Personal Wellness Development - SJ

There is something interesting about being away from your normal environment….
You suddenly notice parts of yourself that were almost invisible at home.

The things you automatically do.
The things you avoid.
How you talk to people.
How quickly you make decisions.
Whether you can sit still.
Whether you need to know what’s happening next.
Whether you feel comfortable not being in control.

A different environment changes the information your nervous system is receiving. And when the environment changes, sometimes your behaviour changes with it.

That’s why I don’t think understanding yourself is simply sitting down and asking, “Who am I?”
I think you have to watch yourself. Watch what happens when plans change.
Watch what happens when someone disagrees with you.
Watch what happens when you don’t know what comes next.
Watch what happens when you have nothing to achieve for a few hours.
Watch what happens when someone doesn’t need anything from you.

Those moments are incredibly revealing.

Because your automatic behaviour often tells you something your conscious mind hasn’t yet put into words. Maybe you discover that you don’t actually need control.
You need certainty.
Maybe you don’t actually hate confrontation. You hate the possibility of losing connection. Maybe you aren’t addicted to achievement.
You have simply learned to feel valuable when you’re achieving something.

This is the part of Human Architecture that interests me most.
Not trying to categorise people.

Understanding the relationship between their experiences, their predictions, their nervous system and their behaviour.

Because once you understand that relationship, you can start making choices that aren’t simply repetitions of what your system already knows.
And that can happen anywhere…….

Even in Amsterdam, walking through a city you’ve visited before and suddenly noticing something about yourself that you couldn’t see while everything was familiar…..

Sometimes you don’t need a new life…..

You need a different perspective on the one you’re already living.

- Sjoerd

“What you aren’t changing, you’re choosing.”

06:30 on a Saturday morning.
I’m on a train, heading to AMS to help my youngest brother renovate his house…..

And somewhere between the bottle of water (not a coffee drinker…), the tired eyes and wondering why we voluntarily do these things on our weekends….. 🤪 I was thinking about something I see in coaching all the time.

We are very good at believing that our behaviour tells us who we are.
“I’m just not disciplined.”
“I’m a workaholic.”
“I’m terrible at slowing down.”
“I’m a people pleaser.”
“I’m just an anxious person.”
But behaviour doesn’t necessarily tell you who you are……..It tells you how your system has learned to operate.

Sometimes you work hard because you love what you’re building.
Sometimes you work hard because stopping makes you uncomfortable.
Sometimes you help someone because you genuinely want to.
Sometimes you help because being needed has become an important part of how you experience your own value.

The behaviour can look exactly the same from the outside…..The architecture underneath it can be completely different.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t spend much time judging behaviour in my coaching. I’m much more interested in understanding it.
Why did you do that?
What were you expecting to happen?
What did you feel?
What did the behaviour give you?
What did it help you avoid?
And perhaps most importantly:
Is this still serving the person you are becoming?

Because sometimes a behaviour that once helped you navigate life becomes the thing that quietly limits it. And you don’t need to get rid of it. You need to understand it well enough to choose when you use it.

Even getting on a train at 06:30 on a Saturday.
Sometimes helping your brother renovate his house is simply helping your brother. And sometimes it’s worth noticing why you find it so difficult to say no.

That’s the difference between judging yourself and understanding yourself.

- Sjoerd

“What you aren’t changing, you’re choosing.”

Your personality may be partly learned…
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out who we are.
Am I introverted?
Am I ambitious?
Am I sensitive?
Am I a perfectionist?
Am I independent?
Am I someone who needs control?
Personality can be useful for describing patterns.

But there is a question I find much more interesting: How much of what I call my personality is actually something I learned…..?

Maybe you aren’t naturally someone who needs to control everything.
Maybe controlling things became a reliable way of reducing uncertainty.
Maybe you aren’t naturally “bad with emotions.”
Maybe you learned that emotions were inconvenient, unsafe or something you had to handle alone.
Maybe you aren’t naturally extremely ambitious.
Maybe achievement became one of the strongest ways you learned to experience approval, safety or worth.

