THE key to success is a simple one - as you believe, so it becomes.

That's the view of Marlow author Deborah Sless, whose new self-help book explores how people can overcome their problems with a positive frame of mind.

Key to that is looking at the so-called Universal Laws that govern peoples' lives.

Having been introduced to spirituality in the 1990s, Mrs Sless became fascinated by the Universal Laws during her job as a psychotherapist - and from those seeds came her new book, Beyond Our Illusions.

It's the first book that fully and comprehensively explains the laws and how they impact on peoples' lives - something 59-year-old Mrs Sless said previous books failed to do and therefore failed to help her patients.

She said: "My clients at the time were reading some of these books and coming to me saying, 'I'm doing what the book says but it's not changing anything'. Within the sessions I was finding myself explaining why that was happening.

"There would be something preventing that law from operating in the way they were trying to make it operate. A client might come and say, 'I'm trying to become more successful but I'm not', so I would say they had a belief they are not good enough to succeed, so how can you change such a belief?

"I started realising I had had something quite interesting and started writing an academic paper. It got to the point where I thought, there's a book here which might help the general public.

"Slowly it evolved. I didn't sit down and write a chapter at a time."

So what exactly are the Universal Laws?

Mrs Sless said: "The most famous is the law of attraction. If, for example, you think about buying a type of car you suddenly see them everywhere, whereas you hadn't before.

"Another one is our experiences are the result of our choices. There are many options you can choose from but you rule them all out until there's only one available to you. If you talk with a friend they say 'Why don't you do this?' and you say 'I can't do that' - they would choose an option you wouldn't dream of using.

"As you believe, so it becomes. You keep fulfilling that belief."

Beyond Our Illusions is £14.99 available from Amazon and other book shops. Published by Live It Publishing.