Do you like my new car?

When I was at school our gym teacher has an old Mercedes sports car in blue. I loved it and have always wanted one.

The Secret says that to get your dream car you must believe you already have it. You must visualise your hands on the steering wheel and smell the leather. It says that you should do whatever it takes to make the vision feel real – including taking the dream car for a test-run.

So today I did this:

Yup, I visited my dream car in a very expensive car show room and pretended – sorry, believed – that I had the £50,000 necessary to buy it. Alas I wasn’t allowed to take it out of a test-run but a lovely man called Gary did let me get behind the wheel of the car.

Here I am asking Gary something about engine size. I have no idea about engine size and can’t remember his answer but I thought it would make me seem more convincing.

And here I am pretending to look interested when he explained how many miles were on the clock. Very few apparently.

So what do you think? Do you like it? Should I take it? Do you like how it matches my coat? And my top? I always say one must match one’s clothes with one’s vehicle…

My friend did a video of me behind the wheel but unfortunately it didn’t record properly. In it she asked me if I believed the car was mine and I said ‘Yes, actually I do.’ And I did. I felt quite at home in it.

‘Well, tell him you’ll take it then,’ she said. ‘Write him out one of those blank cheques from the Universe.’

HA!!! Exactly. And that’s where this whole Secret business comes unstuck. Yes, I believe that with positive thinking and hard work I could do what it takes to afford that car one day but a cheque from the Universe won’t pay for it. I will.

The more time I spend thinking about the book the more I’m struggling to get my head around the ‘Ask, believe, receive’ mantra – what about hard work? Going out and making things happen?

I can see that thinking about your dreams and visualising them, as this book tells you to do, is really important – and something too few of us do – but after we acknowledge our dreams, is it really right a to just sit back and wait for them to happen, without doing anything?

The Secret says that it’s not our job to worry about HOW it’s going to happen, our job is just to ‘place our order’ with The Universe and be on the right ‘frequency’ but I can’t buy that. It makes me feel uncomfortable. it’s like sitting around waiting to win the lottery but in this case when it doesn’t happen, it’s your fault because you’re not ‘believing’ or operating at a high enough frequency.

Athletes believe in their success and they visualise the moment they cross the finish line but then they also go out and train every day to make that vision a reality. Would Usain Bolt break whatever records he’s broken (I know as much about sport as I do engine size) without training every day?

It’s also interesting that a lot of what The Secret talks about is material gain – the big car, house, million dollar cheques. And yes, I really would love all these things, as I think most of us would, but it’s strange to be doing it after my money month. I spent most of last month realising how much I’ve tried to find happiness, status and a feeling of being ‘good enough’ in the right jeans, the right restaurant, the right job – and how ultimately it doesn’t work.  This book is plugging right back into those old beliefs .

Anyway, these are not very well ordered ramblings but bottom line – the car is not mine.

I would have tried to write Gary a cheque from the Universe but I realised I had no guarantee card.

I’ll be back another day with a real cheque earned from my own real work.

xx