Jonathan Fields explains Sparketype, a framework for discovering your natural work style. He shares how a meticulous professional turned out to be a hidden Performer, masked by anxiety, and describes using bodily sensations to tell the difference between trauma-based resistance and simple misalignment with your nature.
You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. And I want to tell a little story. From very early in my career, I was probably 25 before I went to the company that made me briefly a multimillionaire. In my 20s, before I lost it all, I was in an IT department at a company called 3Com that was once a challenger with Cisco for computer networking. And I decided I was going to get a certification in project management. This is the land of spreadsheets and Gantt charts. And I wanted to do it because I sucked at it. And my algorithm was, I should make sure that I'm not weak at anything. So I put all this effort and time got my boss to pay for a course. I never even finished the course. I couldn't even say awaken the classes for the course because it was such a kryptonite sort of thing to do. And that was maybe the first time in, you know, my mid-20s when I realized, you know what, maybe I just suck at this. And it's not that I suck at it, it's that it's so much resistance. And half the resistance that we have is from like trauma. Like something bad happened to me once when I did that. So I have this sort of like, I'll procrastinate, I'll do something else and then others. It's because it's just not in your nature and it's not a trauma based thing. How do we sort out when we feel resistance because it's unnatural for us. Which I think is where you're going with a sparkotype versus I have resistance because, you know, someone was mean to me in seventh grade.
Yeah, that is such a good question. It's one that I've been trying to like tease out. And a couple thoughts come to mind. One, I don't think there's a clear and obvious answer that's right for everyone there because we're not all one homogenous being with the same level of trauma and the same history. So it's going to show up differently for all of us. I have a bit of an unusual litmus test for me, which is I'm. For me things tend to show physiologically I look to my physiology as a really important tool for discernment. And it's largely about where I feel it in an odd way. So I'll try and rationalize things, I'll make lists of how do I actually feel about this, you know, what is, what are all the pros and what are all the cons? And like how is this landing for me? And I'll literally ask myself, you know, like, what is the fear that's coming up involved in this? Is there fear? And what are my coping strategies? And, and so I'll try and really deconstruct it with a little bit of like a homegrown CBT approach. At the end of the day, very often I'm tapping into how something makes me feel and. But whether something is a fear response or not or trauma response or not is an interesting thing. We had had a friend of mine in the very early beta testing of the assessment where I could, you know, the data was coming in slow enough where I could actually see who was, who was taking it and how they were answering. So somebody answer and, and they came up as a performer. But this is somebody who I knew to be sort of like very detailed operated, meticulous operations person in a startup and very behind the scenes, like very intentionally, not forward facing, but absolutely meticulous with systems process documentation. And actually this person came up with their lead Sparketype, their primary as a performer. And I was like, huh, that feels weird to me. So I reached out to her, I was like, does something go wrong with the algorithm here? Like, do we actually need to. Because I want to deconstruct it. And she's like, no, actually that's been me my whole life. I've been hiding it. And part of the reason that she was hiding it was that there was also a lot of anxiety associated with it. And part of the reason that her forward facing role and skill set had become being massively detail oriented systems and processes was because it was a coping mechanism because it allowed her to organize. It allowed her to sort of like say, this is the one place where I know exactly how things are going to be in my life. But part of it was also a coping mechanism for a feeling of like persistently knowing she's not showing up as the person who she really is. So the answer is it's complicated. And that's, that's actually a really fascinating question that I've been starting to like deepen into with our team and say, how can we continue to work on the language and the prompts so that without then having to take these metrics and then sit down with a coach or consultant and just spend like conversationally work through this, which I think is actually a really good idea, how can we keep improving on the language and the ideas that we're putting into the tool itself to try and tease these things out at a higher and higher level. So I'm sort of like right in the middle of this question right now.
I think you'll. You'll find something really valuable in, in what you said there. And this is for everybody listening, that idea that where in the body is it? That's one of the questions that I've asked countless numbers of times during 40 years of Zen. When people are sorting out this sort of stuff, you know, instead of trauma versus, you know, attribute, et cetera. And yeah, you feel it in your gut, it feels different. But if you're not trained or you didn't hear it here or read a book or do some yoga class or something where, especially if you're an engineer or process driven to, oh, hold on. That one was in my gut or my perineum or in my throat. Those mean something like, there's data in that noise. I had no idea there was any data below the neck until I was about 30. So your answer there was actually very finely nuanced. Well, you can tell because if it's trauma, your gut clenches up or your heart closes down or something, and it doesn't do that if it's going against your core nature.
