John Clarke | Why Knowing Your "Why" Is Important In Your Practice | TPOT 125
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
Release Date: 04/20/2020
Beyond the Diagnosis: The Stories That Shape Our Clients | Dr. Travis Heath | TPOT 454
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
What do we miss when a diagnosis becomes the whole story? Dr. Travis Heath joins Gordon Brewer to explore how narrative therapy helps us understand the stories clients tell about themselves—and the stories their families, communities, and culture tell about them. Together, they discuss how labels can both offer clarity and limit understanding, why slowing down matters in therapy, and how curiosity can open up new possibilities. Travis also shares ways therapists can reflect on their sessions, question familiar assumptions, and move beyond simply listing a client’s strengths to hearing the...
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What Growing a Group Practice Really Takes | Whitney Owens | TPOT 453
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
Growing a private practice takes more than adding clients and hiring therapists. It also means learning to delegate, trust your team, and let go of doing everything yourself. In this episode, Gordon Brewer welcomes back Whitney Owens, founder of Water’s Edge Counseling and Wise Practice Consulting. Whitney shares her journey from solo therapist to group practice owner, including the challenges of building a leadership team, navigating staff turnover, and creating systems that support growth. Gordon and Whitney explore how confidence develops through experience, why clear values matter in...
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How Therapists Can Practice What We Preach About Mindfulness | Debi Trent Brown | TPOT 452
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
Therapists spend a lot of time encouraging clients to slow down, practice mindfulness, and become more aware of what they need—but practicing those same things in our own lives can be much harder. In this episode, Gordon talks with Debi Trent Brown about mindfulness beyond meditation, the importance of creating small moments of joy, and what it means to live more authentically. They explore how the “rules” we pick up from family, culture, and society can quietly shape our choices, why pausing before we respond can help us better understand ourselves, and how consistency—not...
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How to Make More Impact Without Adding More Clients | James Marland | TPOT 451
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
What happens when being “successful” in private practice starts to look a lot like burnout? In this episode, Gordon talks with James Marland about the three traps that can keep therapists stuck in one-on-one work: the clock trap, calendar trap, and couch trap. They unpack why being fully booked isn’t always the same as being free, and how tying your income, time, and impact entirely to client hours can eventually become exhausting. James also shares practical ways therapists can begin thinking beyond traditional one-on-one work through workshops, courses, trainings, and other resources...
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Supporting Postpartum Moms Through Private Practice | Hannah Short | TPOT 450
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that the work we feel most drawn to often has some connection to our own experiences. That doesn’t mean our story becomes the center of the therapy room, but it can absolutely shape the populations we care about, the problems we notice, and the kind of practice we want to build. In this episode, I talk with Hannah Short about how her own experiences with eating disorder recovery and postpartum helped shape her clinical niche. We also get into thoughtful self-disclosure, creating a practice where clients feel genuinely understood, moving from...
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Branding Your Private Practice: How to Stand Out and Get Found | Ritu Riedweg | TPOT 449
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
When therapists think about branding, it’s easy to immediately think about logos, fonts, colors, and websites. But your brand is so much more than what your practice looks like online. It is also the feeling people get when they encounter you, the story they associate with you, and ultimately, whether they feel like they can trust you. In this episode of The Practice of Therapy Podcast, I had the pleasure of talking with Ritu Riedweg about personal branding, marketing, and what therapists can do to make their practices easier to find and easier to connect with. Ritu brings an interesting...
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Working With High-Risk Teens in Private Practice | Katie K. May | TPOT 448
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
Working with high-risk teens can feel overwhelming, especially when self-harm, suicidal thoughts, emotional dysregulation, or repeated hospitalizations are part of the picture. So how can therapists provide both compassion and structure without letting fear drive the treatment? In this episode, Gordon talks with Katie K. May about working effectively with high-risk teens and their families. Katie shares why validation matters, how therapists can provide strong clinical leadership, and why caregiver involvement is such an important part of the process. They also discuss proactive safety...
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Why Rapport Matters More Than Ever in Private Practice | Nora Anger | TPOT 447
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
Building rapport isn’t just about helping clients feel comfortable. It can play a major role in whether they trust you, open up, and keep coming back. In this episode, I sit down with Nora Anger, LPC, to talk about building stronger therapeutic relationships in private practice. We discuss what clients really want from their therapists, common reasons they leave therapy, thoughtful self-disclosure, creating safety and trust, and how to balance compassion with challenging clients when they need it. Resources Mentioned In This Episode Meet Nora Anger Nora Anger, MS, LPC, is a...
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Is Your Private Practice Too Dependent on You? | TaVona Denise | TPOT 446
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
What happens to your private practice when you step away? In this episode, Gordon talks with TaVona Denise about what her Private Practice Vitality Report revealed about owner dependency, burnout, delegation, and the systems that keep a practice running. They explore why hiring more staff doesn’t always create more freedom, how to tell if your practice still depends too heavily on you, and the simple 30-day question that can uncover exactly where your systems need work. If you want to build a practice that can grow without requiring you to be involved in every decision, this conversation is...
