In my last article, I shared an observation: people don’t delay estate planning because they lack information. We delay because, as humans, we tend to prioritize avoiding today’s discomfort over preventing tomorrow’s problems.
In other words, it’s not an information problem. It’s a procrastination problem.
I also offered a working hypothesis about what can move us from procrastination—or avoidance—to action. I suggested that this shift requires three things to occur:
- The consequence of procrastination becomes personal.
- The emotional burden is shared.
- The first step feels achievable.
The more I thought about that hypothesis, the more I started to envision… an onion.
An onion?
Yes.
No, I didn’t actually use the word onion in the first article. But I certainly described something that looks a lot like one.
What we often call procrastination in estate planning is really just the outer layer. Beneath it may be fear, uncertainty, conflict, guilt, grief, or some other discomfort we haven’t yet named.
And we usually aren’t prompted to start peeling those layers until the consequence of procrastination becomes personal.
That part—the when—is often outside of our control. The light bulb comes on at different times for different people. Maybe someone close to us becomes ill. Maybe we watch a family struggle after a death. Maybe we become parents, buy a business, remarry, or simply reach a point in life when avoiding the subject no longer feels responsible.
But even when the consequence becomes personal, most of us don’t immediately jump into action. And we certainly don’t always rush to talk about whatever is making us uncomfortable.
I realized that my hypothesis described the prerequisites for movement, but not the mechanism that explains how one leads to the next.
Something was missing between the prompt and the progress.
The missing mechanism? A conversation.
I think that, in the context of estate planning, conversations work a lot like peeling the layers of an onion. What appears on the surface as procrastination may be covering something much more specific underneath. The probing, questioning, and exchange that happen through conversation help us peel those layers back. And as we peel, we begin to see, examine, and respond to what procrastination had kept hidden: the invisible barrier between us and estate planning.
Let’s look at a practical example:
Outer layer: “I’m procrastinating.”
Peel it back: “Why?”
Another layer: “I don’t know what to do.”
Keep talking. Perhaps that isn’t really it.
Another layer: “I’m afraid I’ll make the wrong decision.”
Keep peeling.
Another layer: “I’m remarried, and I’m terrified that anything I do will hurt either my spouse or my children.”
Now that is something we can work with.
Importantly, the conversation hasn’t magically solved the family conflict. It has done something more fundamental: it has transformed an unnamed, unidentified, and unexamined feeling of dread into a specific problem.
After all, we cannot work through what remains hidden.
The process of making those invisible barriers visible is what I like to call the Conversation Effect™.
Conversations help us make the unnamed, unspoken, and undiscussed—what I call the invisible—something we can actually face.
Some of us can engage in this peeling process alone. Introspection can be incredibly insightful—especially for introverts like me.
But many of the clients I encounter need something else. They need help. They need support. They need someone to share the emotional burden.
Someone may begin by saying, “I don’t know what to do.” A meaningful conversation doesn’t simply accept that answer and begin dispensing information. It creates enough space for the person to keep talking until, “I don’t know what to do,” becomes, “I’m afraid I’ll make the wrong decision,” which eventually becomes, “I’m afraid that whatever I choose will hurt someone I love.”
That progression often happens because another person is there—asking, listening, reflecting, and helping the speaker put words around something they may never have articulated, perhaps even to themselves. That means the purpose of the conversation becomes twofold:
Making the barrier visible — Now I can see what is actually stopping me.
Sharing the burden — I no longer have to wrestle with it entirely inside my own head.
And once the real problem is visible and the emotional burden is shared, the third part of my original hypothesis begins to make sense too: The first step can finally feel achievable.
And may I suggest that the first step in estate planning doesn’t have to mean diving straight into documents. It doesn’t have to be knowing exactly who should receive every asset you own. It doesn’t even require having all the answers. Sometimes, the first step is simply having the conversation. At Parrish Law Partners, we call that first step the Clarity Conversation™.
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