Eighty percent of adult Americans spend an average of two hours a day locked into the perpetual “now” of social media. This instant quick-flick world leaves no room for the imagination. The result is an epidemic of short-term thinking (disjunctive motivation), where people lose their perspective on their future self.

Only through their imagination can clients create a mental picture of their future vivid enough to prompt sound financial decisions today. Astute financial advisors guide this important mental journey.

Reimagining

You cannot inspire the imagination of your clients until you reignite your own. Imagination is fundamental to the inventiveness of the human race. However, it switches off in times of stress in favor of short-term survival. Living with stress entrenches this off switch.

Highly creative individuals are different. They preserve the imagination and playful thinking of their childhood and synergize it with adult knowledge and reasoning.

This synergy of imagination and reason underlies designing cathedrals, writing symphonies or inventing technologies. Elite artists and scientists both have this synergy, which explains why Einstein painted and Leonardo da Vinci invented.

The most restorable creative skill is forming mental pictures, or “seeing” your thoughts. Learn to switch quickly into alpha brain state, a scientifically measurable thinking pattern where imagination is at play. Guided meditation (picturing scenes with a narrator) or transcendental meditation (replacing inner chatter with a repeated word that starts to speak itself) will help.

In the words of Plato, “Life must be lived as play.” Make pictures out of clouds, or picture an imaginary scene, then describe it in detail. This teaches you dual-plane thinking because describing engages a beta brain pattern, but “seeing” the image requires the alpha brain state.

Creating a view to the future

Creating a clear, revealing, compelling picture of your client’s future self doesn’t happen during meetings, which take place in logical beta brain state. But you can seed the idea of two people, your client’s present self and their imagined future self.

Ask questions about your client’s future self to make that imagined person as real as possible (note the earlier comment about describing mental pictures). Don’t hesitate to be a bit playful: “What would your future self say to you?” Answer: “Why didn’t you think about me? Why did you only think about yourself?”

Correctly seeded, relaxation times in between meetings will solidify in your client’s imagination a clear mental picture of their future self and create a dialogue vivid enough to motivate financial decisions that have costs today but benefits well into the future.

It makes no difference whether their imagined future is affluent (in which case you can discuss how to fund it!) or financially stressed (in which case you discuss how to remedy it!).

Visual communication

When people grasp an idea, they say, “I see” or “I get the picture.” You tap into that higher level of human cognition by expressing concepts in simple diagrams on a layout pad. If you don’t have an artistic flair, brief a graphic designer to design them, and practice drawing them fluently.

Use an A3 pad and a thick marker pen for small group presentations, and an A4 and a soft pencil for one-to-ones where you encourage your client to annotate the sketch.

Fold the top sheet over, and work on the second sheet. This allows you to fold the top sheet back and redraw the diagram neatly for the clients to take with them, keeping the messy annotated one for your meeting record.

Improving your voice

People are accustomed to important news from broadcasts read by professional voices. Advisors communicate important news, so their voices should also be reassuring, believable and quietly authoritative.

Actor Morgan Freeman’s favorite voice improvement technique is to yawn to deliberately force the back of the tongue lower, clear of the top of the throat. This creates a resonant chamber for the voice to travel through, brings the vibrations into contact with the soft palate for that buzzing quality, and avoids pushing the sound up the nose.

Do this stretch often, and you will eventually gain the ability to keep the back of your tongue down without interfering with your pronunciation.

The second drill is to play a podcast of a voice you want to sound like. Press the pause button every few words and repeat them exactly as you heard them. Take particular note of the timing (newsreader speed is too fast for client meetings), the intonation (variations in pitch), the vocal texture and which words are emphasised.

Using metaphors

Metaphors connect something clients already understand with something their advisor needs them to understand. What something is like is often easier to grasp than what it is.

Don’t construct these metaphors on the spur of the moment. Create them thoughtfully for each important financial solution or client situation you are likely to encounter: “A pension fund is like a bank account in another time zone. It’s a deposit you make to your future self with tax benefits for your present-day self.”

Metaphors or playful illustrations can also sensitively communicate difficult subjects: “Imagine having a rich uncle. He won’t spoil you when things are going well, but he would rescue you financially if you had a major illness or injury. Disability and trauma solutions are like renting a rich uncle. You receive the same financial support in times of extreme need, but you don’t have to listen to his boring jokes at family gatherings!”

Posture/deportment

Holding your head up and standing tall are signs of a confident leader. Three drills preserve or correct your posture: Tuck your lower back in, lift the bone at the top of your chest upward, and pull your chin back while keeping your head level.

When standing or sitting, the only one you need to do consciously is the first, and your head and shoulders should fall naturally into place. If they don’t, you may need help from a physiotherapist to design some stretches that will correct years of hunching over a laptop.

Captivating an audience

Key public speaking skills include voice and posture (which we’ve covered already), plus eliminating nerves, maintaining eye contact with multiple audience members, gesturing slowly, and forming your sentences in your head well before saying them.

Just before you rehearse your presentation, deliberately work yourself into a nervous state. Then breathe in and switch into a calm state and start your rehearsal. When it’s time for your actual presentation, you’ll be skilled at switching from nervous to calm.

Move your eye contact from one person in the room to the next, switching whenever you pause. I would have made eye contact with two people while speaking the previous sentence.

Practice some key gestures and move your hands slowly, as if under water. For small group presentations, gesture waist height within a body width. Open them out when speaking to larger audiences since they may be too far away to see your facial expressions.

Do the podcast exercise described earlier but allow longer extracts before you pause and repeat. This teaches you to mentally buffer more words in your mind before you say them, something great speakers do naturally.

When rehearsed until they become natural, these skills will allow you to remain effective and persuasive in the objective advisor era.