Soul Searching: What It Really Means & How to Do It

You wake up every day with a growing sense that something’s off.

You’ve landed the job. Signed the mortgage. Booked the vacations, posted the wins, and poured the champagne to celebrate all these milestones.

But somewhere along the way, the hunger faded. The goals don’t hit the same. The motivation’s gone quiet. The noise is still loud, but it’s no longer moving you forward.

This is where soul searching begins. Not as a spiritual detour, but as a direct path inward. A moment where the usual answers stop working.

And the goal of this process? To rediscover who you are and “precisely what you want out of life,” says Jon Butcher, co-founder of Lifebook and trainer behind Mindvalley’s program of the same name.

But to get there, he adds, you’ve got to be willing to go inward, ask the uncomfortable questions, and burn off the stories that no longer serve you.

What is soul searching?

The “soul searching” meaning, simply put, is the process of self-introspection where you look inward to reconnect with your true self. It’s when you stop outsourcing your truth and start remembering who you are… before the job title, the grind, the pressure to “have it all figured out.”

But here’s the thing: you’re not just reviewing one part of your life. You’re taking stock of all of it, or what Jon and Missy call the 12 areas of life that shape your entire human experience.

They don’t exist in silos, though. They stack up and spill into, or shape, each other.

Here’s the whole roster:

Health and fitness
Intellectual life
Emotional life
Character
Spiritual life
Love relationship
Parenting
Social life
Financial life
Career
Quality of life
Life vision

“You’re one person with 12 different aspects that make up your life,” says Jon. “This process is not about 12 different things. It’s about you.”

To uncover your life’s true calling, you first look at what’s working and what’s not. Then, you own it all before starting anew and designing a better life blueprint to thrive by.

The science of self-discovery

The ancient greats cracked the code on this self-awareness. Socrates grilled strangers in the street until they questioned their existence. Rumi wrote love poems to the universe incessantly. And Buddha left a palace to sit under a damn tree to “hear” his higher self better.

You see, these figures weren’t mindlessly wandering. Rather, they were intentionally searching for answers within themselves.

And today, science is catching up on why they all felt that “pull” to soul search.

Psychologists call it the need for self-concept clarity, which defines how well you know yourself. People on the clear don’t just float through life. They’re found to sleep better, stress less, and stay grounded in their decisions, all the markers of a life well lived.

And mindfulness, Buddha’s go-to discipline, eases the self-discovery process. A study found that regular mindfulness practices like meditation boost emotional regulation and self-acceptance. It’s how your brain rewires itself to stop the spirals and stay present.

Those who dare unpeel the layers—societal conditioning, the copy-paste goals, the inherited expectations—to find themselves tend to discover their true life purpose. And this, according to the American Psychiatry Association, is the ultimate fuel for a great life, as people connected to their “why” tend to bounce back from setbacks faster and report more joy than those who aren’t.

So, feeling out of touch with yourself and worrying you’ll fall apart? Don’t fret; it’s a good thing. Take it as a sign that it’s about damn time you take your life back.

4 signs you need soul searching

Newsflash: there’s no calendar alert for this. No voice from a burning bush or the clouds above telling you to wake up. (Ah, if only.)

The “pull” for soul searching can come in many forms:

1. The plateau: You feel “meh” overall

You’re not falling apart, but you’re not exactly living in joy either.

Forget what movies like Eat, Pray, Love or Wild or generic soul-searching quotes would tell you. You don’t always have to crash hard to start knowing yourself (although it can happen).

The quieter signs you’re on the verge of soul searching? You’re high-functioning in public but you’re actually numbed out at home. Or you’re crushing deadlines like a champ, while quietly spiraling out of control inside, your career stress threatening to derail your relationships, one by one.

“In certain areas of your life, you may be swimmingly masterful,” says spiritual thought leader Michael Bernard Beckwith in Life Visioning Mastery, his program on Mindvalley. “And in other areas, you may be victimized or feel like you’re a victim.”

2. A big life shakeup, whether good or bad

Death. Breakup. Job loss. A scary health diagnosis you didn’t see coming. These hit like a wrecking ball, ripping your routines to shreds and throwing you into existential whiplash.

