The purpose of the study was to develop a method to assess the different characteristics of goal setting among psychotherapists with varying professional experience, and also to trace the relationship between the parameters of goal setting and the effectiveness of psychotherapy. To do this, a productive methodological basis can be a procedure for the study of professional thinking used in the psychology of expertise. The authors identified the characteristics and conditions of goal setting that contribute to the better achievement of goals. The basis for the development of the method was an assumption that the analysis of someone else’s psychotherapeutic session from an expert position should stimulate the specialist’s ideas about the standard goal setting process. The authors developed a grid of categories for the analysis of structured interview records. Studies using the developed procedure can be carried out in the following areas: 1) identifying the characteristics of goals that are more or less effective in the context of therapy outcomes; 2) studying the transformation of a goal setting process in connection with building up the professional experience of a psychotherapist; 3) revealing the peculiarity of the representation of a client’s problem by psychotherapists with varying degrees of expertise; 4) studying the features of goal-setting and the representation of a client’s problem by psychotherapists of different approaches. The approbation of this methodology for studying goal setting among therapists with more than 10 years of experience allowed us to identify the main characteristics of the problem and target state descriptions that correlate with the effective achievement of psychotherapeutic results, according to other research.