Hi ,

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As some of you may have noticed, we at Sparked Group have been busy ‘chefs in the kitchen’ preparing for the launch of our first new products in the next few weeks. It has been an exhilarating ride these past few months starting from customer feedback, to insights, from prototypes to what I am now seeing as final products.

Now I would be a liar if I proclaimed I. loved every step of the way. That each part of the process made me feel alive. I thrive when I can conceive content (course manuals, videos, playbooks) where coaching or mentoring is going to be the end outcome. I am in nirvana when I can forsee the revolutionary movement that could take place with the appropriate injection of energy. Dotting the ‘I’ and crossing the ‘t’, not so much. Edit after edit. Wow!! Trying to create clarity out of chaos seems an outlier to me. I love the chaos. I can picture the recoil of my three beautiful kids as we speak.

The funny part is I’m not bad at it. I can grind through the detail and get it right. But every one of those fiddly little jobs makes a small withdrawal, and by late in the night the account is empty.

It would come as no surprise to anyone that my Sparketype® Profile is Advisor/Warrior | Essentialist.

If you’ve taken the free Sparketype® Assessment, and more than a million people have now done it, you’ll know it hands you three things. Your Primary, the work that lights you up. Your Shadow, the work that often rides alongside it. And your Anti Sparketype®, the kind of work that empties you out.

I’m an Advisor at heart (“I guide to grow”), so building the new products has been the time of my life whenever I’m sitting with people, helping them see themselves more clearly. My Shadow is Warrior, which shows up as rallying people, banging the drum, getting a crowd fired up about what’s coming. Give me a room and a reason and I’m away. This can be seen watching my beloved Hawks, cheering on my Son’s soccer team and was particularly evident in the backrooms of Corporate, fighting for the will of the people.

Then there’s the rest. The checklists, the systems, that blessed checkout page, the wrestle between quality and quantity of content. That’s Essentialist country (“I create order from chaos”), and it’s my Anti Sparketype®. An Essentialist looks at a messy pile of loose ends and feels their shoulders drop, because they get to make clarity out of chaos. I look at the same pile and feel my soul leak out of my shoes.

Here’s where most of us go wrong with that feeling. We read the drain as a character flaw. “I must be lazy.” “I should be better at this.” “Everyone else seems fine with it.” So, we push harder at the very work that’s emptying us, and wonder why we’re cooked by mid-week.

Marcus Buckingham, who has spent decades studying strengths at work, put it more simply than anyone I know:

I hope that resonates and sinks in. There’s nothing in there about how good you are. You can be excellent at something and still walk away weaker. That’s what happens to me at the kitchen table. I love cooking the osso bucco but the thought of all the tiny elements that goes into a beautiful dish is enough for me, to proclaim: “Uber Eats anyone?” The drain is information about your fuel, not a report card on your ability. And once you see it that way, the guilt goes, and you can start making better choices about where your energy lies and goes.

So, what can you actually do with it? There are four routes. Name it. Shrink it. Swap it and Pair it. I will go through each one but for this week only focus on the one that resonates the most.

First up try naming the drain. That is next time you finish something and feel weirdly flat for how small the task was, stop and say, ah, that was draining. That’s your Anti Sparketype® ‘tax.’ Just noticing it puts you ahead of most people.

How about the ‘art’ of shrinking it. You probably can’t delete the drain (I can’t delete the checkout page, and believe me, I tried sulking at it). But you can often make it smaller, less frequent, or good enough instead of flawless.

Next up is the desire to swap it. This is the big one for me. The work that drains me is somebody’s favourite part of the day. Hand it to the person who’s wired for it, and you give them a bit of joy and get your evening back. Now I must admit we don’t have any Essentialists in our team but a few who love to step up to the plate and get the job done. I do find it ironic though that one of my best buddies is as significant an Essentialist as one can be. And yes, I do hand him tasks with glee.

Last up is to air it. If you can’t offload it, put it next to something that lights you up. I now do my admin with Bruce Springsteen playing and a strong latte I get from the local café. Which is another great hack as it gets me out in the sunlight. The i-dotting goes down easier with a bit of my own fuel in the room.

The impact of getting this right is bigger than a lighter week night. The energy you stop leaking goes back into the work you were built for. And in a team, when tasks find the people, they light up, everybody’s week gets better at once. That’s how a workplace starts to feel alive: not by everyone loving every task, but by the right tasks landing in the right hands.

Your own Anti Sparketype® is in your profile, and it can be any of the ten. But here’s how the drain tends to show up, depending on what lights you up:

The Maven lives to learn, so the drain is often repetition. The same report, the same process, the hundredth time, with nothing new left to find. Even one small new question tucked inside the routine can change how it feels.

The Maker can be brilliant in meetings and still leave every one of them wrung out. What they want is to go and build the thing. The meeting is just the taxiing before the flight.

The Scientist: being handed the answer and told to just execute it. No puzzle, no fun.

The Essentialist gets drained by chaos they’re not allowed to fix. Being stuck inside someone else’s mess, with no permission to tidy it, is a special kind of torture. (Also, I have a checkout page I’d like to talk to you about.)

The Performer can nail a solo deep-work project and dread every minute of the silence.

The Sage wilts in box-ticking work, where nobody wants to understand anything, they just want it done.

The Warrior runs flat working alone on something nobody else cares about. You need a hill and a team to take it with.

The Advisor, and I’m speaking from experience here: work where nobody is growing. Or in my case when my 25-year-old daughter no longer wants to be ‘coached’.

The Advocate is drained by being asked to stay neutral, sitting on the fence when you can see exactly who needs a champion.

The Nurturer might be a gun at the reporting side of their job and still come home with nothing left for their own kids, because caring for people through a spreadsheet isn’t the kind of caring their heart is after. If that’s you, it’s worth knowing the drain is real, and worth protecting some of what’s left for the people at home.

Our new ‘venture’ is open to the public in the next few weeks, and the advising and rallying and helping-you-see-yourself part (the bit I’d do for free) is what it’s built around. Inside, we go a lot deeper on your Anti Sparketype®, with tools we call “subtract one drain” and “audit a drain”, which are about as literal as they sound.

For now, pick one thing. Notice it, then shrink it, swap it, or pair it with something good. And hit reply to tell me your Anti Sparketype® task. Like last week when a reader asked me where I stood on the role of AI on a spectrum (homemade, advise, partner, delegate and autopilot) I read every one. And like last week I often ponder for days.

Talk soon,

Mark & The Sparked Team

PS – For more daily ‘sparks’, follow @sparked.nexton Instagram

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One more thing, for the coaches, leaders and people practitioners reading.

Helping someone see understand their Anti Sparketype®, can lift an enormous weight off their shoulders. And more often than not, it makes them better at the very job they were about to quit.

That’s a core part of what Certified Sparketype® Advisors are trained to do. The CSA is a 12-week certification. The current cohort is underway, and applications are now open for the next one, starting in the new year. .. [Learn more and apply.]​

If this is the work you’re already doing, or the work you want to do, this is built for you.

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