Lumina Spark is a unique next-gen personality assessment tool offering a powerful and nuanced insight into our personalities and the complex and even contradictory way that each of us shows up across different environments. In May 2025, Claire Thorogood became an accredited Lumina Spark practitioner. Whether as an individual or as a team, working with Claire and Lumina’s tools brings meaningful insights into motivations and behaviours with practical and beneficial real-life results.
Other well-known and long-standing personality assessments such as Myers-Briggs or DISC will identify you as a type – an extrovert or an introvert, a feeling or thinking type, as people-focused or outcomes-focused. But we all recognise that this is an over-simplification; each of us operates on a more complex basis.
Lumina has built on long-standing research and models and, by adopting a trait-based approach, developed a tool that measures 24 qualities (or “traits”) separately and independently. With a ‘standard’ personality assessment, qualities relating to introversion are not measured; only those relating to extroversion. So, your ‘introversion’ is simply what is ‘left over’ after extroversion has been measured. But Lumina understands that this isn’t the case: our ‘opposite qualities’ don’t necessarily (or even usually) add up to 100%.
We can show extroversion in some situations and introversion in others. This is why it adopts a spectrum, not fixed category, approach.
Lumina takes into account that personality changes across contexts. Its methodology captures our individual preferences, our behaviours and our reactions under pressure. It identifies these as our 3 personas: our underlying self, everyday self and our over-extended self.
Personality can flex depending on context and we may adapt our behaviour for lots of reasons - group harmony, social roles and context-sensitive behaviour. With Lumina portraits, we discover insights into our 3 Personas and learn which traits come more naturally to us and those that require more energy for us to adopt. We may discover that our underlying self prefers to listen or engage on a 1:1 basis but that as our everyday self, we adopt more socially demonstrative qualities. We may be 46% empathetic as our underlying self but 72% empathetic in our every day. We can explore why we amplify this quality.
Working with Claire and through a Lumina portrait, we learn about our tendency to underuse, amplify, or overuse qualities.
Self-knowledge is critical to self-leadership. Lumina offers a unique and powerful tool to develop self-knowledge. As Daniel Goleman put it, “The best leaders don’t know just one style of leadership; they’re skilled at several and have the flexibility to switch between styles as circumstances dictate.
Lumina Spark isn’t about “strengths” and “weaknesses”; no quality is superior to any other and every quality can be overplayed; enthusiasm can, under stress, become over-bearing; listening skills, if overplayed, can seem passive.
Self-knowledge is key to self-leadership. Self-leaders are intrinsically motivated; they take ownership of their personal development and performance to achieve their personal and organisational goals.
Lumina Spark offers unique insight into what truly motivates and engages you as an individual, not a type. It offers nuanced insights into our preferences and behaviours as well as blind-spots. It therefore helps to better identify goals and healthy coping strategies.
Self-knowledge is a bridge to understanding other people – it is one of Daniel Goleman’s 5 Emotional Intelligence factors. Self-knowledge helps us to process and regulate our emotions and in turn, improve our decision-making, relationships and well-being. When Lumina is undertaken as a team, we learn when and how our preferences can be better deployed as well as to clarify our personality opposites as well as are our “mirror selves” - and the benefits and challenges with each. Working with Claire and Lumina facilitates more impactful and effective leadership, collaboration, task-allocation and sharing.