How would I go about changing the spelling of several common words in English?

Firstly, you’d need to copy yourself thousands of times and then make every copy of yourself spell they way you want. Then you’d need to keep it up for decades and still be prepared for it to fail.

Good luck ;-P

Talk to the folks up at Oxford and convince them to change it in their dictionary.

I think you will need to go through @gailcalled first.
How do you want to spell iron?

eyeurn

It’s very difficult. Many have made a concerted and persistent effort to do just this, with only tepid results. I have a distant family connection to one brilliant academic (he recently authored a history of English spelling for Oxford) who undertook a veritable crusade to rationalize English spelling. His proposed system, which came to be called “cut spelling”, actually looks a bit like txtspk, since it eliminates superfluous letters and is more consistently phonetic than traditional spelling. He formed a “Simplified Spelling Society” and enlisted many respected academics in the effort, but not much has come of it.

Very influential people have tried heroically to reform spelling. George Bernard Shaw was a reform champion, as were the editors of The Chicago Tribune, who for many decades used rationalized spellings of several words; hardly any of these stuck.