Christoffel Sneijders is one of the coaches that we found this month and we did a little interview with him. He impressed us with his innovativeness and dedication.
He joined Krauthammer International (one of the world’s leading behavioral leadership and sales training institutes in Europe) over 25 years ago. After working there for over 10 years as a change manager and sales director, he decided to start his own company.
Today, he is an innovative, multidisciplinary expert in human behavior and change who motivates, inspires, and challenges people to transform. He has worked with over 10,000 people from all around the world. His versatile knowledge in Hypnotherapy, NLP, Coaching, psychotherapy, burnout, PTSD, anxiety, trauma, and grief is vital to helping his clients create a life and outcomes they long for.
His coaching approach mainly uses a method that he personally founded based on the theory of The 3 Brains, and it is now ICF certified. Here is what he said.
Meet Life Coach Christoffel Sneijders:
Name: Christoffel Sneijders
Pillar: The Mind
Who is this coach for: Anyone who wants to have a long lasting change and gain a deeper understanding of how to align their three brains to work together so they can more easily reach their goals.
How they can help: Through a coaching method he created called “The 3 Brains (Head, Heart, and Gut) Method,” as well as using various other tools, techniques, and methods like hypnotherapy and NLP, just to name a few.
First of all, how are you and your family doing in these Pandemic times?
Luckily we’re doing all good. Most of us have had some type of the coronavirus or lookalikes issues but not serious, but we all are in good and almost perfect health.
How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your clients? Did it affect you at all?
For me, personally, it was a massive change.
Before the pandemic I was living in Australia, having my own coaching and training business there.
I took the last plane from Australia to Europe to visit my family and girlfriend in Spain, and was not able to go back the next two years, meaning my training business in Australia, suffered a slow death.
I had to deal with change again, and this time a major one, which was to start from zero again, living in Spain, and not really able to speak Spanish.
I can tell you that having a business in Spain and not speaking the language was a real challenge.
For my clients, their main concern was the question “how to stay motivated in my kitchen what is now my home office and at the same time keep connected with my employees?”.
Then, they started to suffer the zoom fatigue, as they went from zoom meeting in zoom meeting and not having the relaxing time in between meetings they normally had in the office.
Stress increased, and their perception of quality of life was a question mark.
So the questions about “what do I really want to do with my life? Do I really like this job or should I quit?” immediately emerged.
What are the biggest lessons that you learned in this pandemic?
Training, or to say better delivering training, can be done extremely well via zoom and it changes the market from local to global.
Secondly we are extremely adaptable to new ways of working.
The Origin:
Tell us about you, your career, how you started with your coaching career?
A little bit more than 25 years ago I joined Krauthammer international, on that moment the number 1 in behavioral leadership and sales training in Europe.
After working there for 10 years and after doing a few interim job’s as change manager or sales director, I decided to start my own company.
Nowadays I am perceived as an innovative, multidisciplinary expert in human behavior and change who motivates, inspires and challenges people to transform.
I have worked with over 10,000 people all around the globe.
My passion, authenticity, empathy, and versatile knowledge in Hypnotherapy, NLP, Coaching, psychotherapy burnout, PTSD, anxiety, trauma, and grief are vital to helping my global clients create a life and outcomes they long for.
What was your biggest obstacle that you had to overcome in your life that made you who you are today?
I’m not really sure, what the biggest obstacle was, as I had (like everyone) some.
I am doubting if it was being dyslexic and called stupid by my language teachers, being bullied at school, or my emigration to Australia where I hit rockbottom after my divorce and loosing my income.
Having said that, I would say that being bullied had the most impact as it affected the following 25 years in having truly trustful relationships.
At the other hand, the aftermath of my immigration to Australia sparked a huge personal development as I started to work as a hypnotherapist, founded a clinical hypnotherapy school which ultimately led to the development of the 3 Brains Theory, writing 2 books about it and developing an ICF approved coaching training.
The Coaching Style:
How do you innovate with coaching your clients?
I am the founder of the 3 Brains (Head Heart and Gut) Coaching Certification Training.
The concept of 3 Brains is the biggest innovation, in my opinion, of the last decades, that we can use in coaching, counselling, and even therapy, to make our clients thrive again.
So, when I or anyone that has followed my training program, work with clients, the 3 Brains approach allow us to work on the deeper patterns that are responsible for the topics the clients want to work on and the goals they want to achieve.
We can really coach someone with guarantee of a more sustainable change.
