Learning to Hear the Inner Voice

Unlocking Answers When You Don’t Know What to Do Next

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The unofficial motto of my life is: I’ll try anything twice.

Over the years, I’ve mostly lived up to those words. There are few paths, modalities, philosophies, and experiences I’ve left unexplored in my search to answer the Big Questions we all ask in our own ways—Who am I? Why am I here?

This has caused me no small amount of friction in my life, especially in friendships. I grew up in the church, attended a Christian university, and started deconstructing my faith in my early twenties.

I don’t mean deconstruction in a negative sense, but as an honest examination of whether my worldview was just a cultural artifact of when, where, and to whom I was born, or if it was my own. I had to discover what I knew instead of simply believed because someone once told me I should.

I was like that kid who couldn’t help but take apart his Nintendo to see what it looked like on the inside and how it worked even if I’d likely not be able to put it all back together again.

Friends often warned me I was going too far. The stakes were too high, they said, (eternity itself!) to ask questions and risk being wrong.

To me, the stakes were too high not to ask questions. I didn’t understand why those who seemed so concerned about the next life seemed to care the least about this one, or why they pretended to have life figured out when they were just as miserable as everyone else. Sometimes, they were more so because they felt a lot of guilt for never measuring up.

They had it backwards, I suspected. The truth was, I hadn’t gone too far. If anything, I hadn’t gone nearly far enough.

I dutifully listened to their concerns, but somewhere in the background of life there was another Voice I was hearing. It was like a faint signal in the background noise of life. An Inner Voice that was whispering, “This is the way. Walk here.”

You can call that Inner Voice by many names—spirit, intuition, inner guidance—but the label matters very little. Hearing it and acting on it is what matters, and that is what I began to do.

The process wasn’t graceful. I was like a child learning to walk who starts off on his belly, builds enough strength to push to his knees, and eventually manages to wobble across the room. Eventually, I found myself running (and often falling, too) as I learned to trust the Voice and have the courage to follow it no matter where it led.

Recently, a friend and I were talking about what it means to live in what feels like a post-truth world. How can we navigate life when it feels like we’re always crossing uncharted waters?

I told him there are three guiding principles that I’m returning these days:

1. I believe being an explorer instead of a seeker is the most helpful approach to life. Explorers see a different world than seekers do, and that perspective shift is everything, especially if you’re willing to trust your curiosity to be a reliable North Star.

2. Truth—the capital “T” kind—isn’t a fragile thing. It can withstand even the heaviest questions, defiant challenges, and midnight-hour doubts. Truth, like the sun, is always shining. It’s simply we who cannot see it because it’s covered up or we’re in the dark.

3. More important than either of those, though, is this: living a deeply purposeful and true life comes down to hearing The Inner Voice and then acting on what it says. Of all the things I would tell my younger self if I could time travel, it would be this. At some point, you must stop looking to others to tell you who to be or what to do. The answers you seek, ultimately, are within.

This is really the Pathless Path every spiritual tradition points to in different ways. It’s an invitation to being and inspired doing. To knowing and creating. All of the maps, modalities, and practices I’ve ever explored can be distilled into these two invitations from the Inner Voice:

Be still and know. In your knowing, create.

To be still and know means to get out of the mind. No one ever thought their way to peace, purpose, or freedom. This is why so many traditions begin by encouraging us to get out of our heads and into the Now, which is the only moment we can ever know the essential truth of who and what we are.

It’s in this clear stillness and knowing that the Inner Voice speaks to those who are attentive. When you hear the guidance, if you dare, you can then act on it.

John the Apostle once wrote, “You don’t need anyone to teach you. The spirit [the Voice] that lives inside you will teach you everything you need to know.”¹ I’ve found this to be true. Other traditions, too, teach that the guidance you seek isn’t out there. It’s already within you, and you can learn to hear, trust, and act on that Voice.

In my experience, this is a truth like gravity that no one culture or creed can lay claim to. It is everyone’s birthright, including yours. It’s simply a matter of getting out of your head and into the Now so you can hear.

If you only discover how to live your life from this place of knowing, everything else is, in some ways, extra credit. Nothing else could be more important because from it flows guidance for everything else.

It’s become so important to me that nearly my entire professional practice is now devoted to teaching others how to access their Inner Voice. The world as we’ve known it is changing because it must, and we want it to change. Navigating the future will require being able to hear the deeper guidance within.

How do you begin? I wrote about it the first steps in an essay titled What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do Next.

If you would like to go a step further, I want to invite you to check out Unlocking Intuition, a two-part virtual class we hosted for our community recently on how to get out of your head and more aligned with your intuition.

Reading an article is fine, practicing with others is even better. Regardless of how you do it, I encourage you today to slow down, listen for the Voice, and see what happens when you begin to follow it.

Much love,

Kevin Kaiser

1. From the Bible, 1 John 2:27 (paraphrased)