But disruption doesn’t always come dressed in black.

A new baby. A move across the world. A raise that finally puts you in the tax bracket you wanted. These “wins” can still rattle you, leaving you to question who you are inside the life you’ve built.

Whatever cracked your routine wide open has now cracked you open, too. But scary as they may be, they may be the start of your self-discovery.

“You may be at a place of deep heartbreak or deep despair. You may be at a place where the rug has been pulled from underneath you,” Michael points out.

But this feeling, he further explains, isn’t an artifact of your undoing. In fact, “it’s the beginning of transformation.”

3. You’re chasing goals that don’t light you up anymore

You built the vision board, hit the career milestones, and crossed the finish lines you’ve set for yourself. But now, that dream job you’ve bagged feels stale. And the house you worked your ass off for just feels like another box to clean.

You did everything right, yet it all feels so wrong.

Now, instead of wondering how to recover from burnout every time you’re hit with that nagging feeling inside, ask yourself if you’re living your true purpose. The thing is, exhaustion isn’t always from overwork; it can be from chasing goals that were never fully yours to begin with.

“You’ve gotten crystal clear on who you want to be and how you want to live,” Jon points out in his Mindvalley program. “You’ve put great effective strategies in place, and you’ve taken action.”

So, why don’t you press pause on everything and really dig deep?

4. You’ve outgrown the life you used to love

Friends who used to light you up now drain you. The way your calendar is packed and color-coded used to make you feel productive, but now it rings hollow. And your favorite haunts in the city? Now they feel like old clothes two sizes too small.

Don’t freak out. These are not signs that you’re insane, despite how those late-night meltdowns make you feel. You’re actually on the precipice of shedding a life that was once great but no longer serves you.

To ground yourself through this shift, take a page from Jon’s playbook: remind yourself you’ve earned the right to evolve. Say your thanks to the you that brought you here. Honor them, and let them go.

“The feeling is becoming more real now,” Jon says. “This is who you are.”

How to do soul searching in 5 expert-backed steps

There’s no shortage of advice on how to find yourself. One scroll through your feed and you’ll find a hundred checklists and five-day challenges from brands and influencers telling you to wake up at 5 A.M. and take a cold plunge.

It’s all a lot. Not that these aren’t great, but if you’re already feeling lost and you’re unsure where to start, all that noise can push you further out to sea.

So let’s cut through the BS with the following steps backed by Jon and Michael’s know-how.

1. Ask the right questions

Forget generic, out-of-context positive affirmations. You need to give yourself some “truth serum” (in the form of some hard, often uncomfortable, but super revealing questions).

Because the truth is, an authentic inner journey only kicks off when you’re brave enough to investigate yourself, even if it makes you squirm a little.

These questions can look like:

“What do I believe I have to do, and who taught me that?”
“What am I chasing that no longer excites me?”
“When was the last time I felt fully alive?”

Self-inquiry, for one, is the foundation of Jon and Missy’s Lifebook method, where clarity comes not from guesswork but deep, deliberate reflection.

Start small. And once the bite-sized truths start cracking through, you can zoom out and ask end-goal questions, like this one Jon broadcasts in his program:

“If you are able to execute every single strategy you defined in your life vision and really make it a reality, what does that look like for you five years from now?”

2. Write down your self-reflection to make it tangible

Once the questions are out, you need somewhere to put the answers. And no, keeping them in your head isn’t enough.

This is where you have to put pen to paper, and there’s nothing like mastering how to journal daily to clear the fog. It forces you to slow down, get honest, and process what’s real. No filters, no walls to hide the “noise.”

Michael calls this part of the journey “blissipline,” a discipline you want to return to because of how grounded it makes you feel.

And you don’t have to spend hours on end doing it. Just start with five minutes every morning or before bedtime. Let it be messy. You’ll eventually find clarity in the scribbles.

3. Try meditation and creative visualization

“You are not your body; you are not your mind,” says Michael. “You are a spiritual being.”

But you don’t just think your way into remembering that. You have to feel it, and that’s where meditation makes all the difference.

