206 Part III: Opening the Toolkit
✓ ‘Can you recall the picture of when you finished your physics homework
on time last week?’
You’re asking him to make a picture of the time when he actually fin-
ished his homework, forcing him into the start of his strategy (Vr).
✓ ‘When Mr Saunders really praised you. Do you remember what he said?’
You’re asking him to recall the words that were used in order to fire the
next step of his motivation strategy (Ar).
✓ ‘Can you remember the wonder with which you said to yourself, “For the
first time, I really understand physics!”?’
By asking them to repeat their conversation with themselves, you’re
directing them into the penultimate step of their motivation strategy
(Ad).
✓ ‘Do you remember how elated you felt and wouldn’t it be great to finish
your homework now and get that elated feeling back again?’
In this final step you’re making the teenager motivate themselves by
hooking into feeling good (K) and suggesting that they can recreate feel-
ing good by getting their homework finished.
You can use this technique any time you need to be really persuasive. First,
ask a question and watch the eyes as the person responds, and then phrase
your suggestions in language that gets you the best response.
Spelling out the NLP spelling strategy
As with other strategies, every literate person has a strategy for spelling. The
good spellers have an effective strategy; the poor spellers have an ineffective
strategy.
Spelling well is a very visual process. If you class yourself as a good speller,
you may naturally look up to your top left (visual recall) when you visualise
the word you want to spell. This action means that you’ve memorised pic-
tures of words and built them into a library; you can then draw upon this
store of words when you spell.
Trying to spell phonetically is usually an ineffective spelling strategy. You may
be looking down and getting caught in feelings (kinaesthetic) or to the side to
recall how a word sounds (auditory).
