In this perceptive episode, Peter Sorgenfrei, CEO and Founder Coach of Sorgenfrei ApS, shares how he brings valuable insights to discussions on leadership, team building, and strategic planning and helps CEOs and Founders lead happier, healthier, and more productive lives as they build their companies.
You will discover:
– How we can lose ourselves as our company grows
– Why “work-life balance” is a myth and what we should pursue instead
– The biggest challenge most leadership teams are facing right now
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And here with me today is the one and only Peter Sorgenfrei. He helps CEOs and founders develop themselves and their teams and grow their companies through his coaching, he started and built companies in the US, the UK, and Denmark as founder and CEO for the past 15 years, he can contribute valuable perspectives and factual insights to discussions emphasizing the significance of adopting a whole human approach, and this approach fosters success in professional development and ensures a harmonious balance between personal life, drawing from his extensive experience working with clients across diverse and international contexts, he can provide finished, firsthand accounts of successful strategies. He’s here with us today, Peter, I’m really excited to dive into this, because a lot of times we can see coaching through a very myopic lens, right? I have this problem. I want it solved, but I’ve found, as a coach, I think you’ll agree with this, that that’s very seldom the actual problem there’s there’s usually much bigger challenges that goes so. So welcome to the show. I’m wondering if we could start right out of the gate here, when do folks need coaching and why?
Peter Sorgenfrei
They probably needed it 6 to 12 months before they realized they needed and they need it when they start. In my case, my clients come to me when they start sort of having memory lapses or not sleeping well at night, or they’re short with their loved ones, things like that. That’s when they start thinking about, okay, am I doing things the right way, or do I need to change how I go about living this life? So that’s a that’s a tell tale sign.
Scott Ritzheimer
Which is fascinating, because a lot of us would go to the doctor right for something like that, but again, it’s a deeper issue. So I know your story is a big part of this, and you’ve had just significant amounts of success, but you had some challenges as well. Tell us a little bit about what you were doing before getting into coaching and how that led you to make the leap?
Peter Sorgenfrei
Yeah. So as you said, you know, I founded and led six companies across the last 15 years on three continents, hired hundreds of people, raised millions of dollars, and in 2019 it all came to an end because I got sick. I got so sick that I couldn’t get out of a bed in the morning, literally, physically incapacitated, and I’m old enough to fear like a brain tumor. But it turned out it was just a stress induced incapacitation. And so lying there and going through that, getting healthy from that, working with psychologists and regular doctors, I started thinking about, how did I get here? How did that end up happening to me? And I realized there was a need for this new whole human approach to dealing with being a founder and CEO, and that’s how I started my business.
Scott Ritzheimer
So with the folks that you’re working with, you identified a couple of the the symptoms, if you will. On the front end, what have you found are some of the biggest challenges that you’re helping them overcome?
Peter Sorgenfrei
Well, all the time, to your point, they come to me and they think they have a very specific business problem, right? I have trouble leading my team, or I’m dealing with a board that that I have some issues with, but it often turns out it’s not just a business problem. It’s also a personal problem. It’s around their habits, how they get about their life. It’s about their relationships at home. It’s about their their feelings of self worth. So the biggest thing I help them with is actually starting to become true to who they are. Many people start out building companies being very idealistic and being very passionate, but over time, they sort of move away from the person that they truly are and what makes them unique. And so what I do is essentially say, Okay, we are here now, but you want to be here. How do we get there without you losing sense of self and sense of accomplishment. So that’s the adjustments that I make with them.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. So tell what is the the whole human approach. What are the what are kind of the main tenants of that and and I’d love, also love to just kind of dive into, how do we start to apply some of this to our daily lives? So let’s just start with what’s the whole human approach, and how do you and how do you know if you need it?
Peter Sorgenfrei
So the whole human approach is just recognizing that you’re a whole human, right? You’re not the professional Scott or the personal Scott. You’re both, and oftentimes at the at the same time. You know, there’s no work life balance. It’s work life integration. So it’s those two sides, and then it’s strategies and tactics. So in order for you to get better, Scott, if you were one of my clients, I’d start looking at small things that we could adjust in your daily life that quickly would have an impact. That’s the tactics. And then we would look at strategies to say, okay, longer term, how do we make sure that you don’t get in trouble again? So it’s anything from. Um, habits, sleep, eat, exercise, that kind of stuff that we all know we need to do, but we don’t do it in the right way to things like, Okay, I want to be more assertive with my team. How do I do it in a way so that they don’t lose faith in me? Or I want to be less assertive with my team. How do I do that without losing sense of self?
Scott Ritzheimer
Right? Right? So, you know, getting enough sleep, exercise, eating, well, everyone knows that, right? Why is it that so few people do that?
