Act As If

Act As If is the practical discipline through which The Secret turns belief into conduct. Rather than treating a desire as absent and waiting anxiously for it to arrive, the practitioner is instructed to think, speak, feel, and act as though the desired condition already exists. The practice is presented as a decisive extension of the law of attraction: expectation is not merely an inward attitude but a signal expressed through choices, surroundings, and repeated behavior.

Definition and Operation

In the book’s account, the law of attraction reflects a person’s dominant thoughts. If someone continues to notice that a desired object or circumstance is not yet present, that sense of absence is said to reproduce further experiences of not having it. Act As If therefore requires a reversal of attention. The person must feel that the desired thing has already been received, as though it belongs to the present rather than to an uncertain future. The book compares this state to the ordinary certainty that follows booking a vacation, ordering a new car, buying a house, or receiving an inheritance: even before physical possession, the person treats the result as settled and makes no contradictory duplicate plan.

The practice begins with make-believe. The book advises approaching the desired outcome with the imaginative openness of a child, repeatedly acting as though possession has already occurred until the imagined state becomes a credible belief. This is not described as a single performance at the moment of asking. Because the Genie is said to respond to predominant thoughts over time, the practitioner must continue to believe, maintain faith, and cultivate the feeling of receiving. The desired result is consequently represented not as an object pulled toward a passive observer, but as a condition toward which the observer organizes thought and conduct.

From Inner Image to Visible Action

Act As If becomes most concrete when actions either support or contradict the stated desire. The book emphasizes that thoughts generate words, feelings, and actions, while actions reveal thoughts that may otherwise remain hidden. A person may verbally claim to want a particular future while arranging daily life around its opposite. In that case, the contradiction between speech and behavior becomes the practical obstacle.

Mike Dooley illustrates this principle through a woman who wanted a perfect partner. She clarified the qualities she desired, made a detailed list, and visualized the relationship, yet no partner appeared. The turning point came when she noticed that her own household communicated non-receipt. Her car occupied the middle of the garage, leaving no place for another car. Her wardrobe was packed, leaving no space for another person’s clothes. She also slept in the middle of the bed rather than reserving a side for a partner. She moved the car to one side, cleared room in the wardrobe, and began sleeping on her own side. The story then places her perfect partner beside her at a dinner where she related the experience to Dooley; the couple is subsequently described as happily married. The garage, wardrobe, and bed function as practical tests of whether expectation has become behavior.

The same logic is applied to Glenda, the production manager of The Secret. She wanted to leave Australia, move to the United States, and work in the American office, but months passed without a change. When she examined her conduct, she recognized that she was not organizing her life as someone preparing to depart. She canceled memberships, gave away possessions she would not need, brought out her suitcases, and packed them. Within four weeks, she was in the United States working from the U.S. office. Her story gives Act As If a logistical form: making room for the desired future means removing arrangements that presume the future will not happen.

Examples of Confirmation

The book presents several stories as demonstrations of what occurs when an inner image is held with confidence. A young man who had watched The Secret chose a deliberately small experiment. He imagined a feather with distinctive markings so that he could recognize it as the exact object he had pictured. Two days later, before entering a high-rise building on a street in New York City, he happened to look down and saw a feather at his feet. It had the particular markings he had imagined. The encounter is presented as the moment when uncertainty became faith: he concluded that he could attract something through the power of his mind and then felt ready to pursue larger aims.

A similar pattern appears in the story of Colin, a ten-year-old boy who had seen and loved The Secret. During his family’s weeklong visit to Disney World, the family encountered long lines on its first day. Before falling asleep, Colin wished to ride all the major attractions the next day without waiting. When the family reached the gates of Epcot Center at opening time, a Disney staff member selected them as Epcot’s First Family of the Day. The designation brought VIP status, a staff escort, and walk-on passes for every major ride. Hundreds of families were waiting to enter, but Colin understood the extraordinary selection as the result of his use of The Secret. In narrative terms, the story moves from a modest bedtime expectation to an unexpectedly privileged access to the park.

John Assaraf’s Vision Board provides a longer example of the same method. Beginning in 1995, he placed pictures of desired achievements, including items such as a car, a watch, or an imagined soulmate, on a board and looked at it daily from his office. The purpose was to visualize being in the state of already having acquired those things. Years later, after furniture and boxes had been stored through several moves, one sealed box reached the doorstep of his office in California. When his son Keenan asked what it contained, Assaraf opened it and found the Vision Boards. One board displayed a picture of the house he had visualized five years earlier; the family was then living in that very house. The episode gives Act As If a delayed, material form: the image survives in storage while life has, according to the book’s interpretation, caught up with it.

Personal Transformation and Narrative Meaning

The practice is also used to explain changes in social experience. Robert had been subjected to homophobic abuse on the street, heckled during stand-up comedy because he was gay, and harassed by people in his office. His attention was concentrated on what he feared, wanted to avoid, and did not want. He was taught to redirect that attention toward the circumstances he did want. Within six to eight weeks, the people who had harassed him either transferred, left the company, or stopped bothering him; he began to love his job, encountered no further harassment while walking down the street, and received standing ovations instead of heckling during his comedy routines. The book attributes the change to his changed thoughts and describes him as emitting a different frequency into the Universe.

Act As If also appears at the level of The Secret’s own creation. The film’s vision had become fixed in the mind of Rhonda Byrne, and over two months her film and television production team learned The Secret because the attempted production was considered impossible without that shared knowledge. Although no teacher had yet been secured, Byrne traveled from Australia to the United States with complete faith. Seven weeks later, the team had filmed fifty-five teachers across the United States and recorded more than 120 hours of material; eight months afterward, The Secret was released. The production is therefore framed as an instance of the method it teaches: the filmmakers acted from the premise that the film could be made, and the narrative interprets the resulting chain of people, circumstances, and timing as having been magnetized toward it.

Across these examples, Act As If is less a single gesture than a repeated alignment among image, feeling, speech, environment, and action. A feather, a packed suitcase, a cleared garage, a reserved side of a bed, a childhood wish, and a picture of a house all give the abstract doctrine a physical surface. The book’s central claim is that desire becomes effective when a person stops rehearsing its absence and begins arranging the present as evidence that receipt is already underway.