“Tell me the facts and I will learn. Tell me the truth and I will believe. But me a story and and it will live in my heart forever.”

People love stories, they alway have and they alway will. Before the written word, people told stories for hundreds of thousand of years. We gathered around campfires and told stories over and over again and they were passed from generation to generation. Facts weren’t told at campfires. Statistics weren’t told at campfires. Stories were told. Stories stick more in the heart than the mind.

You will want to tell as many stories as you can in your letter. The stories are going to touch the heart more than anything else. They are the best way to teach a lesson. 

You can write in your letter that they need to let go of the past and forgive before they can move one. But it is much better to tell them a story about it.

There were a very clever tribe of people three thousand years ago that caught monkeys using an ingenious method. The would cut a coconut in half, hollow out the inside, put a delicious small orange in the center and then tie the coconut back together and put a small hole in the top. Then would then hang the coconut in a tree by a string and wait. Monkeys would smell the delicious orange and find there way to the coconut. They would put their hands through the hole and try to pull the orange out. The couldn’t pull their hands out while it wrapped around the orange. The hole was too small. The hunters would wait until the monkey had his hand in the coconut and then they would lower the coconut using the string. Although the monkey could have let go of the orange and simply taken his hand out, he was so focused on the orange that he wouldn’t let go and therefor allowed himself to be captured because of his stubborn refusal to let go of the orange.

By telling a story rather than preaching good advice a person is much more likely to remember the lesson because all people are wired to remember stories much easier than facts.