This doesn’t mean personality isn’t real……
It means that the person you experience as “me” has been shaped by an enormous amount of learning. And once you understand that, you can start separating two things that are often confused.

Who I am. And, how I learned to operate….
That distinction can be liberating.
Because you don’t have to reject yourself to change.

You don’t have to become less ambitious because your ambition may have an old story underneath it.
You don’t have to stop being independent because independence once protected you.
You simply become curious about whether you are still choosing these behaviours.
Or whether they have become automatic responses to predictions you learned a long time ago.

Human Behaviour Design isn’t about finding the “real you” hidden underneath everything. It’s about understanding the system that created the person you currently experience as you. And then asking a much more interesting question:

Does the way I operate still fit the life I am trying to build? Because something can be perfectly understandable and still be ready to change.

- Sjoerd

“What you aren’t changing, you’re choosing.”

The person you are at work is still you….

There is something I find fascinating about human behaviour.

You can be incredibly calm in the boardroom and completely irrational when someone you love doesn’t answer your message.

You can make difficult decisions worth millions of euros and then spend two hours wondering whether someone is disappointed in you.

You can lead hundreds of people with confidence and still struggle to tell one person what you actually need.

We often experience these contradictions as evidence that something is wrong with us.
I see them as information.

Your behaviour is highly dependent on the context your nervous system believes it is in.
The same person can respond completely differently to two situations because the predictions are different.

At work, you may predict competence, control and respect.
In an intimate relationship, you may predict rejection, abandonment or conflict…… So your behaviour changes.
Not because you suddenly became a different person. Because your system is responding to a different perceived environment.
This is an important part of Human Behaviour Design.

If you only look at behaviour, you might conclude that someone is confident in one situation and insecure in another.
If you look at the architecture, you become curious about what each environment represents to them.
What does this situation predict?
What does that relationship predict?
What is at stake?
What has this person learned before?
And suddenly the contradiction starts to make sense.
You don’t have multiple personalities.
You have a nervous system adapting to different predictions.

That is useful information….!!!

Because once you understand where your behaviour changes, you can start discovering what your system believes is different about those situations.And that may tell you far more about yourself than any personality test ever could.

- Sjoerd

“What you aren’t changing, you’re choosing.”

You did not consciously design yourself….
You probably didn’t consciously decide to become the person you are today.
You didn’t sit down at six years old and decide, “From now on, I will never ask anyone for help.”
You didn’t decide, “I am going to become a perfectionist.”
You didn’t choose, “My worth will depend on how much I achieve.”
You didn’t make a conscious decision to become uncomfortable with conflict, addicted to productivity, afraid of failure or obsessed with getting everything right.

And yet…….somehow…..those patterns can become part of your adult life.

This is what makes human behaviour so fascinating.

Your system is constantly learning from experience long before you have the ability to consciously analyse what is happening.
Something happens.
Your nervous system responds.
It notices what follows.
It updates its expectations.
Then, when something similar happens again, it uses what it learned before to decide how to respond.

Do that enough times and you have a pattern.
Do it for long enough and the pattern can become automatic.
Do it across enough areas of your life and you may eventually call it your personality.
“I’m just like this.”

Maybe…….
Or maybe you learned to be like this.

That distinction matters. Because if something was learned, it can potentially be updated.

Not through positive thinking.
Not by pretending the past didn’t happen.
And not by simply demanding that you behave differently.
Through experience….!

You give your nervous system new evidence.
You speak up and discover that the relationship survives.
You make a mistake and discover that you are still respected.
You rest and discover that nothing falls apart.
You ask for help and discover that dependence doesn’t make you weak.

Slowly, the prediction can change. And when the prediction changes, behaviour doesn’t always have to be forced anymore.

