[Update Jan 16 2026: Currently not taking new clients]
I’ve been doing emotional coaching for few years now and haven’t advertised it very much since I already got a lot of clients with minimal advertising, but right now I’m having fewer of them so figured that I might as well mention it again.
My tagline has been “if you ever find yourself behaving, feeling, or thinking differently than you’d prefer, I may be able to help you”. Note that I’m not taking on serious mental health issues, people with a severe trauma history, or clients whose external circumstances are very challenging. That said, things like mild to moderate depression, motivational problems, or social anxieties do fall into the umbrella of things I may be able to help with.
In my experience, clients are the most likely to find me useful if they’ve tried something like Focusing or IFS a little bit before and found it promising, or at least feel like they have some kind of intuitive access to their emotions. I’m least likely to be useful for the kinds of people who struggle with feeling emotions in their body, don’t get what my felt sense article is trying to point at, or feel a need to approach everything very intellectually. (It’s fine to want to approach many things intellectually, we’re on LessWrong after all, but working with emotions requires an ability to suspend intellectual dissection for a while. If you want to intellectually analyze everything that happened after the session, that’s totally fine.)
Results vary. My general guideline is that if you haven’t gotten at least some benefit, such as a better intuitive understanding of your problems after three hours of working with me, I may not be the best person to help you. Occasionally I manage to just completely one-shot a client’s biggest problems in a session or a few, though this is not the median case. (I have limited amount of follow-up data on these clients, because they often don’t come back after. This could be either because they no longer have major problems or because the problems came back and they feel embarrassed to admit that. However one of these clients did email me a year later to let me know that the improvements had stuck; see the testimonial from “Anonymous 3” below.)
A more typical case is that people keep coming back for sessions for a while and seem to get benefits of varying magnitude. They eventually stop coming once they feel like they don’t need me anymore, determine that some other approach would work better for them, their financial circumstances change for the worse, or some other reason. On a few occasions, I’ve told a client that I feel like I’m not managing to be very helpful for them and that they may want to move on.
My current rate for new clients is 110-200 EUR/hour (based on the client’s financial circumstances as determined by themselves), with the first hour being free. My timezone is UTC+2/3 (Europe-Helsinki), and I’m generally available in the day/afternoon. If you’d like to try me out, please send me an e-mail (kaj.sotala@gmail.com) or a private message and say a bit about what you’d like to work on and whether you have any previous history of severe mental health issues or trauma. (I check my emails more often than I check my LW private messages.) [Update Jan 16 2026: Currently not taking new clients]
I haven’t collected testimonials very actively but here are a few that I’ve gotten permission to publish.
Kaj’s help has been instrumental in helping me sort out my priorities and find ways to live a more balanced, less stressful life. Now I understand much better how parts of my mind often have conflicting desires and needs. Thanks to Kaj, I feel I am now able to live much more harmoniously, enjoying life and performing well in my work at the same time.
-- Juha, startup entrepreneur, D.Sc. (Tech)
Kaj managed to pick a tool out of his belt to help me make significant progress on a long-stuck hangup regarding what I want out of life and how I might go about getting it. Some people you can’t tell whether you’ll like after a bit of conversation; I’m pretty sure Kaj isn’t one of them. This is especially helpful for an emotional coach, where fit is paramount and being able to test for it helps a lot. In other therapy-tinged relationships I’ve felt some shade of potential for condemnation and judgement which was completely absent here.
-- Stag
Kaj’s help was a critical factor for me to recover from burnout related physical symptoms which made me unable to work or study at all. This was possible because Kaj helped me to uncover psychological origins, or as Internal Family Systems calls them “parts”, related to many of my issues (despite my initial scepticism/uncertainty around their existence and unsuccessful experimentation on my own).
-- Touko
I found working with Kaj extremely helpful. I’ve been suffering from, at times severe, depression for quite a long time (on and off). Kaj was more helpful than any therapist I saw (and I saw five, none of them EA-related though). So even though Kaj officially does only coaching, I think he is also good at working with depression, for example. Perhaps you should read some of his posts on LessWrong first, to see if his style is a good fit.
