Christoffel G. Sneijders MCC
Executive Coach MCC & Founder
3 Brains Intelligence Academy
Most people have watched somebody argue, convincingly, against the very thing they are about to do. It may be the colleague who says at lunch that working weekends achieves nothing, and then works them. It may be the manager who tells the team that perfect is the enemy of shipped, and then holds the release for one more pass. It may even be the executive who has just presented a slide on psychological safety, only to struggle to let a meeting end without correcting somebody.
Such situations are often explained as a matter of willpower. Yet that may be the least useful place to put them, because when people decide they are the problem, they can spend their energy on shame rather than on meaningful change.
Christoffel G. Sneijders MCC has been exploring this difference through data gathered from behavioural assessments. In his thirties, he was a partner at Krauthammer, at the time a leading company in behavioural change, where he trained coaches, leaders, and salespeople every day. If he had been asked then whether pushing through everything was a good idea, he would have given a thoughtful answer about limits and recovery because that was what he was teaching. Then he experienced burnout himself, something he did not see coming. What affected him most was not simply the exhaustion, but the loss of control.
Two and a half years ago, he underwent open heart surgery, which permanently changed his belief that he was untouchable. Yet even after those experiences, behaviour did not always move at the same speed as belief. The contrast became clear in everyday life. After going to the gym in the morning, he could still spend two hours cleaning a house with a water hose. The belief had moved, but the doing carried on regardless.
This distinction sits at the centre of two assessments used in his work. The 3 Brains Dominance Test identifies which of the 3 Brains, Head, Heart or Gut, tends to lead when a person makes a decision. The 12 Protectors Assessment measures twelve automatic patterns that the 3 Brains hire to keep a person safe. These include patterns such as the Analyst, the Controller, and the Endurer.
The 12 Protectors Assessment does something particularly deliberate. For each of the twelve Protectors, it separately asks what a person does and what that person believes. Three questions measure behaviour, while one measures the belief underneath it. Across 832 complete profiles, this produces 9,984 paired readings. As a result, the distance between doing and believing can be measured directly rather than inferred by simply asking somebody whether they are being honest with themselves.
The findings reveal a significant gap. Behaviour ran above belief in 54.9 per cent of all readings, while in 31.2 per cent of readings, behaviour was a full point or more above belief. Using the instrument’s stricter flag, where behaviour and belief sit two points apart, 65.1 per cent of people carried at least one pattern that was running louder than the conviction underneath it. In 79 per cent of those flags, the direction was the same: the doing was ahead of the believing.
The ranking of the patterns also offers an important perspective. The Endurer sits at the top at plus 0.76. This is the pattern that says a person should keep going and rest when the thing is finished. It is followed by the Controller at plus 0.68, which holds that being in charge keeps a person safe. Next comes the Order Keeper at plus 0.66, which needs things to be in their proper place before it can settle. The Analyst follows at plus 0.63, reflecting the need for one more fact before deciding.
These four patterns span three different Brains, yet each is running harder than the belief that is supposed to be driving it. Only the Performer runs in the other direction, suggesting that most people would put on more of a show if they allowed themselves to do so.
However, the findings need to be interpreted carefully. A gap between behaviour and belief does not automatically mean that a person has a blind spot. Sometimes it may. But there are other explanations that matter just as much.
A different Protector may be driving the same behaviour. What looks like approval-seeking, for example, may actually be the Observer wanting clarity before committing. Behaviour can also become pure habit, repeated for so long that an active belief is no longer required to sustain it. In other situations, behaviour may serve a value rather than a fear. Attention to detail can be an expression of craft, while caring deeply for people can simply be care.
The software flags the first possibility, but the numbers alone cannot establish which explanation applies. A person reading their own results can therefore quickly turn a behavioural pattern into a negative judgment about themselves.
There is a simpler question that can sometimes provide more useful information than prolonged analysis: after doing the thing, how does the person feel?
Moving away from something a person is avoiding tends to leave them drained. Moving towards something they genuinely want tends to give energy back. The action may look identical from the outside, but the movement underneath it can be very different. Recognising which movement is taking place may be one of the most important parts of understanding the behaviour.
For organisations attempting to create change, the findings carry an important implication. Awareness by itself does not necessarily stop a pattern. A person can know perfectly well that they are checking a piece of work for the fourth time, watch themselves doing it, feel embarrassed while it happens, and still do it anyway. That can be an accurate description of an active pattern in a nervous system that has practised the behaviour for thirty years.
This creates a challenge for change programmes that focus heavily on explaining change more clearly. Such programmes are working on the believing. Yet the data suggests that in approximately two people out of three, the believing has already moved, while the doing carries on, because it stopped needing the belief a long time ago.
The question, therefore, is not simply whether people understand what needs to change. It is whether they can recognise what they continue to do after they have already stopped believing in it.
That question can be asked in the most ordinary circumstances, even at a kitchen table on a Tuesday: What am I still doing that I have already stopped believing in?
Whatever answer emerges usually has a history. A behaviour once had a reason. It may have protected something real at a time when that protection was needed. For that reason, the behaviour deserves respect even as it begins to leave.
The work is not necessarily about judging what remained. It is about noticing what stayed after the reason for it had gone.
A Note on the Data
The figures come from 832 complete 12 Protectors profiles collected between August 2025 and September 2026. Each profile scores the 12 Protectors using three behaviour questions and one belief question, producing 9,984 paired readings. A reading is formally flagged as non-congruent when behaviour and belief sit two or more points apart on the five-point scale.
The wider 3 Brains Dominance Test database contains 6,890 completions from 5,279 people across fourteen languages, collected between 2021 and September 2026. The sample is self-selected throughout, and the belief and behaviour scores are two self-reports rather than a self-report set against observed behaviour. Full workings are available on request.
© 2026 Christoffel G. Sneijders MCC · www.3brainsintelligence.com