All through history, stories have been told and retold. Ancient anthropological sites tell stories of gods and kings through hieroglyphics painted on rock faces, and children still go to sleep to the sound of their parents’ voices telling them bedtime fables.
Stories are a function of human communication. Everyone uses them - often powerfully - to communicate a vision, an experience, a point or an emotion.
Comedians and motivational speakers almost solely rely on stories to leave their audiences laughing, crying and inspired. Stories are visual and appeal to the right hemisphere of the human brain, distracting the left, thinking hemisphere from logic and numbers.
The moral of the story
Sales people have told stories to potential customers for a long time, creating the vision of an amazing life after the purchase.
Financial planners use stories that create an impact and move their clients to taking action in their lives through investment and insurance. Sometimes a real story, about real people, goes a long way to help clients realise the risk of not planning for themselves and their families.
Advice and story telling
Clients planning for retirement will rely more on the financial advice that they receive. If that advice is supported with real, true-life accounts, it may resonate more with the pending retiree.
Retirement is a large piece of a person’s life but planning for it is often avoided until it is too late, because it is too far away. A person may have worked for 40 years and the next 40 will rely on the money he or she has accumulated in the former. Couple this with longevity of life, and the fantastical idea of taking it easy and travelling the world withers away with their company benefits.
Telling stories can motivate clients of any age to take retirement planning more serious. They can drive commitment and inspire the right type of action. Retirement conversations do not have to be doom and gloom - they could be conversations about dreams and an unexplored world, leaving them feeling good about preparing for their future.
Different types of actions
Stories can demonstrate possibility: “I have a client who retired last month. He always had a dream to buy a Porsche but never thought he would be able to afford one because he was employed. Well, he just bought his dream car and the purchase did not affect his retirement plan at all.”
Stories can inspire action: “I convinced one of my clients to give up smoking and invest the money with me. Ten years later the investment paid the deposit on her new home.”
Stories can drive a point: “Clients of mine moved to the coast when they retired five years ago. A year later they moved back to the city because they missed their family, friends and the conveniences.”
Stories can challenge your clients to think about what they want to do: “One of my clients retired from corporate and opened a coffee shop, which failed because he was retired and did not want to spend time working.”
Stories can give hope: “Last year I had a client who was diagnosed with MS and could not continue to work. His insurance provided him and his family with enough capital to settle their debt, and enough liquidity to get him through the next few years until retirement.”
Tell your clients stories. Share your experiences and those of others. Have a repository of stories that you can call on, but only when they are applicable and support a point that you are trying to make. Use stories to build relationships and help your clients to see what you need them to see and make the decisions that they need to make.
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