So, start with your favorite meditation techniques. Engage in mindful breathing. Shut the world out long enough to hear your deepest desires and truths beneath all the chaos. Don’t forget to journal them so you’re aware of what’s what.

And once you’re tuned in, turn to creative visualization—or what Michael calls “rehearsal for reality”—to imagine yourself already living out your goals. Feel all the feelings that come with them. Doing this actually sets you up for achieving them, since the brain doesn’t know the difference between imagining something and living it.

The thing is, the more you leverage the meditation-visualization combo to see and feel your desired reality, the less foreign it becomes. Until one day, it stops being a vision and starts being your life.

4. Seek new experiences that shake your perspective

If your life feels like a highlight reel of routines, it’s time to shake your snow globe. Because you won’t find your true self by staying in the same old loop.

As Jon puts it, “You need to step out of your current environment to get perspective on it.” Staying put, he says, is “like trying to see the picture when you’re inside the frame.”

New environments jolt your senses awake. New people reflect parts of you that you didn’t know existed. And new challenges? They force you to remember what you’re made of.

This doesn’t mean you have to book a silent retreat in Nepal or sell your stuff to live out of a van (unless that’s your drift, power to you). Sometimes, good change can be as simple as:

Taking a different route home.
Reading a book in a genre you normally avoid.
Saying yes to a last-minute invite.
Listening without judgment to a contrarian view.

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate,” said Carl Jung, the father of modern depth psychology.

And that’s exactly why new experiences matter. They shake you out of autopilot, disrupt old mental patterns, and force your unconscious habits into the light.

“If we want to live the life we truly want,” Jon says, “we’ve got to become the kind of person who can make it happen.” That means leveling up how you think, what you believe, and how you operate. And sometimes, that requires outside help.

That’s where having professional support from a therapist, a life coach, or a career mentor helps. They hold up the mirror when you’re too close to see your blockers and strengths clearly.

And science has spoken up about this: having strong, high-quality social support on your speed dial makes or breaks one’s resilience after stress from major life setbacks.

5 soul-searching examples of people who truly “discovered themselves”

Every soul-searching journey feels like chaos in the moment. But zoom out, and you’ll realize that you’re not the only one facing this.

If we want to live the life we truly want, we’ve got to become the kind of person who can make it happen.
— Jon Butcher, founder of Lifebook

Many leaders in history went through this cycle, where they didn’t just find themselves without putting up a fight. And their stories prove that soul searching is the real way to remake yourself from the inside out, like the ones below:

1. Vishen: How burnout led him back to himself

The founder and CEO of Mindvalley didn’t “find himself” on a mountaintop or in some picture-perfect retreat. No, his soul-searching started in a cubicle, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, where the younger him was successful on paper but quietly falling apart inside.

He had the job. The perks. The title. But none of it felt like his.

So one day, he decided to walk away from it all and move to New York. The nonprofit job he would take there paid much less but gave him way more meaning.

Along the way, he stumbled upon meditation, which he used to cope with stress. But it ended up triggering his eureka moment: that he was meant to build a platform that helps others unlock their potential.

That platform became Mindvalley.

2. Carl Jung: The deep inner dive that changed everything

Long before shadow work became a buzzword, Jung lived it.

After a heart attack in 1944 and the death of his mother, he spiraled into what he later called a confrontation with the unconscious. He pulled away from Freud’s camp, stopped publishing, and began journaling obsessively—recording dreams, drawing visions, and channeling his inner world into what would become The Red Book.

Jung wasn’t trying to come up with the world’s greatest psychology theory; he was trying to survive himself. Yet in doing so, he created a map of the inner world that gave rise to modern analytical psychology.

In hindsight, his soul-searching journey cracked open a whole new world of understanding the human psyche that the rest of us can now comprehend.

3. Viktor Frankl: Finding meaning in hell on Earth

Before he penned Man’s Search for Meaning, Austrian neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl was a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps. He lost everything: his family, his home, his career. But in the thick of that devastation, he discovered a truth that would shape generations:

Suffering without purpose destroys you. But with a “why,” you can survive almost any how.

