Why a Novel, and Not a Test
A report tells you how you work; a novel shows you a character working. Pascal Stifani on why SoulPrint chose a story rather than one more personality test.
When I describe SoulPrint to someone, I often begin with this sentence:
Imagine a story whose main character carries your first name and looks strangely like you.
Some sides of that character will please you. Others will irritate you, sometimes a great deal. You will watch them talk with their family, deal with their colleagues, chase what they want, react under pressure, or make decisions that feel familiar. Through them, you can watch your own way of working from the outside.
That is the central idea of SoulPrint: to create a mirror novel that lets a person understand themselves better through a character drawn from them.
Choosing a novel was deliberate. I could have built one more personality test, produced a report, or laid out a series of results with explanations attached. I know those formats well, and I use them in my professional work. They are very useful. Their effectiveness simply depends on the context and on the frame of mind of the person receiving them.
A report gets straight to the point
In my work as a personal branding consultant, I regularly use reports to present an analysis of archetypes to professional clients. Those clients are after precise information. They want to understand quickly what is working, identify what could change, and then take the necessary steps.
In that context, a report is an excellent instrument. It structures the information, gets straight to the point, and shortens the distance between analysis and decision. Someone ready to look at their own behaviour and act on it can take a direct observation, hold it against their experience, and begin working with it.
So there was never a precise moment when I decided reports had become useless. They keep all their value in the right place. SoulPrint answers a different situation.
Most people open the result of a test with a very natural reflex: they judge what they read.
“Yes, that is me.”
“No, that does not sound like me.”
“I knew that already.”
The information lands in the mind. The person immediately compares it with the picture they already hold of themselves. They accept it or they reject it. Once that verdict is formed, the loop can close. The reading may have confirmed something, without creating a realisation deep enough to change how they see themselves or how they act.
Understanding a piece of information about yourself and absorbing it are two different experiences.
We already have too much information about ourselves
The internet gives us access to an almost unlimited amount of information. Within minutes, we can take several tests, read profile descriptions, watch videos about psychology, compare methods, and ask an artificial intelligence to explain our own behaviour to us.
Our main problem rarely looks like a lack of information. Our attention is saturated.
A new analysis can feed the brain for a few moments, then join all the others. It becomes one more piece of data in a mental system that is already full. For a realisation to settle, you sometimes have to slow down, step out of the reflex of evaluation, and create a space in which the information can be felt.
A novel creates that space.
It asks for time. It sets up a situation, lets an interaction play out, and allows the consequences of a behaviour to appear. The reader follows a character before drawing a conclusion. They meet their qualities, their contradictions, and their blind spots inside the movement of a story.
That slowness has a purpose. It lets understanding arrive gently.
A story lowers your guard
A report says, directly: “This is how you work.”
A story shows a character working.
The difference changes the experience of reading entirely. Faced with a statement about ourselves, we can defend ourselves, argue with the word that was chosen, or look for an exception. Faced with a scene, we watch. We watch the character speak, hesitate, love, avoid, decide, or get it wrong. We can feel tenderness for them, be annoyed by their reaction, or recognise a situation we have already lived through.
A story engages the emotions as much as the reasoning. It takes the reader by the hand and lets them discover, step by step, what the story is saying about them. The realisation then comes from recognition: “I know that reaction. I would probably have done the same thing.”
SoulPrint uses this capacity of the novel to open another way of looking at oneself. The reader keeps their own pace and their own freedom of interpretation. They can close the book, go back to a scene, or let an idea settle. Nobody asks them to justify themselves.
The first signal came from Virgile
The first person to read a SoulPrint story written from his own profile is called Virgile. He is an entrepreneur who specialises in copywriting, and I had met him shortly before through a mutual friend.
We were simply talking about the project. I offered him a first attempt, built from my analysis of his archetypes and from other elements that belong to the SoulPrint method. I then used artificial intelligence to turn that reading into a story about the way he lives relationships and love.
Virgile passed the text to his partner. She recognised her husband in it.