As we all know, we can coach our clients on how to deal with conflicts, providing feedback or difficult discussions.
For me, if the client is willing, I love to assist them in overcoming the deep, rooted reasons why they have an issue with, whatever the topic is: dealing with conflicts, providing feedback, difficult discussions or changes they want to make, that sometimes they even know how to do it but paradoxically they do not do it yet.
We have all learnt how to deal with these topics in our upbringing according to how our parents dealt with them.
But what we learned and was really useful for that period of time, it is now 20, 30, or 40 years later, absolutely outdated and it is hard to change them as we belief this is who we are.
The moment the clients can learn more about themselves and learn how to change those coping mechanisms they are able to deal with the difficult situations in many more ways.
The 3 Brains approach helps really the client to increase their awareness on what is blocking them to change and what they really want, what they need and the resources they have to overcome the obstacles.
It is a fantastic way to empower people to really lead themselves and lead their lives for the better.
What’s unique about your coaching approach?
Two things stand out:
One, as being a therapist and coach, whatever the client brings I can help them out.
Second, The 3 Brains (Head, Heart and Gut) Coaching Methodology.
This way of coaching truly creates long lasting development or change for the client.
It makes their action plans going from their logical head to an embedded body and mind experience.
Just like we never forget how to ride a bike, the moment the client has a 3 Brains, body and mind learning experience, they will never forget it, as it becomes an automatic body mind habit.
What benefits do your clients get after working with you?
Long lasting change. No doubt about it.
Many of my clients have shared with me that they worked on their topics already for some time with other coaches or even therapists, without getting lasting success.
It has been after working with me when they have had a development they only had dreamed of.
Do you use any specific tools to be efficient with your clients?
I don’t like to fall in repetitions but yes, besides the 3 Brains coaching techniques, I am using techniques from NLP, conversational Erickssonian clinical hypnotherapy, constellations and of course, as a coach, I highlight the power of questions.
The Impact:
If you had a super megaphone that, when you speak into, the whole world will hear your message, what would you say?
Learn about the 3 Brains (Head, Heart and Gut Brains) theory!
The easiest way to do that is to read my book “Relationships? Which Brain Is Talking? The ultimate guide to happy, healthy and successful relationships”
In that way you are about to discover the missing link to human understanding and why people act and talk the way they do, and what is the key to health, happiness and success.
A little insight, why is it so important?
Reason 1: Our 3 Brains have a different view on the meaning of life, hence they will direct our live in different directions when only one of them is in charge.
Reason 2: Our 3 Brains pitifully do NOT speak the same language, meaning we, and our partner, family or colleagues could have the understanding they have to do something different but are unable to let the heat or gut understand that.
Reason 3: Decisions are mostly made by 1 or 2 Brains, not with the 3 of them aligned, meaning we, and our partner, family or colleagues could be barking up the wrong tree or be saying the wrong and maybe painful things whilst having the best intentions in mind.
Reason 4: When the 3 Brains do not communicate with each other, they stay reflexively loyal to the most dominant brain, and that could cause us pain, frustration, disappointment, and destructive or failed relationships.
What is the greatest lesson you have learned in your life?
Don’t trust what people say, trust in what you see people doing.
I have an attitude in life of trusting people when I meet them for the fist time, for me that is an extremely important value, having said that I always keep in mind that when I work with people, I trust their actions and not their words.
Your final thoughts?
When you read the newspapers, you would think that the current time, it’s not the best to live in, it is all about climate change, the big leave, AI that could take over many of our current jobs, and that the depression or burn out rates for the generation Z or Millennials is rather high.
But if you just think what we achieved the last 100 to 150 years, it is amazing and these are the best times ever.
Our average life span is increased with more than 30 years, literacy rate went up to more than 95% in most Western Countries, the average workweek was in 1900 on average 60 hours and holidays, antibiotics, telephone, television, airplanes did not exist.
So I truly belief life’s great and we have at our disposal all the solutions of the future if we as people and organizations, would only shift the way we are leading the world, moving from our egocentric gut brain to our compassionate heart brain or at least listen to both.
Where Can You Find Christoffel Sneijders?
If you liked this interview and if you would love to find what brain is your compass and how to bring more alignment between your 3 brains, go to www.3brainsacademy.com and see how Christoffel can help you.
If you like to capture a glimpse of his coaching, follow his Instagram, Twitter or Facebook accounts.
If you like to connect more personally with him, you can do that through LinkedIn or Facebook. It was an honor having this interview with him.
