To help clients achieve their ideal retirement, financial advisors need to understand their retirement vision, as well as their financial situation. Without this vision, your clients won't know what their financial needs will be—or the steps to get there.

Here are a few ideas and conversation starters to help you—the trusted financial advisor—delve more deeply into what your clients truly want.

Overspending is often a misguided attempt to meet an underlying need. It could be the need for a thrill, a need to show love, or a need to feel powerful. By understanding the different reasons why clients are overspending, you may be able to help them overcome this damaging habit. The key is to satisfy the underlying need; if overspenders don't find another outlet for getting those needs met, any positive changes in their spending habits are unlikely to stick.

Financial advisors use traditional fact finders to inventory clients' assets and liabilities, insurance, tax and estate issues, and, hopefully, their goals. What these forms often don't ask are questions that tap into clients' fears, strengths, financial mistakes, and hard-fought wisdom—knowledge that could position you to more effectively remove client emotions and irrational behavior from the financial decision making process.

In my conversations with financial advisors, one question comes up fairly frequently: how to build trust with clients. Is there a shortcut? Maybe not a shortcut, per se, but certainly a method that has generated positive results. It involves asking clients personal questions and digging deeper into what motivates them.

As you read in When Did a Vacation Not Become a Vacation?, today, technology is nearly everywhere, all the time. That has some serious drawbacks, and unless you own the technology you use, it will own you.