by David Finlay (04 Aug 08)

Lorna Cordwell could no doubt have chosen from a wide range of subjects for her first book. She is a therapist with a private practice in Harley Street, specialising in relaxation work and hypnosis and advising clients on anxieties, phobias, bad habits, confidence, stress, depression and much else.

She also conducts sessions on overcoming driving test nerves, and that is what she has decided to write about. Cordwell admits to having failed her first driving test simply because her nerves failed her. A few years later, now qualified as a therapist and able to persuade herself to relax, she passed. Her book is full of the things she was able to tell herself before that second, successful attempt.

It doesn't take long to read, and it has a lot of very good advice. On page 20, Cordwell writes, "The key to overcoming nerves is is to stop perceiving the test as a threat," a sentence which is worth the £5.99 cover price all on its own. I continued quite happily until page 68, at which point Cordwell starts discussing the use of scripts, and at this point I left the party.

A script, in this context, is something you record yourself saying and then play back to help you relax. Cordwell's driving test script is intended to last 30 minutes (if you read it out slowly enough) and it includes passages like this one: "Say the word 'calm' through your mind, and feel that wonderful experience of calm and confidence growing stronger and stronger within you as you see yourself driving that car, looking so calm, so confident and so perfectly in control."

I'm sure this kind of thing works for other people, but I'm equally sure it wouldn't work for me, for three reasons: I would feel very silly recording myself saying it (in fact I feel quite silly even thinking about it); I don't like the sound of my own voice and would not be able to relax while hearing it; and I would not be able to take seriously advice about controlling nerves from someone (me) who was by definition as nervous I was.

After the section on scripts Cordwell finishes off with chapters on positive thinking, other confidence-building methods and "putting it all together", all of which seemed fine to me. But how important is my opinion? I passed my test years ago, so I'm not part of the book's target market. What I needed was to give it to someone who was in the process of learning to drive.

And here she is. Let me introduce you to Sarah. She's very bubbly and seems exceptionally confident in most situations, though she'd be the first to admit that she can become stressed out when the going gets tough. She was also due to sit her driving test on July 30 - pretty much the ideal guinea pig, then.

Actually, the timing wasn't quite right, because I received the book the day after Sarah had gone on holiday, and she wasn't due back until a couple of weeks before her test. As you're reading what happened next, it might be worth bearing in mind that the book is meant to be read for the first time much earlier in the learning process.

Sarah's instructor put her through a mock test soon after she came back from her holiday. "I was feeling fine about that until I started reading the book," she says. "It just made me feel really nervous. It was almost like the book told me I should be feeling nervous - I kept thinking about how I'm supposed to be feeling nervous, as the start of the book says, rather than feeling positive."

Despite being so wound up that her left leg was shaking during her mock test, Sarah passed with six minor faults. She decided to stop reading the book before her real test, though even if she had persevered she would not have recorded the half-hour script. (We did not discuss this in advance, in case you're wondering - Sarah made that decision herself on the grounds that "I hate my own voice!")

That might have been the end of it, but the day before the real test Sarah had another look ("I felt that I should give the book another shot") and found that some of the advice she had previously missed was quite valuable. During the test she was still nervous, but not nearly as much as during the mock test, and she passed - at her first attempt - with just four minor faults. This led her to think that perhaps the chapters should be shuffled around:

"I think that for the book to work it should be put into a different order, so that when first reading it boosts your confidence and makes you want to read on to find out why you are anxious and how to help not feeling like that. What it says is really helpful, it's just that the first part was really off-putting, and I can work myself into a pretty nervous state without the help of a book!"

So, the combined opinion of your two reviewers is this: Lorna Cordwell's book contains useful information, but it needs to be used over a long period, and you may have to ignore chapters that actually make you feel worse and concentrate on the parts that will genuinely help you.

Get Past Driving Test Nerves, by Lorna Cordwell, is published by Summersdale at £5.99. ISBN 978 1 84024 673 5. More details at www.summersdale.com.

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