After talking with lawyers and financial planners long enough, you grow numb to the concept of talking about death. You grow numb to the phrase, “Heaven forbid if anything were to happen…” This is a perfectly fine way of phrasing it, in fact I don’t know if I could think of a better way to phrase such a delicate subject.

Yesterday, I experienced an interesting way to broach such a delicate subject. While my wife and I met with our lawyer to speak about our wills, we had the conversation take an interesting turn.

Instead of saying, “Heaven forbid anything were to happen to you…” She said, “Imagine you and children were on a plane flying to Disneyland when all of a sudden the plane falls out of the sky and you’re all dead.”

My wife’s eyes grew with horror as she blurted out, “Holy Shit!” As the room grew quiet, I began laughing because that sure was a way to break the tension. Having the risky engagement technique actually work helped ease the weight of the room as my wife defensively responded, “Why do we have to be going to Disneyland? Couldn’t it be a fire or carbon monoxide poisioning? Couldn’t it be something a little less horrific?”

The lawyer responded, “Okay. I apologize. Tom is taking the family out to dinner and he makes a sudden decision to try and beat the train. He miscalculates and the train smashes your car to pieces and everybody is dead, who would you want to get your money?”

The ridiculousness of the examples had us laughing. As I read this blog, I realize this situation may have been one of those “you had to be there moments,” but I promise you we are not the Manson family.

What the lawyer did was take what is normally a boring, dry subject and get us to relax. We were able to make better decisions once we were relaxed, and therefore the quality of her product, the wills, will be improved. A better quality product because she wasn’t afraid to take a risk.

Now before you send me hate email, consider the fact she may have intuitively known we would not be offended by such a level of banter. Perhaps it was when I announced we were ready to talk about death, as we walked in the room. Give the lawyer a bit of credit for knowing when to use such risky tactics and when they would not be so appropriate.

The point is there are times you can follow your gut and lay things out there; the quality of your product may just depend on you doing so.