This is one of the reasons I don’t think the most useful question is, What’s wrong with me?
A much better question is, What did I learn that makes me behave this way?

Because the answer may tell you far more about where you came from than about who you actually have to become.

- Sjoerd

“What you aren’t changing, you’re choosing.”

Your behaviour has a design….
We tend to talk about human behaviour as if it is mostly a collection of choices.

You choose to procrastinate.
You choose to overthink.
You choose to work too much.
You choose to avoid the conversation.
You choose to stay in the relationship.
You choose to keep scrolling even though you told yourself you would stop.

There is truth in that…..But it leaves out the most interesting part.

Before a behaviour becomes a choice, there is a system underneath it.
Your biology.
Your experiences.
Your nervous system.
The patterns you have learned.
The predictions your brain makes.
And the identity you have built around all of it.

That is what I mean when I talk about Human Behaviour Design.

You are not a blank slate making completely independent decisions in every moment.
You are a biological system that has been learning since the beginning of your life.

Experience becomes information.
Information becomes learning.
Learning shapes prediction.
Prediction influences your response.
Repeated responses become patterns.
Patterns can become automatic.
And eventually, those patterns can become so familiar that you experience them as “just who I am.”

That is why two people can be given the same opportunity and respond completely differently.

One sees possibility.
The other sees risk.

One experiences feedback as useful information.
The other experiences it as rejection.

One can rest without thinking twice.
The other feels guilty within ten minutes.

Neither necessarily has the “right mindset.” Their systems have simply learned different things. And this is where understanding yourself becomes useful.

Instead of asking only, Why did I choose this?

You can start asking, What had my system learned that made this choice make sense?

That question doesn’t remove responsibility.
It gives you a better starting point for it.

Because if you understand the design behind your behaviour, you can finally start deciding which parts of that design still belong in your life…..

- Sjoerd

“What you aren’t changing, you’re choosing.”

We often approach our patterns as if they are enemies.

Stop procrastinating.
Stop overthinking.
Stop people pleasing.
Stop getting angry.
Stop caring what people think.
Stop being afraid.
But your nervous system doesn’t understand the word “stop” very well.

It understands prediction.
It understands experience.
It understands patterns.

So when you try to remove a behaviour without understanding what created it, you are often fighting the final expression of a much larger system.

Imagine someone who constantly seeks reassurance.
You could tell them to become more confident. But perhaps the deeper pattern is that uncertainty has become difficult for their nervous system to tolerate.

You could tell someone to stop avoiding difficult conversations. But perhaps their system predicts that confrontation will threaten connection.

You could tell someone to stop working so much. But perhaps their nervous system has learned that achievement is what creates safety, approval or worth.

Now the behaviour makes sense. And once it makes sense, you can work with it.

You can begin asking what the nervous system needs to learn differently.
That might mean experiencing uncertainty without immediately resolving it.

Speaking honestly and discovering that connection survives.

Resting and discovering that nothing falls apart.

Making a mistake and discovering that your identity remains intact.

This is how I think about change.

Not as a battle between the person you are and the person you want to become. But as a learning process.

Your nervous system learned the old pattern through experience. It can learn something new through experience too.

So the next time you notice a behaviour you don’t like, try not to attack it immediately.

Ask it a better question, What are you trying to protect me from?
You may find that your pattern isn’t your enemy.

It is an old protection mechanism that hasn’t yet learned that your circumstances have changed.

And that is a very different problem to solve.

- Sjoerd

“What you aren’t changing, you’re choosing.”

Sometimes the person who looks the most disciplined from the outside is actually the person who is struggling the most on the inside.

They never miss a workout.
They answer every message.
They work late.
They keep their promises.
They keep pushing when everyone else has stopped.
And we call that discipline……

But what if some of it isn’t discipline at all?
What if stopping feels unsafe?
What if being productive is how they manage anxiety?
What if achievement has become the way they regulate their sense of worth?
What if “I can always handle more” isn’t strength, but a prediction that says, “If I stop, something bad will happen”?
This is why I am careful with labels…..

