Investors are getting comfortable with the extended bull market. So comfortable, in fact, that it may be a good time for advisors to talk to them about the next crisis.

So says investment executive Andrew Crowell, who believes that the calm periods are the best time to prepare clients for when all hell breaks loose.

“Another correction is inevitable, so it’s better to think about it in advance, when you and the client have clarity of mind,” says Crowell, vice chairman of D.A. Davidson & Co.’s Individual Investor Group.

Complacent clients are more likely to panic and make bad decisions when a crisis hits, Crowell notes.

“Talking about corrections helps people to understand how their plans will behave during all of that volatility,” Crowell says. “It helps us not to worry that a drawdown will be so extreme that our clients will bail out at an inopportune time.”

It's important that advisors frame the correction conversation before cable news investment gurus instill clients with the kind of fear and uncertainty that might jeopardize a financial plan, says Crowell, pointing out that 16,000 baby boomers enter retirement every day—a pace expected to continue for the next 15 to 20 years.

The way much of the planning industry discusses risk falls short of addressing investor behaviors, says Crowell.

“I think we’ve gotten too caught up in the theory behind financial planning and we’re not going deep enough into the practice and in creating tangible illustrations for our clients,” says Crowell. “We’ve become too theoretical and not practical enough.”

The current market environment is like a lulling walk among the poppies for many investors. Volatility remains low, and with the exception of a few sputters here and there, the eight-year bull market continues unabated. But political uncertainty and elevated equity valuations continue to worry some market analysts. Even through the bull market, corrections or market declines of 10 percent or more are not unheard of. The recent decline in technology stocks briefly entered correction territory. Statistically speaking, a correction across broader markets is almost inevitable: Between 1900 and 2013, at least 123 corrections occurred.

Earlier this month, JP Morgan alerted investors to increasing probabilities for a summer correction. Not to be outdone, DoubleLine founder Jeffrey Gundlach also predicted a correction in equities this summer, which happens to be the season when some of the largest recent corrections has taken place.

Crowell believes that planning for inevitable market corrections should always be part of client meetings, but that those discussion need to go beyond assessing a client’s risk tolerance.

“What people believe on paper ... may not turn out to be what they can emotionally handle during volatile climates,” says Crowell. “It’s not until a client gets into this situation that you truly find out that the [aggressive, long-term investor] is, in reality, an emotional and short-term investor. When people get into the heat of battle, they realize that their inclination is to change their plan or adjust their plan.”

Starting conversations about corrections and risk early can help clients navigate market downturns more easily and make wiser financial decisions, he says.

Ideally, clients should see their advisors as a sounding board for ideas, fears and concerns about investing. This should give advisors' recommendations greater weight than warnings from the likes of Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Jeff Gundlach. It should also help comfort clients when the media hyperbolizes the threat of a correction, says Crowell.

“Conversations about risk and correction need to take place as frequently as the client’s emotional barometer dictates," he says. "If they’re still in the accumulation phase, an early conversation will help them understand the benefits of averaging in when the market is down to add more shares to the portfolio.”

During corrections, clients should be reminded that a stock market index is not indicative of their portfolio’s performance, and that short-term fluctuations typically have muted impacts on long-term financial plans.

Chris White, a Boston-area advisor and author of “Working With the Emotional Investor,” argues that the industry too often frames discussions about market corrections as distractions.

“We too often measure risk by volatility and standard deviation, when what we should be communicating is the potential or likelihood for loss of capital,” White says. “At the end of the day, for clients, it’s that asymmetric loss of capital that turns out to be most important, and measures of risk dependent on volatility fail to measure that.”

White says that it is the relationship between an advisor and client, not an investment allocation, that protects a financial plan from the brunt of a market correction.

Crowell agrees, in part, but adds that advisors too often discuss market risk in terms of account values.

“Whether the market goes up or down, the ability to reach client goals is the most important objective for us to reach,” Crowell says. “It’s not about outperforming the market year over year, or worrying about a down year in the market. Clients need to be more focused on whether they’re going to be able to access cash when they need it.”

Advisors must reframe the discussion about risk, Crowell says, to make it more relevant to the client.

Advisors who use technology to connect with clients may be at a disadvantage, argues White.

“If the market’s crashing, it’s hard to bring forward all these intangibles unless you have a personal, face-to-face connection with all the parties in a household,” says White. “Connecting with FaceTime and HangOut is useful, to a point, but you’re only talking with the person that you’ve been led to believe is the financial decision-maker. Household decisions are seldom made by one person.”

With growing sums of assets managed by technology, too many investors have no emotional backstop for when things go wrong, says White. Even as robo-advisors become more sophisticated, they do not have the tools to prepare clients for corrections.

Hybridizing technology with call centers staffed with planners may also fall short, says White, as call centers don’t establish a long-term relationship with the client and aren’t as effective at building trust.

“There’s no way you can teach a system to pick up on the nuances of a client adequately,” says White. “When the next crisis occurs, it will not look like the last crisis, so training AI to respond as if it were the last crisis will not do the trick for most investors, because it will not respond knowledgeably.”