One of my teachers in high school was great with chalk or a blackboard marker.

He wrote quickly and legibly, and his handwriting was also beautiful.

He knew how to draw simple pictures and diagrams in a simple and effective way. That’s harder than it sounds, you know.

But there was one sub-skill in the vast discipline of whiteboarding that he struggled with:

Write ALL CAPS.

Every time I did that, I made typos.

Charming and precocious young adults that we were, we would point out his mistakes to him. I will never forget what she said:

“When I look at a word, I see its shape, so I can catch an error because the shape is wrong. With all caps, the shape is less familiar and distinctive.”

What an interesting idea!

If you ask most people how they read, the question will confuse them. “What do you mean, how? I look at the words.”

Some will say something like they infer the meaning of symbols, fragmented into semantic groups which they then analyze for meaning…

Those explanations are true, but incomplete. In the spirit of my old teacher, let me draw a simple diagram:

see symbols on a page -> infer meaning

But that’s not how it reads, is it?

You are missing a step.

How do you infer the meaning?

Are you looking for the form of the word, like my teacher? That leaves you vulnerable to certain typos, such as capitalizing words or changing Ls to Is.

Do you pronounce each phoneme?

Maybe you have synesthesia, so each word has its own “color” or “texture.”

As for me, I trust the shape of the word a bit, but also its sound and its relation to other words. I’m susceptible to making weird typos: writing ‘for’ instead of ‘more’, or ‘you’ instead of ‘how’.

If you’re not sure how you process words, it’s not a big deal. That’s not a useful thing to learn for most of us. And it happens so quickly, so automatically, that it’s harder to tell than it seems.

Anyway, it means that the diagram above looks more like this:

view symbols on a page -> process them automatically -> infer meaning

It’s so smooth that it often feels like the symbols themselves have meaning, rather than you adding that bit.

Still with me?

The same happens with phobias.

Let’s say you have antophobia, fear of flowers. The process feels like:

see flowers -> feel fear

But that’s not the whole picture. The proof of this is simple: most people see flowers without fear.

So something else must be going on.

And something else is:

see flowers -> automatically add meaning to what you see -> feel afraid

Something happens between the flower and fear.

Something fast and automatic.

But not immutable.

This may seem strangely abstract, little more than an intellectual exercise. It’s not, it’s one of the most powerful and subtle hypnosis lessons I’ve ever learned.

Because you can use hypnosis, in addition to this perception, to resolve any emotional response that bothers you, including phobias.

Sure, if you’re familiar with the NLP quick phobia cure, you can use it.

But this works for anything from bad habits to pregame jitters to binge eating to watching.

Because with hypnosis, you can rewire your automatic responses and make them healthier.