ADHD: Programming Your Unconscious Mind
"If you don’t have a vision of your destination, you’ll never get there"
This idea of intentionally programming your unconscious mind is an old one, and the business-card-in-your-wallet-and-on-your-bathroom-mirror is straight out of both Claude Bristol (The Magic of Believing) and Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich). I did the same thing in my twenties with “successful author” and it seems to have worked for me, although I never got as far as, say, Stephen King.
Nonetheless, I agree with Ron that it probably works really well; give it a try or, at the very least, share the suggestion with your ADHD children…
Ron in Seattle uses cards to reprogram himself:
When I was a kid, a teacher in high school asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was struggling with school (now I know it was my ADHD), but anyhow, I said that when I grew up I wanted to be an attorney. It kind of just popped out.
I guess I’d thought about it a lot, but I’d never really said it out loud. And, really, I didn’t think there was much of a chance. At that time, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to graduate from high school.
We were sitting there after class, because I had flunked a test and had to take it over, and my teacher started up the conversation with me.
When I said attorney, he pulled a small pile of business cards out of his shirt pocket. They were from a Mexican restaurant in town that always had a stack of them on the check-out counter next to the matches, toothpicks, and gum.
On the back of six or seven cards, he carefully printed the words SUCCESSFUL ATTORNEY, and handed them to me. “Do you have a wallet?” he asked.
I did, as I’d just gotten my driver’s license, and told him so.
“Put one of these in your wallet, on top of your driver’s license under that plastic window, so every time you open your wallet you’ll see it. Put another on the mirror in your bathroom so you’ll see it whenever you get up and before you go to bed when you brush your teeth and comb your hair. Put one on the dashboard of your car when you get one, where only you can see it. Put one on the wall next to your bed. Stick one inside the door of your locker here in the school.”
“Why?” I asked.
“If you don’t have a vision of your destination, you’ll never get there,” he said—and I remember those words exactly to this day. Then he added, “Those cards will help you keep the vision alive and vivid.”
I did what he suggested, mostly because I didn’t want to piss him off, as his class was the one where I had the greatest chance of failing that year.
Today, I’m a successful attorney. I’m ADHD as hell, and have two great paralegals who are good Farmers working for me to keep things on an even keel. It was tough work going through law school and I had to take the bar three times before I passed it.
But I’m a successful attorney, I win more cases than I lose, and I’m making damn good money.
I can’t tell you absolutely that those cards had anything to do with it, but, honestly, I think that they did. For years, there wasn’t a day that went by when the words “successful attorney” weren’t run through my mind, and that had to have an influence on me.
And even today I have one of those cards in my wallet.