-- Anonymous
Kaj’s style fit my personality well and kept me talking and thinking, nudging me forward when I needed it. I learned and grew a lot working with Kaj. Next time I’m again in a difficult spot or in a place where I want to devote some time for serious personal growth, I’ll be sure to contact Kaj again.
-- Anonymous 2
I attended a few IFS sessions with Kaj towards the end of 2022.
I don’t say this lightly, but the sessions with Kaj had a transformative impact on my life. Before these sessions, I was grappling with significant work and personal-related challenges. Despite trying various methods, and seeing various professionals, I hadn’t seen much improvement in this time.
However, after just a few sessions (<5) with Kaj, I overcame substantial internal barriers. This not only enabled me to be more productive again on the work I cared about but also to be kinder to myself. My subjective experience was not one of constant cycling in mental pain. I could finally apply many of the lessons I had previously learned from therapists but had been unable to implement.
I remember being surprised at how real the transformation felt. I can say now, almost a year later, that it was also not transient, but has lasted this whole time.
As a result, I successfully completed some major professional milestones. On the personal front, my life has also seen positive changes that bring me immense joy.
I owe this success to the support from Kaj and IFS. I had been sceptical of ‘discrete step’ changes after so many years of pain with little progress, but I can now say I am convinced it is possible to have significant and enduring large shifts in how you approach yourself, your life and your pursuits.
[Update Jan 16 2026: Currently not taking new clients]
I’ve been doing emotional coaching for few years now and haven’t advertised it very much since I already got a lot of clients with minimal advertising, but right now I’m having fewer of them so figured that I might as well mention it again.
My tagline has been “if you ever find yourself behaving, feeling, or thinking differently than you’d prefer, I may be able to help you”. Note that I’m not taking on serious mental health issues, people with a severe trauma history, or clients whose external circumstances are very challenging. That said, things like mild to moderate depression, motivational problems, or social anxieties do fall into the umbrella of things I may be able to help with.
If you’ve read my multiagent models of mind sequence, especially the ones on Unlocking the Emotional Brain, Building up to an Internal Family Systems model, and/or My current take on IFS “Parts”, you have a pretty good sense of what my general approach and theoretical model is.
In my experience, clients are the most likely to find me useful if they’ve tried something like Focusing or IFS a little bit before and found it promising, or at least feel like they have some kind of intuitive access to their emotions. I’m least likely to be useful for the kinds of people who struggle with feeling emotions in their body, don’t get what my felt sense article is trying to point at, or feel a need to approach everything very intellectually. (It’s fine to want to approach many things intellectually, we’re on LessWrong after all, but working with emotions requires an ability to suspend intellectual dissection for a while. If you want to intellectually analyze everything that happened after the session, that’s totally fine.)
Results vary. My general guideline is that if you haven’t gotten at least some benefit, such as a better intuitive understanding of your problems after three hours of working with me, I may not be the best person to help you. Occasionally I manage to just completely one-shot a client’s biggest problems in a session or a few, though this is not the median case. (I have limited amount of follow-up data on these clients, because they often don’t come back after. This could be either because they no longer have major problems or because the problems came back and they feel embarrassed to admit that. However one of these clients did email me a year later to let me know that the improvements had stuck; see the testimonial from “Anonymous 3” below.)
A more typical case is that people keep coming back for sessions for a while and seem to get benefits of varying magnitude. They eventually stop coming once they feel like they don’t need me anymore, determine that some other approach would work better for them, their financial circumstances change for the worse, or some other reason. On a few occasions, I’ve told a client that I feel like I’m not managing to be very helpful for them and that they may want to move on.
My current rate for new clients is 110-200 EUR/hour (based on the client’s financial circumstances as determined by themselves), with the first hour being free. My timezone is UTC+2/3 (Europe-Helsinki), and I’m generally available in the day/afternoon. If you’d like to try me out, please send me an e-mail (kaj.sotala@gmail.com) or a private message and say a bit about what you’d like to work on and whether you have any previous history of severe mental health issues or trauma. (I check my emails more often than I check my LW private messages.) [Update Jan 16 2026: Currently not taking new clients]
I haven’t collected testimonials very actively but here are a few that I’ve gotten permission to publish.
-- Juha, startup entrepreneur, D.Sc. (Tech)
-- Stag
-- Touko
-- Anonymous
-- Anonymous 2
-- Anonymous 3