Mindbeat is privileged to offer a global network of expert coaches. In the first of a new series of interviews to introduce you to our much-loved coaching personalities, Mike Fletcher talks tomatoes, training and playing the accordion with Søren Holm, who lives in Sweden.
Søren Holm brightened my day even before he began to speak. Admitting him to our Zoom call, the 66-year-old former vice-president of the International Coaching Federation (ICF) appeared on my computer screen wearing a fuchsia-coloured shirt and holding a beautifully crafted accordion.
“I’ve been trying to learn how to play this instrument ever since my wife bought it for me 15 years ago,” he confesses. “I keep picking it up, learning a bit but then leaving it alone for too long so I have to start over.”
It seems the business of coaching leaves little time for accordion playing. After our chat, Søren will need to dive straight onto another Zoom call with a new client who wants him to develop a career progression programme for future female leaders. He then has a one-to-one session with a female mobile communications executive based in Iraq.
“It’s a huge privilege to coach people of different nationalities, backgrounds and cultural characteristics,” Søren says. “My background is in behavioural science, so understanding different cultural traits and seeing how different people learn and grow is fascinating to me.
“I once had a spate of coaching candidates from The Netherlands, who are thought of here in Sweden as being very direct and outspoken. I found out through our coaching sessions that they felt pressure in business to live up to this national stereotype of being forthright, when in fact many of them were much more introverted.”
Søren’s coaching strengths
Søren’s coaching strengths lie in his ability to listen, ask considered questions and provide the much-needed space required for candidates to develop new thinking that leads to growth.
He admits he’s never had a coaching specialism but in an increasingly noisy world, his calm and amiable style must be a welcome breather from the turmoil of the corporate workplace for any level of employee.
“The whole point of coaching is to help someone move in the direction they want to go. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that,” he says. “I talk with people on an equal footing, which is rare in any profession as usually there’s one person who’s the expert or the authority. I listen, we talk and I contribute perspectives that help shape their thinking.
“It’s not about getting them to move – it’s about helping them figure out where they’d like to get to, what’s preventing them from getting there and how you navigate the roadblocks.”
Søren now lives 100 km from Stockholm but grew up in Denmark and spent three formative teenage years living in the US. He coaches in Danish, Swedish and English but can also get by speaking in German, Spanish and French.
By his admittance, he’s ‘been around the coaching industry a long time’. In fact, he’s believed to have been one of the first professional coaches to have operated from the Nordic region – although he’s quick to acknowledge that it’s a claim he finds hard to substantiate.
He did however help to launch the ICF’s Nordic Chapter and has served for five years on the ICF global board, helping to drive the organisation’s growth throughout Europe. In 2022, he was inducted into the ICF’s Circle of Distinction.
Early adopter
Søren was almost certainly the ICF’s first Nordic member though and considers himself a pro-typical early adopter of not only the discipline of coaching but most things in life.
“I’m not sensible enough to wait for second or even third generations of technology. I have to be among the first to get my hands on the latest Apple product or experiment with new gadgets,” he says with a laugh.
“I like to keep up with new thinking in behavioural science too. The last 15-20 years of data-driven research into personalities is so different from the traditional Jung and Freud ideology taught in the early Eighties. I subscribe to newsletters and extracts of research papers and receive a bunch every day that I read and find interesting. Some people stop learning as soon as they leave school. I just love learning and understanding new things.”
Søren rarely travels to coach in person these days, partly because he’s grown more conscious of his carbon footprint and ‘no longer wishes to fly’.
Virtual coaching suits him anyhow. His original training to qualify as a coach was conducted over the phone with a US company, long before video conferencing came along.
“Through Mindbeat, I can now meet candidates across the globe from the comfort of my own home. I do one-to-ones and group sessions involving line managers and team leaders so that we can work through appraisals and everyone from an organisation has bought into a thoroughly planned out process,” he says. “The advantages to meeting and talking to people face-to-face are so small that they’re outweighed by the practicalities of being able to coach and receive coaching online from wherever you are in the world.”
In theory, the absence of travel that comes with virtual coaching should afford Søren at least evenings and weekends to continue teaching himself the accordion. I get the impression though that he prefers to spend quality time with his grandchild as well as outside with his keen gardener wife, tending to his tomato plants.
“When I finally retire, I’d like to grow tomatoes semi-professionally,” he says. “It’s the visual appeal of all the different colours, sizes and shapes – you just can’t buy anything like organically grown tomatoes in the supermarket and they certainly don’t taste the same.”
Still, just as learning and growth development occur over time with the right coaching programme, the same commitment and patience that Søren already shows his tomato plants will see him one day become an accomplished accordion player, I’m sure of it.
Perhaps the next time we meet online, he may even play me something – I do hope so.