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The Systems Your Private Practice Needs to Run Smoothly | Lisa Permar | TPOT 445
The Practice of Therapy Podcast with Gordon Brewer
A private practice can look successful on the outside and still feel exhausting behind the scenes. Clients are showing up, revenue is coming in, and everything appears to be working, but the owner may still be answering every question, fixing every exception, following up on loose ends, and carrying far too much of the practice in their own head. In this episode, Gordon talks with Lisa Permar about the small, repeated friction points that quietly drain a practice owner’s time, attention, and energy. They explore how everyday tasks around intake, scheduling, billing, documentation, and team...
info_outlineJohn Clarke joins the show; he helps private practice owners build a practice that they love. In this episode, John gives tips on how to do private practice made human. First, start with your “why”. Why are you considering private practice, or why did you get into private practice in the first place? Later, John gives more tips on establishing your endpoint, creating company values, and knowing your ideal income.
Meet John Clarke
John Clarke is a licensed psychotherapist and a private practice expert at PrivatePracticeWorkshop. After learning a lot of things the hard way while building his first practice in San Francisco, he started a blog to share with others the lessons he had learned. Private Practice Workshop was born, and this blog eventually evolved into so much more: a thriving Facebook community, a successful podcast, online courses, and coaching/consulting. Some therapists want to learn how to use digital marketing to grow their audience and get more clients, but the majority just want to leave it to the pros. John founded Unconditional Media, the digital marketing team for therapists, to meet the biggest need of private practitioners: getting more clients! When he’s not nerding out over all things private practice, he’s playing jazz drums, practicing Muay Thai martial arts, and talking to his pets like they’re humans.
Having Fuel in the Tank
Start with your why. You are crafting your purpose statement. Why do any of this in the first place? Why does this matter? Knowing your why will be your fuel source. So especially on days where it’s tough to get out of bed in the morning like in a crisis, you need enough fuel in the tank to make this worth it. There are more risks associated with being a business owner than being an employee. There are more risks; there’s more stress. You are going to take work home more often; you’re liable to different things that you’re not as responsible for if you’re the employee of a company. So for John, it has to be worth that. The bumps in the road have to be worth it.
Why Private Practice?
Many therapists feel like they were born to do this. They were born to help people. Take that one step further and write down why private practice? If your purpose in life is to help people, then why private practice? It’s not the most effective place for you to help people. Do you have other ideas behind your purpose? Whether it’s owning your schedule or increasing income. Try to get honest with yourself.
Establish Your Endpoint
The endpoint is a mission statement. You should think big! You should think of the ripple effects of your work. Your mission statement is this high-level impact that your business could have on the world. Start to sketch out how are you going to get there? If you don’t know where you’re going, than any place will do—reverse engineer your big tasks. So if you want to get 50 fully booked students in this launch, you can start to work backward and go, then what do you need to do in these next one to three months to build your email list for that? What do you need to do this week to create more lead magnets to make your email list? So it helps if you trace back what actions you are taking today and what they should lead to.
Establish Company Values
Establishing your company values will help you make decisions. Even if you’re a solo practitioner, John highly recommends doing this. Create the kind of practice that you want to have for yourself. Put some thought into that and get out a piece of paper to write stuff down. When we write, we get clarity and can see the big picture.
Set Your Ideal Income and Ideal Schedule
Get in there, create that income target and make it sure it’s based on something. What are you going to need to get that money, and how are you going to use it? Then, you can reverse engineer that around your schedule. If you want to make a certain amount, how many hours will you have to work to get there? What kind of schedule do you need? Start sketching out your days, weeks, months, and years and make sure when you look at your calendar that it seems right to you. It looks good. It looks like, yes, this is worth it.
John’s Resources
Private Practice Workshop
Listen to John’s Podcast
PODCAST| Grace and Gratitude with Gordon Brewer of the Practice of Therapy
John’s Free Online Training
Apply For 1-1 Consulting
Other Resources
Financial Tips for Surviving The COVID-19 Crisis
The Practice of Therapy Teachable Courses (use code SPRING2020)
Money Matters in Private Practice | The Course
G Suite for Therapists | The E-Course
Session Note Helper
Cool Resources
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Meet Gordon Brewer, MEd, LMFT
Gordon is the person behind The Practice of Therapy Podcast & Blog. He is also President and Founder of Kingsport Counseling Associates, PLLC. He is a therapist, consultant, business mentor, trainer, and writer. PLEASE Subscribe to The Practice of Therapy Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher and Google Play. Follow us on Twitter @therapistlearn and Pinterest “Like” us on Facebook