Jacob Kelli

About Me

I'm a certified life coach in the Solution-Focused Brief method. I'm also a psychotherapist in training. At the moment I have more than 4500 hours of experience working with clients in on-one-one sessions (tutoring and coaching).

It's quite hard to avoid clichés when describing oneself as a coach. Therefore, I think it'll be best if I give you an idea of who I am as a person and share something about my life story so you can better decide if I'm worth your time and money.

I'm 32 years old, happily married. Despite my relatively young age, I believe I've already experienced quite a few things in my life. I started off my career as a scientist and popular science writer but life circumstances set me on an entirely different path.

In my early twenties, I experienced great turmoil in my life. Obsessed with becoming a great scientist, I worked far harder than anyone should have and I exhausted myself to the point of being diagnosed with sever Chronic fatigue syndrome. This was; however, only a mask for underlying symptoms of anxiety, depression, paranoia and many other symptoms.

My fatigue and back pain were so severe I could hardly get out of bed for several months. And thus began my healing journey which is still ongoing. Over the next 10 years I tried many different, both conventional and alternative healing methods. I undertook hundreds of hours of psychotherapy of various types (including psychoanalysis, somatic experiencing, person-centred approach and gestald). As for the alternative methods, I had dozens of sessions with shamanic frog-medicine Kambo, Ayahuasca, LSD, and ketamine.

Piece by piece, session by session, I slowly got better and better as I gradually replaced dysfunctional patterns of thinking for more adaptive ones. It's true that I am too here where I am "thanks" to my illness and I sure as hell have learned many things on the journey I wouldn't have had otherwise. However, the journey has been long and tough.

That's why I don't like it when poeple who have healed from a major illness talk about a "wonderful journey" of self-discovery and what kind of benefits their illness has brought them. Focusing only on the positive outcomes overlooks the severity of suffering that many humans have to go through. In fact, it is in the negative things where we find our biggest resources - resilience, compassion, understanding, empathy and many others. These things we need to uncover in ourselves to overcome the challenges lifes presents us with.

Besides gaining a lot of knowledge about various approaches to healing, I believe that above all I've learned a great deal of understanding for other people and their problems. This is somehting I hope you can benefit from in my coaching sessions.

Coaching with me

How I like to coach

Whatever your goal is, I always start by asking about the things you enjoy doing or are good at. The aim of this is not just to develop a productive working relationship based on mutual respect, trust and a feeling of safety, but also to get an idea of your resources that we can later use to make change in your life.

In the next step, I often ask a variation on the following : What would have to change in your life for you to be able to say that our cooperation has been successful, and you can end it? The purpose here is not to set some kind of fixed goal we must achieve. In fact, the desirable endpoint is something that we will keep constantly developing and tweaking in our conversation. Rather, the purpose is to get a direction we can head towards. Heading in a clearly defined direction is far better than wandering aimlessly. Even if you eventually end up changing your mind about your goal, following one will teach you many important skills which are transferable to any other goal in the future.

What follows depends on what I feel may be right in the conversation. Generally, I try to get you to be as specific and detailed in your description of your preferred future. Getting a very detailed and clear idea of what you want is surprisingly very often enough to bring about the desirable change in your life.

Offerings

Coaching

Experience, Certifications & Training

Certifications and Degrees

• Masters degree in Cognitive and Decision Sciences (University College London)
• 1-year certified training in Solutions-Focus coaching
• 5-year certified training in Solutions-Focus therapy (in progress)

Training and development

• Introduction to Bodypsychotherapy (2022) - 20 hours
• Introduction to Solution-focus Meditation - 24 hours
• Self-experience in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy - 40 hours
• Self-experience in group Gestaldt psychotherapy - 40 hours
• Self-experience in Person-centered approach (PCA) psychotherapy - 50 hours
• Self-experience in Somatic Experiencing psychotherapy - 200 hours
• Self-experience in psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis - 400 hours

Professional and life experience

Professional and Life Experience

Fee description

I have a sliding scale. The standard rate is $60 per session but I can offer discounts of up to 50% if your income doesn't allow you to pay the full rate. Each session lasts the minimum of 45 minutes.