I enjoyed it like other people thought it was a pain in the ass and I'd like to meet with people and help them figure out what they want to do. So yes, I think that does make sense to me.

You can use your use your know it all sage to to advise them on what to say it's perfect.

It;s a twofer. It really should have been named advice or something different because you're an advisor, you're not giving a lot of times, the deepest meaning of it is that you're guiding others to find their own answers from within, rather than you telling them what to do. So I don't know if that resonates or not. But that's what I do in my role is I'm guiding others to figure out their own answers rather than oh, this is what you should do, this is what you should do, which a lot of people don't have that. And that's how people come best to live and have their best life from within rather than somebody telling them what the answer should be.

What does it mean that Mike's secondary was at your secondary type here, your shadow type was it the warrior?

No. So this isn't No, this is a question I had? No, it was Maven. But here's the question I had. So I took it just a few weeks ago but I also took it like a year and a half ago. And I got different types when I took it before. And so I'm interested in that. But I'll share the types. My primary was the Maven. And that's where I really dug into Oh, really is this learning thing and just getting energy from learning different subjects? Then I was like, Wow, that's pretty exciting. And then the shadow was the warrior. And my anti spark was actually the nurturer, which also makes a ton of sense for me. But tell me a little bit more about does this change over time? If you retake it? And how does that kind of work?

I would only change, this is from Jonathan Fields description, it changes one, if you really weren't on the right space centered within yourself and really answering truthfully, the first time you took it. So that could be one reason. The second is if you get more information, so you have more experiences, so you actually have more knowledge of what different things feel like and you and so especially young people that are starting out in their careers or early in their careers, and they're using this to guide them of what they would do very likely they're going to change because they haven't had a lot of experiences yet to give them that information. So with you, I'd say either, you maybe didn't take it at the best time, or you gave your short answers instead of your true answers. Or maybe in the experiences you've had it got you to answer it a little differently.

I think I'll answer that. I think it was a little bit of both, actually, now that you said that, because I'm a financial advisor. Of course, I had to be the advisor. First I'm sure was like picking those answers as I was going through the assessment. So I think there's part of that. And I will say the warrior had that leadership aspect in a different, slightly different context. And that really resonated me with a lot earlier in my life, and that I still really enjoy it. But I was probably thinking more of those times versus I don't do as much of it these days. And so that's interesting, a little bit of a shift over time, not that I just still don't enjoy it, but just maybe my answers weren't reflecting it as strongly as when I took it previously.

But the other thing that occurred to me as I was doing this assessment, because I had a suspicion that my answers might change, they might vary a little bit more next week, depending on my mood. I'm dreading a certain meeting today, or I'm just coming off of a great experience and I wonder if that's okay, if that's maybe a feature not a bug here, if it's not providing one hard and fast nail to the wall answer for you and your personality for all time, because first of all, our personalities do change. Our thinking does evolve over time you tell me you're the expert. And the other thing is that I think all of these tools, I was just dunking on Myers Briggs, but there's nothing inherently wrong with Myers Briggs. I think, to me, it felt like part of the value here is what story are you telling yourself? And if something is resonating with you, and you get some insight out of it, and I'm just I'm in this in the midst of like I said before, with Mike, I'm having this conversation where I'm like, I've come to realize something about myself recently, which is how much energy I get from coaching. And I didn't foresee that would be an important part of my life and it is. And so even if what this tool is doing is it's like, I'm handing it my wristwatch, and it's telling me the time that's valuable. It's making more concrete, something that was easily taking shape in my mind. So even if it shifts, even if it's not 100% the truth in a kind of Platonic chair sense, like, I still found some value in that.

Oh, yeah, I think of all these, I'm sure if we had Jonathan here, he'd give you the reason because I don't think he ties this one to personality, like some are as deeper and more innate and more so essential to who you are. But I think all of these tools is just a self discovery, isn't it self awareness so that you can then take that information? I could take any of those assessments and I'm like, Oh, yeah. Oh, that's why I do what I do. And it's just some of them are interesting, like Enneagram. I think we talked about that at one point. And the enneagram, to me is very interesting. But it's so complex, and I can't remember it to save my life. I can't I remember my number, but I have no idea what it means because it's too complex. And this I love, because it's just simple. And you can keep testing it out like you said, it's just a point in time. But as I keep doing different things, I can just see for myself as this. Do I feel like I got more energy from that thing, or did it take it out and or am I glazing over because it's like, hard to get through that and it just fit so many of us don't pay attention to that though it might be happening, but we're not really paying attention. So I think you're spot on it just gives you something to be more concrete.

So don't wait, first of all, don't tell Matt he's spot on. That's terrible. This is going to invigorate his sage characteristics. They're going to start coming out Mr. know it all over there. Andrea, this is great. Is there any other information that you want to make sure we share? Or where should people go next to take advantage of checking this out for themselves?

Yes, the first thing I would do is take the assessment which is at sparketype.com, which I think is on your show notes. Do we need to spell that?

Sparketype with an E.

Yeah, surprising place. Sparketype. But it's an E not an A anyway. Yeah.

Yeah, we'll figure it out on the show notes. And then when you take it, like we said, just see if it resonates with you, and see what that means for your life. Now, do a little exploration with yourself the next seven days, start to see what you notice. And then yes, the book if you want to dive deeper then do it.

Since I'm a Maven, of course I've got the book and I had to read it and all the types. It's what I do. So yeah, sparked book, which is amazing. And you've mentioned Jonathan Fields, who did all this research and kind of does a lot of this stuff. I've listened to some podcasts with him as well. Amazing. So definitely, if you want to learn more and fill up podcasts, you could do a search for him and find some one that he's been on as well. So that's great.

Yeah, all the mavens out there, there's a ton for you. I'm just like you, Mike, I'm at Bias or Maven. And so I do it, there are some Mavens who go broad, and they just like people who just love to learn anything, it doesn't matter. They love to learn. I'm a narrow Maven, where I only I love the human, like understanding humans and our experience and then applying that how to guide others to grow. Yes, I eat the stuff up. He has a good life project podcast. He has a sparked podcast, and a number of books that are all good, I love him because he takes ancient wisdom and how that applies to us. We're just too busy with all the stuff that we can't see it clearly. So he just takes all these different perspectives and puts it together. And yeah, I love this assessment. It's just simple and can guide you right now. Cool.

Yeah, that's awesome. Matt, any last words from you before we sign off? Comments, questions?

Trying to make sure I can defeat those orcs. Some strong cones have done shyer energy to this I will say but I did find it genuinely helpful.

Yeah, it's awesome.

Thanks so much, Andrea, for joining us today introducing the topic, definitely check out the resources and it was a pleasure having you on.

Thanks so much love being here.

for joining us on financial planning for entrepreneurs. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe to and rate the podcast on Apple, iTunes, Google Play Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can connect with me at LinkedIn for Morton financial advice.com. I'd love to get your feedback. If you have a comment or question, please email me at financial planning pod@gmail.com. Until next time, thanks for tuning in. This recording is for informational purposes only and should not be considered for and As much advice opinions expressed as are of the date of recording such opinions are subject to change we do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the data presented here