Neuro Linguistic Programming

208 Part III: Opening the Toolkit

5. Have a quick glance at the word you want to remember how to spell.


6. Keep hold of the positive feeling, move your eyes to your top left, and
   make a picture of the new word you want to spell.

Make sure that you make a clear, bright, big picture of the word and look

at it; we mean really look at it.

7. Next time you want to spell the word, move your eyes to visual recall
   and the word pops into your mind’s eye, and you begin to believe that
   you can spell.

While discussing the power of this simple spelling strategy, Kate discovered

how she often uses the visual recall section of her memory to remember tele-

phone numbers, shopping lists, and diary appointments. You can also use this

method to remember where you left your keys or to help remember your mul-

tiplication tables.

Something is GHOTI-y around here

Robert Dilts, one of the most innovative gurus of

NLP, relates his experience of learning to spell

as a child:

My consternation grew, however, as we began

with basics – such as the names of the first ten

numbers. Instead of ‘wun’ the first number was

spelled ‘one’ (that looked like it should be pro-

nounced ‘oh-nee’). There was no ‘W’ and an

extra silent ‘E’. The second number, instead of

being spelled ‘tu’ like it sounded, was spelled

‘two’. (As the comedian Gallagher points out,

perhaps that was where the missing ‘W’ from

‘one’ had gone). After ‘three’ (‘tuh-ree’), ‘four’

(‘fow-er’ ) and ‘five’ (‘fi-vee’ ) I knew something

was wrong, but being young, I figured it was

probably just something wrong with me. In fact,

when ‘six’ and ‘seven’ came along I started to

build back some hope – but then they struck

with ‘eight’ (‘ee-yi-guh-hut’) and I felt like the

next number looked as if it should sound – ‘nine’

(a ‘ninny’).

The vagaries of phonetics also weren’t lost on

George Bernard Shaw. He demonstrated that

the word ‘fish’ could be spelt ‘GHOTI’. ‘GH’, for

example, from the end of the word ‘laugh’, ‘O’ as

pronounced in ‘women’, and ‘TI’ as in ‘nation’.

He was just making a point though: ‘GH’ never

sounds like ‘F’ at the beginning of a word and

‘TI’ can’t be used at the end of a word because

it needs to be followed by a vowel in order to

make the ‘SH’ sound.

Reproduced with the permission of Robert Dilts.