Peter Sorgenfrei
It’s because there’s so many exciting things to do when you’re building a company, right? Either you’re in an excitement phase where you have a new product, service, you’re building on and you’re hiring a TV, you’re looking for investors, that’s all good stuff that you’re looking to do, and our brain is wired in a way that it just wants to keep performing. So shutting down and actually going to sleep, we don’t do what we do do is we go home, we eat a little bit late, probably not the right kind of food, then we binge some TV, then we go to bed exhausted, and then when we wake up in the morning, we’re not fully refreshed. So we know we need to do it. We don’t. What I do is, essentially, I force people to do the things that they know they need to do. So in some ways, I’m an accountability partner to them, but they need that external person kind of whipping them into shape.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, one of the things that I found that’s fascinating about particularly those areas, just kind of fundamental bidding blocks of really a good day, is that you can get by without them for quite a while, but once you adopt them, you feel the loss of them immediately, right? And it’s kind of bizarre, like you go to a point where it’s like, I don’t have time for that. I don’t have time to sleep seven hours a day. And then, if you can do that, you can follow someone’s advice, you can actually make the life changes to make that happen. You get to a place where you have less than that, like, how did I ever live without this? It’s a fascinating thing. So I want to shift gears slightly and look a little bit at some of the relational aspects of leading and being a team, because I had a founder who told me this once. He said, Scott, this, this whole like being a CEO thing would be a heck of a lot easier if it weren’t for all these people. Why is it that? Why is it that, particularly from that CEO or Executive seat, why is it that leading people is so challenging?
Peter Sorgenfrei
Well, a couple of things. The reason you became the CEO is because you like to get stuff done. You like to move in front of everybody. You’re not necessarily good at getting everybody with you on that bus, right? Typically, it’s type A personalities that excel at something, and that’s how they end up becoming the CEO. So when you say the trouble with leading is it involves people. It’s a very common feeling that people have. I think the hard part is you have super high expectations of yourself, and naturally you’ll have high expectations of those around you, but you’re missing a key component, and that’s communications. Many CEOs are surprisingly poor at communicating with their teams. They think that they can get up and say, this is where we’re going, this is how we’re doing it, and then go away. And then everybody’s like, dotted that’s what we’re going to go do, but just play a game of telephone, right where we’re sitting in a circle. If I tell you something, by the time that message get back to me, it’s completely different. And that’s the same thing that happens in companies. So CEOs have this issue because, number one, they need to learn to communicate better and more frequently.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, what do you find are some of the biggest challenges that executive teams are facing right now?
Peter Sorgenfrei
Managing a constant flow of disparate information in different areas, right? So you’re always on. You’re always getting information from your board, from investors, from your team, from the market, from you know, your spouse, everybody else, and managing that in your head, which is what most people do, getting it organized and deciding how to take action. That’s the biggest challenge for most of my clients.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, it’s so true and, and it’s one of those is, it’ll be interesting to see how, how we continue to respond this way, because I feel like and in the area of business, is particularly true the pace of the world around us is accelerating much faster than our brains, right? Like the capacity of our brains and the degree to which we rely on them versus the other systems of our body, is rising faster and faster and faster, setting up a really interesting conundrum, I think the one other question for you here, and then there’s a question I like to ask everyone. I’ll get to in just a second, but some founders find it a lot easier to succeed at work than in other areas of their life, and particularly in the area of relationships, right? We talked about some of these health factors, but relationships are such a big part of it. Why do you think so many feel so much more confident in their ability to manage relationships at work than at home?
Peter Sorgenfrei
Because there are not as many emotions involved. Many of the people who lead companies are not necessarily in touch with their emotional being, right? So it’s easy. Easier to lead people at work than it is to relate to the fact that your teenage kids don’t want to talk to you, or that your spouse is on the way out. So it’s because they’re not really in tune with their emotions, and they don’t need to be, at least in some organizations to lead them, because what matters in those organizations is return on invested capital, right? Are they creating results? Then that’s fine, even if they’re not emotional human beings.
Scott Ritzheimer
So question I like to ask everyone, and it is this, what would you say is the biggest secret, Peter, that you wish wasn’t the secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
Peter Sorgenfrei
There’s there’s a couple, but I think the biggest secret is, the more you are yourself, the better you lead and the better career you can build. We all run around try to be something that we’re not to please what we think are the expectations around us. But I think the biggest secret is, the more you are who you are, the better you’re going to do. Period.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. It’s so true. So Peter, there’s some folks, whether it be the list of symptoms that you rattled off earlier, trouble with their spouse, not sleeping well, that memory lapses, or they’re just sitting like this guy finally gets it like, you know they’re hearing what they’ve been looking for for a long time and didn’t even know it. How can they find more out about you in the world? And the work that you do?
Peter Sorgenfrei
Well, thankfully, my name is easy to find. Peter Sorgenfrei will be in the show notes. I’m sure there’s not many of us in the world. So petersorgenfry.com I write a ton on LinkedIn, so find me there, and I have a YouTube channel, and I’m everywhere, basically, so easy to find.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Well, Peter, thank you so much. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you for the work that you do. It is much needed, and I know I appreciate it. I’m sure your clients do as well. Thank you for being here for those of you watching or listening, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Peter Sorgenfrei
Peter Sorgenfrei helps CEOs and founders develop themselves and their teams and grow their companies through his coaching. He has started and built companies in the US, UK, and Denmark as a Founder/CEO for the past 15 years. He can contribute valuable perspectives and factual insights to discussions, emphasizing the significance of adopting a Whole Human Approach. This approach fosters success in professional endeavors and ensures a harmonious balance with personal life. Drawing from his extensive experience working with clients across diverse international contexts, he can provide firsthand accounts of successful strategies.
Want to learn more about Peter Sorgenfrei’s work at Sorgenfrei ApS? Check out his website at https://www.petersorgenfrei.com/
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