[4] At age 18, she left home for Vancouver, Washington, where she found employment as a file clerk in a shipping yard.

[3][6][7] She was a homemaker who was also president of the Grand Prairie Community Chorus, a Girl Scout leader, and on the board of her local PTA.

[8] In 1958, she entered the Mrs. America Pageant and made it past the first round,[8] before losing in the Fort Worth division finals.

[12] After having been named to a supermarket magazine advisory board, a local paper described Hadsell as "an enterprising girl if ever there was one.

"[13] In Hadsell's era, there was an activity known as "contesting", in which people would dedicate their time and efforts towards winning sweepstakes, where winners are chosen at random among those who have entered and the usual strategy was to submit as many entries as possible, and consumer skill contests, in which prizes were won by submitting some kind of writing extolling a particular product, often "In 25 words or less".

[7] In 1949, she won a Toni Home Permanent Kit as a 48th-through-168th place prize in a contest run by Skillern's Departmental Drug Stores.

[19] Nonetheless, Hadsell thought that they hadn't yet "won any of the big prizes, like cars or trips around the world.

The Formica Corporation had an exhibit at the 1964–65 New York World's Fair which showed a house where all interior walls, and many of the appointments and furnishings, were made of the company's laminated plastic.

[20] As part of this, the company ran a $100,000 contest, the grand prize of which was a $50,000 replica of the house to be built anywhere in the United States, lot included.

[19] She won the contest, a result announced when a marketing director for Formica Corporation came to Dallas to present the Hadsell family with a model of the house to be built.

[24] In 1968 she was part of a lecture series in Dallas on subjects related to psychic abilities and mental potential; her topic was the power of positive thinking.

[29][30] Hadsell received training in the approach from Silva's Institute of Psychorientology in Laredo, Texas,[31] and subsequently did teaching there.

[32] By 1973, Hadsell had received a distance–learning "doctorate in metaphysics", specifically psychics and counseling, via correspondence education from the Brotherhood of the White Temple in Sedalia, Colorado,[5][31] an unaccredited institution that had been founded by Maurice Doreal.

She championed the phrase "Anything the mind can conceive – and believe – it can achieve,"[31] which in a slightly different wording was earlier popularized by personal development guru Napoleon Hill and has been reformulated by many others.

[31] In 1973 she taught a class which covered telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychic healing at Tarrant County Junior College.