Goals vs Intentions: Why Your To-Do List Isn't Moving Your Private Practice Forward

Get the free companion guide for this episode here

Ever watched American Beauty and felt a strange kinship with the moment Kevin Spacey's character quits his job to go work the drive through window? Brooklyn opens this episode with that scene because she's been there too, and she suspects a lot of women running private practices have been there as well. From the drive through she moves into a personal update about manifesting a new, spacious chapter of her own life, and how chasing that spaciousness led her back to a realisation about who she actually serves and why her messaging needed a tweak, not an overhaul.

The heart of this episode is goal setting for therapists in private practice, and the difference between a goal and an intention. Brooklyn breaks down why so many counsellors, psychologists, and social workers end up feeling like a hamster on a wheel, endlessly ticking off to-do lists that never actually shift the numbers in the business. Her argument is simple. A goal is external and measurable, something like five new inquiries by Friday, while an intention is internal, the why and the how underneath it. Without a goal, a to-do list just keeps growing and you never get the felt sense of progress, even when you're working flat out.

To explain why so many private practice owners get caught in this loop, Brooklyn walks through the difference between an employee mindset and a business owner mindset. When you work for someone else, your tasks are prioritised for you, your performance is tracked and reviewed, and someone else notices when you do well. When you're running your own private practice, none of that oversight exists automatically, which is why tracking KPIs in private practice becomes so important once you're out on your own. Brooklyn draws on her own background managing government contracts and working inside Medicare, where every appointment and every outcome was monitored, to show just how different it feels the moment you're suddenly self-directed with no one checking your numbers but you.

This episode is for you if you've been asking why am I not getting more clients despite doing all the things, or if you've noticed you're posting on Instagram and Facebook because it feels productive rather than because it's actually moving the business forward. Brooklyn's message is that the business is a vehicle to the life you actually want, whether that's more time, more money, or more freedom, and setting a proper goal, paired with the intention