Her reaction stayed with me because it brought an outside view. Virgile could recognise himself in the story, with everything subjective that such a reading involves. The fact that his partner recognised his way of being as well gave the result another weight. Virgile then said to me: “You are onto something.”
That response was one of the first strong signals of what SoulPrint could become. It pushed me to put far more time and energy into the project.
It also let me understand more precisely the part artificial intelligence could play. A human being usually observes a person from one privileged position: that of a friend, a parent, a partner, a colleague, or a professional. Each of them sees a different part.
Artificial intelligence can hold several angles at once, cross-reference what it is given, and look for the coherence between them. It can then help turn that reading into situations, into relationships, into a story. That capacity offers a wider view of the person being observed.
The technology provides a new instrument for creation and analysis here. The quality of SoulPrint depends on the method that guides that instrument, on the material it works from, and on the way the story is built.
Seeing yourself in the third person
My background as a coach, a therapist, a master practitioner and a master trainer in neuro-linguistic programming has often led me to use a very simple change of viewpoint.
When a person stays locked inside a situation, you can ask them to imagine a colleague behaving in exactly the same way. What would they think of that person? How would they react? What advice would they give?
The answer often becomes clearer the moment the person mentally steps out of the scene and looks at it from outside. They sometimes apply to others a reading they cannot yet apply to themselves.
SoulPrint turns that principle into a narrative experience. The reader watches a character who resembles them, without directly bearing the consequences of what happens in the story. That distance lets them look differently at behaviour that would be harder to examine in the first person.
The character may strike them as admirable in one scene and irritating in the next. That alternation matters. Knowing yourself means seeing what you love in yourself as much as the parts that sometimes make life complicated.
The book offers enough distance to look, and enough closeness to recognise yourself.
A space without judgement
I want SoulPrint to remain a space for personal observation, with no verdict laid on the reader.
A test generally sorts answers and returns a profile. Working with a human being can go further, especially when someone wants to be challenged and to work actively on themselves. Coaching and therapy have immense value. Yet a large part of the population has never had a single session, by choice, for lack of access, or simply because they feel no need for one.
A book creates another way in. It can be opened at home, on the train, or during a quiet moment. It asks for no immediate answer. It does not sit watching the reader for a reaction. It leaves them all the room they need to recognise what speaks to them and to leave the rest aside.
That is what I want to offer: a stretch of time in which a person can meet the one who will keep them company all their life, themselves.
Personal awareness often begins with an honest observation. It can then help you know yourself better, understand yourself, love yourself, and grow alongside yourself.
Real technology, no mysticism
I sometimes speak of the “magic” of SoulPrint. I use that word to describe the astonishment a story can produce when it seems to know its reader intimately.
That magic rests on a new technology, a method of analysis, and a piece of narrative craft. It rests on no mystical or esoteric promise. SoulPrint is not here to offer spiritual elevation or to reveal a hidden truth about anyone.
The project uses what artificial intelligence makes possible today to create a reading experience written for one person. The technology can bring elements together, vary the points of view, and support the construction of a coherent story. The SoulPrint method frames that work so it produces a story that speaks to one particular person.
I also refuse to let the project become one more personality test. Its ambition lies in what is lived during the reading, not in a label or a score.
What SoulPrint is for
Social media exposes us every day to the lives, the work, the bodies, and the successes of people all over the world. Once, our comparisons were more limited to the people in our family, our neighbourhood, our village, or our town. Today they can be constant and global.
Conversations about mental health and wellbeing have grown in that context. We have plenty of instruments for comparing ourselves with others, and far too few moments for looking at ourselves calmly.
SoulPrint wants to create one of those moments.
My ambition as a founder meets my experience as a coach and therapist here: to let as many people as possible gain a little personal awareness. The mirror novel makes that accessible in a familiar form. The reader enters a story. They meet a character. Then, scene after scene, they realise they are also meeting themselves.
SoulPrint is a story whose main character carries your first name, resembles you, and lets you watch yourself in the third person. You may love some of their reactions, be annoyed by others, and recognise in their experiences a part of your own life.
The book pronounces no verdict. It holds up a narrative mirror and gives you the time to look.