Results of a different approach

I told recently about how I was stumped on what to write to my sister in law and her husband while they await court dates in jail. We got a letter back from her over the weekend saying how she really appreciated the letter, and that she felt it was the first letter that didn't seem to her to be lecturing and judgemental.

As I mentioned earlier, there were a lot of things I could have written. Some things would have been just to make myself feel better. Some would be just a rant. Luckily I took the time to come up with what I thought would be the most useful.

Perhaps I've discovered an effective way to communicate with her by approaching the situation from a teacher-student relationship rather than the saint-sinner mode that is so easy to fall into by default. In most cases, education seems to work better than rebuke.

Everybody knows things that they should be doing, but that they don't quite get around to doing. With some people it's more serious and important things that don't get done. The trick is to translate "know" into "do." Like Yoda said, "Do, or do not. There is no try." Having an excuse for failure still means you failed and someone has to take up the slack.

So how do we get from knowing something to doing something? It works forward through the concept that I sent in that letter a week and a half ago, where what we do is based on what we think. I believe we need to have both a reason that we care about, and a plan to get us there.

I'll be concentrating on providing those reasons and plans as I work on writing the next letter.