Encourage your Clients to Look Back From the Future

Want clients to spend more on legal services?  Ask them to step into the future.  From this article from Psychology Today about economists studying why people pay premiums for immediate over future rewards (called temporal discounting), we learn that people who better connect their present with their future selves make better long term decisions:

Stanfordresearcher Hal Ersner-Hershfield has preliminary results from a studyin which virtual reality lets people experience old age. Subjects puton video goggles and move through a world where they look just likethemselves, or similar, but with gray hair and wrinkles.

Standingin front of a virtual mirror, they're asked to decide how to spend athousand dollars. Gifts? Parties? A retirement plan? Those with theelderly avatar put more than twice as much into long-term savings.Ersner-Hershfield says that embodying your future self may alsoencourage more responsible planning in other domains, such asrelationships (should I cheat?), the environment (should I recycle?),and health (should I smoke?).

So what if youdon't have a VR system at home? You might get results from simplythinking about what you'll be like when you age. "Realize that yourinterests and values will be similar when you retire,"Ersner-Hershfield says. "Sure, a 25-year-old avid rock climber mightnot be as into scaling Everest when he's in his 60s, but he'll probablystill like outdoor activities." Once identified with your future self,you might suddenly care whether he looks back on you and curses you forbeing such a knucklehead.

What does this mean for lawyers?  If you're working with clients and encouraging them to make better long-term decisions for themselves or their businesses (estate planning, incorporating, succession planning, etc.), you'll get better results -- the study suggests -- if you ask your clients to look to future and imagine themselves already there.

Ask clients to see themselves twenty years from now.  What have they accomplished?  What challenges have they overcome?  What are their children doing?  Who's running their business?  Etc. 

I think you'll find them far more open to your advice and less likely to say, "Well, we'll just wait 'til we get there" because they already are.