ROMINE
Strategic & Psychic Intelligence
Build Your Own Invisible Council
By Karen Romine · August 27, 2026
First sent to subscribers of Notes from the Black Table.
Napoleon Hill held a meeting in his head almost every night for years.
The attendees were dead.
He called them his Invisible Counselors. Lincoln, Edison, Emerson, and six others he admired. Before sleep he would close his eyes, seat them around a table, and ask how they would handle whatever he was facing. He wrote about it in Think and Grow Rich, in the chapter almost everyone skips on the way to the money part.
This was a mental technique, not a séance. Hill was quieting the anxious, self-protecting part of his mind and giving his deeper intelligence a table to speak at. The counselors were a device. They gave him permission to think as clearly as the people he admired, with his own fear left outside the room.
What follows is the modern version. It is the prompt I run when a decision matters and I want my council in the room without my fear in the way.
Why it is built this way
A plain pros-and-cons list keeps you stuck in your own head, in your own voice. This does something else. It seats three people you trust around a table, lets them speak in their own voices, and then makes them argue. The disagreement is where the real answer surfaces.
A word on the structure, because the structure is the whole trick. I engineer my prompts to do what a plain question cannot.
Assign a real role, so the model reasons as someone with a point of view instead of a search box.
Force the advisors to disagree, because the friction is where the insight hides.
Make it ask you questions before it answers, so the response is tailored to your situation instead of generic.
That structure is the difference between a chatbot and a thinking partner. Copy it into your own prompts and everything you get back gets sharper.
The prompt
Paste this into any AI tool and fill in the brackets.
ROLE: You are Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich and architect of the Invisible Counselors technique, the practice of consulting an imagined mastermind of historical and living figures to access deeper, fear-free thinking on any decision.
CONTEXT: I am facing a decision or challenge that I want to run through my own Invisible Council. My situation is this: [DESCRIBE YOUR DECISION OR CHALLENGE IN 2-3 SENTENCES]. The stakes feel like [LOW / MEDIUM / HIGH] and I have been stuck on this for [TIMEFRAME]. The three advisors I want to consult are [ADVISOR 1, living or dead], [ADVISOR 2, living or dead], and [ADVISOR 3, living or dead]. I chose them because [BRIEF REASON FOR EACH].
REQUEST: Using Hill's Invisible Counselors framework, run my council session as follows.
Step 1, Set the table. In 2-3 sentences, describe each advisor as they sit down: their defining quality, what they sacrificed or risked, and why their voice matters for my specific situation.
Step 2, First round. Speak in the distinct voice of each advisor, one at a time. Each should give their honest, unfiltered read on my situation in 150 to 200 words. No flattery. No hedging. Speak as they would, not as I want them to.
Step 3, The friction round. Now have each advisor respond to what the others said. Where do they disagree? What would they push back on? Let the tension surface.
Step 4, The hard question. End by answering this as a unified council: "What is the one thing all three of us agree this person is avoiding, and what happens if they keep avoiding it?" Do not soften this. The value of the council is that fear is not in the room.
QUESTION: Before proceeding, ask me any clarifying questions to make sure the session is tailored to my decision and the advisors I have chosen.
Three notes before you run it
A plain pros-and-cons list keeps you stuck in your own head, in your own voice. This does something else. It seats three people you trust around a table, lets them speak in their own voices, and then makes them argue. The disagreement is where the real answer surfaces.
Choose advisors who would disagree. A shark and a softie, plus one who has done the exact thing you are facing. The friction round only works if their values pull in different directions.
Be honest in the brackets. The council can only reflect what you feed it. A polite description gets you a polite answer.
When it names the thing you are avoiding, sit with the discomfort before you argue with it. That discomfort is usually the sound of it being right.
Who are your three
So. Who are your three, and what will you run through them this week?
P.S. One tip that makes or breaks this. Pick advisors the internet knows well, because AI can only argue as well as the record it has to pull from. Ask Warren Buffett about a money decision and you get decades of his thinking pushing back on you. I would love to seat my dad at my table, and I do in my own head, but AI has never met him, so here it needs names it can study. Famous, documented, a little opinionated. Those make the sharpest council.
Karen Romine is a psychic medium and strategic advisor to founders and serial entrepreneurs. Four decades in corporate leadership, including more than $400 million in mergers and acquisitions. Local law enforcement and the FBI bring her missing-person and cold cases. She is the author of The Future of Decisive Choice: Bio-Hacking Your Mind With AI and the founder of The Black Table.
More on what changes when you put a decision in front of a machine: AI and intuition in decision-making.
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