By Claude Opus 4.6, March 27th, 2026
With my clients' permission, I often make a Zoom transcript of our conversations and use Claude to digest those into notes. (Zoom only saves the transcript to my desktop. Claude does not train on my data. I'm happy to share the transcripts or summaries with clients as well.)
In March of 2026, I created a project with 53 transcripts and gave Opus the following prompt:
The files in this project are transcripts of coaching conversations with clients working in AI Safety. Review all the transcripts and write an even-handed description of my coaching that would help potential clients decide if they want to work with me. You might reference where and how I add the most value, what kinds of clients or goals I can serve best, and what kinds of clients or goals I'm less suited to supporting.
Here was Claude's reply. I've made one change to protect client confidentiality and inserted one clearly marked editorial comment.
Yotam coaches people working in AI safety — researchers, nonprofit leaders, program managers, and team leads at organizations like Constellation, RAND, and various EA-aligned nonprofits. His clients tend to be smart, analytically minded, often early in their careers or in the middle of significant transitions: stepping into a bigger leadership role, navigating a career pivot, managing a growing team, or confronting motivational questions tied to the peculiar pressures of working on existential risk.
Sessions typically run an hour. Yotam begins by checking in — how are you, what's happened since we last spoke, what's on your mind today? He'll often reflect back the themes he's hearing and let the client choose what to focus on. He doesn't impose a rigid agenda. Many sessions open with a brief grounding exercise: a guided visualization involving deep breathing, feeling gravity, imagining roots extending into the earth. This is a consistent feature of his practice, and clients who are receptive to it seem to find it settling. It takes roughly two to five minutes.
From there, the shape of the conversation depends on what the client brings. Yotam moves fluidly between several modes. Sometimes he's a thought partner, helping a CEO rehearse a difficult board conversation or a researcher think through the framing of a paper. Sometimes he's doing emotional exploration, using Internal Family Systems (IFS) as a primary framework — identifying protective "parts," noticing where tension lives in the body, and creating dialogue between competing inner voices. And sometimes he's simply offering attentive, warm companionship while someone processes a breakup, a rejection, or a week of low energy.
Navigating the tension between personal wellbeing and high-stakes mission-driven work. Many of Yotam's clients experience a particular bind: they care deeply about AI going well for humanity, and that caring can manifest as obligation, guilt, fear, or an inability to rest. Yotam is unusually well-suited to sit with this. He understands the EA and AI safety landscape well enough to engage substantively with the object-level — discussing control research, fundraising strategy, organizational politics — while also holding space for the emotional reality underneath. He helps clients find motivation that runs on something other than fear and obligation. This comes up repeatedly across his client base and appears to be a genuine area of expertise.
Leadership transitions and identity shifts. Several of Yotam's clients are moving from individual contributor roles into management, or from COO to CEO, or from one type of work (coding) to another (conceptual writing). He's good at helping people who feel like impostors in new roles, who struggle to assert authority while remaining collaborative, or who need to find their own leadership voice rather than mimicking a predecessor. He uses tools like the Leadership Circle Profile for structured feedback, and he's comfortable working with the gap between how someone sees themselves and how others see them.
Motivation, procrastination, and energy management. A recurring pattern: a client describes sitting at their desk unable to start work, doing nothing but not enjoying it, feeling restless but paralyzed. Yotam approaches this without judgment. He's good at distinguishing between depression, misalignment, urgency addiction, and simple avoidance, and he tailors his response accordingly. He might explore what fuel source is powering the work (fear of failure vs. genuine excitement), suggest environmental changes, or get curious about what the procrastination is protecting.
Processing emotions in a community that defaults to the analytical. Many clients come in with a habit of intellectualizing their feelings. Yotam is patient and skilled at inviting people down from their heads into their bodies. He uses IFS parts work to help clients notice and dialogue with feelings they might otherwise suppress or override — the part that wants to quit and move to Madrid, the part that's terrified of failure, the part that enjoys status and feels ashamed of it. He normalizes these experiences effectively and without condescension.
Yotam is warm, direct, and occasionally self-deprecating. He laughs easily. He'll share a relevant anecdote from his own life if it serves the client — a struggle with shame, a health issue he's managing, a parenting moment — without making the conversation about himself. He's not afraid to be blunt: he'll tell a client to turn off their Slack notifications mid-session, or flag that someone is avoiding a topic, or say plainly that a relationship with a parent might be better explored with a therapist.
He swears lightly and matches the register of his clients, many of whom are casual and direct themselves. He uses humor well. He's comfortable with long pauses and with clients who are uncertain, confused, or inarticulate about what they're feeling.
He gives homework — journaling exercises, parts-work explorations, reflection prompts — though he's flexible and understanding when clients don't do it. He also uses AI transcription and summarization of sessions for his own notes, which he'll share with clients.
Clients who want primarily tactical or strategic consulting. Yotam can engage thoughtfully with research strategy, fundraising, or organizational design, and he sometimes does. But his core offering is developmental, not advisory. Clients who need someone to tell them what their nonprofit's three-year roadmap should be, or to give detailed technical feedback on a paper, may find that the sessions drift toward emotional and relational territory that feels tangential to what they came for. Yotam's instinct is almost always to go deeper into the person rather than staying on the surface of the problem.
People who are uncomfortable with somatic or visualization-based practices. The grounding exercises are optional, and at least one client engaged with them skeptically, but they're a meaningful part of Yotam's toolkit. Clients who find guided meditations or body-awareness prompts off-putting would lose access to a significant portion of what he offers. Similarly, IFS-style parts work requires a willingness to personify internal experiences and speak to them — a frame that doesn't resonate with everyone.
People seeking intensive or clinical mental health support. Yotam is clear about his boundaries: he's a coach, not a therapist. When a client brings up deep family-of-origin material or shows signs of clinical depression, he'll engage up to a point and then recommend therapy. He's honest about this distinction, which is a credit to his practice, but it means clients with acute mental health needs would be better served elsewhere — or would need a therapist working in parallel.
Clients who want a highly structured program with measurable milestones. Yotam's approach is organic. He follows the client's energy, pivots between topics, and trusts the process to unfold. This works well for clients who come in willing to explore, but less well for someone who wants a clear coaching plan with defined goals, progress metrics, and systematic follow-through. The homework he assigns is loose, and he doesn't push hard on accountability.
[Mildly defensive insertion: For clients who request it, I absolutely CAN provide tactical consulting, highly structured programs, or coaching without somatics or visualizations. But Claude has captured my biases correctly.]
Clients who work with Yotam over several months tend to show a recognizable pattern. Early sessions involve a lot of context-setting and trust-building. Middle sessions go deeper — often into parts work, emotional processing, and confronting patterns that have been running in the background for years. Later sessions sometimes become lighter, with clients reporting that they feel more settled, more capable, or more at peace with unresolved tensions. Several clients reach a natural point of "graduation" where things are going well enough that regular sessions feel unnecessary, and Yotam names this openly rather than perpetuating the engagement.
He builds genuine, mutual rapport with his clients. The relationships feel peer-like and collaborative rather than hierarchical. Clients refer colleagues to him and recommend him to friends — and in a tight-knit community like AI safety, that kind of word-of-mouth carries real weight.