A behaviour can look incredibly healthy while being driven by a very unhealthy prediction. And the opposite can also be true.
Someone who appears unmotivated may not lack ambition. They may be protecting themselves from the possibility of failing at something that matters deeply to them. The behaviour alone doesn’t tell you enough.

You have to understand the system producing it…..

So if you are someone who prides yourself on being disciplined, capable and reliable, I would ask you something slightly uncomfortable:
Can you choose to stop?
Can you rest without feeling guilty?
Can you disappoint someone without immediately trying to repair it?
Can you make a mistake without questioning your worth?
Can you do nothing productive and still feel like you are enough?

Because real freedom isn’t being able to push yourself endlessly…. It’s being able to choose when to push and when not to.

That distinction is easy to miss when your adaptations are being rewarded by the world.

- Sjoerd

“What you aren’t changing, you’re choosing.”

Here’s a slightly uncomfortable exercise…..

Look at your life and ask yourself:
“Which parts of my current life are actually chosen, and which parts have simply become familiar?”

Your calendar is a good place to start.
What fills most of your week?
Work.
Family.
Training.
Friends.
Your phone.
Meetings.
Obligations.
Time alone.

Then look at your behaviour inside those things.
Where do you feel energised?
Where do you feel constantly tense?
Where are you saying yes while secretly wishing you could say no?
Where are you working because you genuinely want to, and where are you working because stopping makes you uncomfortable?
Where are you maintaining a relationship because it matters to you, and where are you maintaining it because changing it feels frightening?
Where are you chasing something because you want it, and where are you chasing it because you believe you need it to prove something about yourself?

Don’t immediately change anything….Just notice.

This is one of the things I find fascinating about human behaviour.

We can spend years building a life around predictions we don’t consciously remember making.
“If I work hard enough, I’ll be safe.”
“If everyone is happy with me, I’ll belong.”
“If I stay in control, nothing can surprise me.”
“If I achieve enough, I’ll finally feel like I’m enough.”

And eventually, those predictions stop feeling like predictions. They start feeling like reality.

So your homework is simple…..

Look at your life as if you were an outside observer.

Then ask, What am I doing because I genuinely choose it?” And: “What am I doing because some part of me believes I have to?”

You don’t need to change the answer today. Awareness is enough. Because you cannot consciously choose a life you haven’t first learned to see clearly.

- Sjoerd

“What you aren’t changing, you’re choosing.”

Sunday is a good day to stop trying to improve yourself for a moment and simply observe yourself.

Not your goals.
Not your productivity.
Not whether you had a “good” or “bad” week.
Your patterns…..

Think back over the last seven days and find one moment where you behaved in a way you didn’t really understand.

Maybe you avoided something you knew mattered.
Maybe you became irritated with someone you care about.
Maybe you worked when you were exhausted.
Maybe you said yes when you wanted to say no.
Maybe you kept yourself busy when you actually needed to slow down.

Don’t judge the behaviour. Audit it….

What happened immediately before?
What did you feel in your body?
What did you start thinking?
What did you predict was going to happen?
What did the behaviour give you immediately afterwards?

Relief?
Control?
Approval?
Distance?
Certainty?
Avoiding discomfort?
This isn’t about finding an excuse for what you did.

It’s about collecting information.

Because your behaviour leaves clues about what your nervous system has learned to expect. And you don’t need to analyse your entire childhood to start understanding yourself.

Sometimes one ordinary moment is enough.

So here’s your completely unofficial Sunday homework.

Find one behaviour from the past week that you don’t fully understand.
Don’t try to change it today. Just become curious about it.

“What was my system trying to accomplish?”

You may discover that the behaviour you wanted to get rid of was actually doing a very good job at something.

The question is whether that something is still necessary.

- Sjoerd

“What you aren’t changing, you’re choosing.”