That insight became logotherapy, a framework that helps people reclaim their power by choosing meaning over victimhood.

In the end, Viktor’s self-discovery gave millions of others a reason to keep living theirs.

4. Maya Angelou: Reclaiming her voice after prolonged stillness

At eight years old, Angelou stopped speaking after enduring sexual trauma in her childhood. The experience left her silent, without so much as a whisper out, for nearly five years.

The silent years were, in retrospect, her years of soul searching. During that time, she formed a deep understanding of human nature, injustice, and the power of words whenever she retreated into literature, poetry, and pure observation of others.

And when she finally found the courage to speak again, she just couldn’t stop. Words after words of wisdom came pouring out, culminating in I Know Why the Caged Birds Sing, arguably her greatest literary “roar.”

Maya’s story is a great reminder that conscious quietness, a facet of soul searching, can be a great form of healing and the birthplace of greatness.

5. Lisa Nichols: Remembering who she was fueled her rise to success

Before she became a bestselling author and global speaker, Lisa Nichols was a single mom with $11.42 to her name. Feeding her son meant scouring couch cushions for spare change. Her days were heavy. Her options were few. But her will? It’s unshakable.

That stretch of life—broke, uncertain, and worn down—became the furnace that forged her clarity.

Lisa soon revisited the sting of a teacher telling her she’d never be a writer. She worked through her fear of speaking in public. And over time, she peeled back every limiting story and built new ones, brick by brick, from resilience.

That commitment put her on the map for the birth of her company, Motivating the Masses, one of the first Black-woman-owned companies to go public. Today, she’s trained millions, published bestsellers, and stepped onto stages worldwide.

“Your purpose doesn’t need permission,” Lisa assures. “It just needs your commitment.”

Overcoming common challenges in the soul-searching process

Let’s be honest: soul searching isn’t all epiphanies and eucalyptus-scented baths.

It’s gritty. Unraveling. Unfiltered.

Why? Because you’re peeling off old layers of identity and beliefs that never belonged to you in the first place.

“When you start seeking, you bump up against resistance because you’re dismantling your present paradigm,” says Michael.

And this resistance tends to wear many hats:

Endless discomfort. Everything feels off. Your routines break, and your plans fall apart. That’s your old identity resisting change. Ride it out. It’s proof your inner shift is real, and it builds resilience, too.
Self-doubt. You’ll hear whispers like, “Who do you think you are?” That’s your brain clinging to the known. Acknowledge the fear, but choose differently. Don’t let it steer your course. And remember Jon’s words: “Self-doubt is a natural part of the growth process.”
Fear of the unknown. The middle space (after the old, before the new) feels shaky. Your nervous system hates it. But clarity lives here, so reframe fear as momentum. As Michael says, “Embracing uncertainty is essential. It’s where true transformation occurs.”
Identity crisis. When your labels fall away, you’re left asking, “Who am I?” That confusion? It’s the cocoon phase before a new self emerges.
Emotional overwhelm. Grief, rage, regret… they all tend to surface in the thick of self-discovery. Don’t turn away from them. Let them move through you instead of managing you.
Social isolation. You might feel out of sync with your usual crew. That’s okay. Solitude is a sacred space where you can tune into yourself more clearly.
Information overload. The Internet is shouting advice from every angle. Cut the noise. Choose two sources max—a podcast and a book, or a book and a trusted friend—then check in with what feels true.

Whenever it gets too much or too dark, remind yourself that you’re probably doing it right. So keep calm and march on.

Your purpose doesn’t need permission. It just needs your commitment.
— Lisa Nichols, motivational speaker, bestselling author, and trainer of Mindvalley’s Speak and Inspire program

Bonus: 21 soul-searching questions to ask yourself

Before personal growth became a hashtag, mythologist and writer Joseph Campbell studied legends across cultures and noticed something wild: they all followed the same arc. He called it the hero’s journey.

And if you’re deep in soul searching, you’re already on it.

To keep moving forward, pull on the threads that unravel your old self. And that starts with leveling up your self-inquiry.

Here’s a roadmap for your heroic path: seven stages, three questions each.