The exercise takes about four minutes. Staley asks the client to picture themselves, as specifically as they can, ten years from today. Not the abstract version of their future self. The specific version. Where they live. What their morning looks like. Who is in their kitchen. What they no longer do for work, and what they do instead. He then asks them a question almost no one asks them in any other room of their life. What does that person, ten years from now, want you to do today.
Thomas Staley, a Senior Wealth Advisor at Maia Wealth working from the firm’s Indianapolis office, has been running this exercise with clients for years. He considers it the single most useful diagnostic tool he has, and one he believes much of the wealth management industry has structurally underweighted in favor of more measurable conversations.
“The answer to that question tells me almost everything I need to know,” Staley said in a recent interview. “It tells me what the client is actually trying to build. It tells me where their current behavior is aligned with that future and where it is not. And it does it in a way that no spreadsheet I could put in front of them ever does. Most clients have never been asked the question. When they sit with it, the answers tend to come fast, and they tend to be more honest than the answers I get from a goals questionnaire.”
What the research says about future-self thinking
The behavioral research underneath this exercise has accumulated over the last fifteen years and is more robust than most clients realize. UCLA’s Hal Hershfield, who has spent much of his career studying what he calls future-self continuity, has demonstrated repeatedly that people who feel a strong psychological connection to their future selves make systematically better long-term decisions. They save more. They exercise more. They are less likely to make impulsive purchases. They follow through on commitments more consistently.
Hershfield’s most-cited experiments used age-progressed images of participants’ faces, shown to them just before retirement-savings decisions. The participants who saw the older versions of themselves contributed materially more to retirement accounts than control groups who did not. The effect held across multiple replications. The mechanism was simple. Most people, given a choice between rewarding their present self and rewarding a stranger, choose the present self. The future self, for most people, registers psychologically as a stranger. When the stranger becomes recognizable, the trade-off changes.
Staley’s read of that literature is that the financial industry has paid almost no attention to it.
“We give clients spreadsheets, projections, Monte Carlo simulations, and probability cones. None of it bridges the gap between the person making the decision today and the person who will live with the consequences. The decision-maker and the consequence-bearer are, in a real sense, two different people. Until the client makes them the same person, no amount of analysis is going to change behavior.”
Thomas Staley, Maia Wealth
The shape of the question
Staley said the version of the question that produces the most useful answers is unusually specific. The generic version, what do you want your future to look like, almost always produces a generic answer. Financial security. Comfort. The ability to stop working when I want to. None of those, in his experience, are operationally useful. They are too abstract to drive any decision the client has not already made.
The version that works requires the client to picture a specific morning in a specific year. What time do you wake up. Are you going to a job. If yes, doing what. If no, doing what instead. Who is in your house. What is in your calendar this week. What is no longer in your calendar that is in your calendar today. What recurring stressor have you finally retired. What did you have to do, between now and then, to retire it.
The questions are deliberately concrete. Staley said the concreteness is the point. Abstract futures generate abstract behavior. Specific futures generate specific behavior. A client who can see, in some detail, the morning they want to be having in 2036 tends to make different decisions in 2026 than a client whose future is still a slogan.
Where Staley parts ways with the industry
This is where Staley’s framing diverges from the way much of the financial planning industry has trained itself to talk to clients. The conventional client-discovery process leans heavily on goals frameworks, risk tolerance questionnaires, and time-horizon estimates. These tools have their place, in Staley‘s view. He uses several of them. What he questions is the assumption underneath them, which is that clients arrive with their goals already clarified and that the planner’s job is to elicit those goals and translate them into a portfolio.
Staley considers that assumption wrong for most of the clients he sees.
“Most clients do not have clear goals,” he said. “They have rough hopes, low-grade anxieties, and assumptions they have never examined. The standard discovery process treats them like they have a finished blueprint they just need help executing. They do not. The first job is to help them build the blueprint, and the standard tools are not built for that. They are built to extract a goal that is not yet there.”
That critique is contested. Many advisors would argue that goals frameworks are precisely how the conversation gets started, and that the structured questions are the scaffolding clients need to articulate what they actually want. Staley does not entirely disagree. His position is narrower: the structured questions tend to produce structured answers, and structured answers, in his experience, are often the answer the client thinks they are supposed to give rather than the answer they actually believe. The future-self exercise produces messier answers and, in his experience, more honest ones.
The mismatch most clients carry
The exercise often surfaces a particular kind of mismatch that Staley said he sees in roughly half the clients he runs it with. The future the client describes, when they slow down and answer specifically, is meaningfully different from the future their current behavior is producing.
The client who describes a future morning that involves no commute is still saving as if they intend to work until traditional retirement age. The client who describes a future morning that involves a much smaller house is still spending as if the larger house is permanent. The client who describes a future where they are present with grandchildren is still on a partner-track schedule that makes that presence essentially impossible. The mismatches, in Staley’s experience, are rarely failures of intent. They are failures of translation. The client has never asked their future self what their future self wanted. So their current self has been making the decisions alone, and the current self has different incentives.
The conversation Staley then has with the client is the one most planning conversations skip. It is not about returns. It is not about allocation. It is about whether the client is willing to make a small change in their current behavior, this quarter, on behalf of the version of themselves they just described. Most clients, when asked that way, are. The version of themselves they just described feels, after the exercise, less like a stranger and more like a person they have an obligation to.
Why the question is the leverage point
Staley said he has come to believe the future-self question is the highest-leverage question he asks all year. The reason, in his framing, is that almost every other financial decision a client makes flows downstream of it. Saving rate. Risk tolerance. Career decisions. Real estate decisions. The trade-off between spending now and saving for later. None of those decisions can be made well without a clear sense of who the savings are for. The future-self exercise puts a face on that question.
The clients who do this exercise well, Staley said, do not necessarily save more than the clients who do not. They save differently. The savings have a destination. The trade-offs feel less like deprivation and more like investment. The portfolio, in their head, is no longer a number on a screen. It is a tool for delivering a specific person to a specific morning.
“The clients who win at this over thirty years,” Staley said, “are not the ones who optimized the most. They are the ones who could clearly picture, in concrete terms, the person they were saving for. Once that person is real to them, the discipline gets easier. The decisions get easier. The trade-offs feel like trade-offs the future person is asking them to make, not sacrifices the present person is being asked to absorb. That reframe is, in my experience, the single largest source of long-term success in financial planning. And it costs nothing.”
Why this is the planning-first frame
This is the philosophy Staley returns to most often when he describes his practice. The technical work of financial planning is real and necessary. Investments. Tax structures. Estate documents. Insurance. Withdrawal sequencing. Clients eventually do all of it. Where the practice differs, in his framing, is in the starting point. The starting point is not the portfolio. It is the question of who, ten years from now, the portfolio is supposed to deliver.
Clients of Thomas Staley Maia Wealth get the technical work the industry expects. They also get, before any of it, a few quiet minutes with a question most of them have never been asked. The answer to that question, more than any other input, is what Staley uses to build the rest of the plan. Built on top of a clear answer, the plan tends to hold. Built without one, the plan tends to drift, and the drift is rarely caught until years later, when the client realizes the plan was never quite for them in the first place.
About the Source
Thomas Staley, CFP®, MBA, is a Senior Wealth Advisor at Maia Wealth, working with high-earning families from the firm’s Indianapolis office. He has twenty years in financial services, earned his undergraduate degree in Finance and his MBA from Ball State University, and received his CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ designation in 2011. Staley practices a planning-first approach that integrates investments, employer benefits, estate questions, and the household dynamics money creates inside families. Learn more at tomstaley.co or visit the Maia Wealth team page at maiawealth.com/team.
