In 1981 no one outside her hometown of Fairmont, West Virginia, even knew her name. By the summer of 1984 she was the most famous girl in America – possibly in the world. And what about the girl next door who could be your sister, cousin, best friend – Mary Lou Retton?

The famous grin says it all.

Rather than dwell on past glories that she can’t hope to recapture, she now uses them as teaching tools to spur others on to achieving their potential – whatever it might be.

“I try to look at every situation with a positive attitude,” Retton explains. “I don’t go into situations thinking maybe or probably. I go into it thinking I’m going to do it.” Although she admits that it’s difficult to teach that determination, Retton also finds ways to help people relate to how she found the determination to face almost insurmountable odds. “I think you’ve got to have that determination, that will, that desire to set a goal within you. I tell people you’ve got to take risks. You’ve got to ask questions. Only a question that isn’t asked is a stupid question. All somebody can say is no. Then you try again. If I’d quit gymnastics every time I fell off beam, I’d never have made it to the Olympics. Never. I tell people you have to seize that moment. When you have a chance to make that sale or win a competition, you have to take that chance.”

No risk, no possibility. But along with risk, there’s pain. In Retton’s determination to live her dream out to its fullest, she gave up everything a young girl treasures: family life, chatting on the phone, school, dating, proms, homecoming, free time, lifelong friends and the security of staying in your own house, in your hometown, with your own family.

“I spent my whole life preparing for the Olympics. You must prepare for anything you want to accomplish,” Retton admits. “My coach, Bela, would have us physically prepared. We would do routines and routines, over and over. It was very repetitive in workouts but we were so ready physically that mentally we were 100 percent confident.”

Special moments come and go, but professionals can always depend on competition to drive their performance. Without competition, we all would become mediocre. Competition keeps you going one step further and that’s the only way to get ahead.

“Competition is wonderful,” says Mary Lou. “It only makes you better. I remember if I slacked off a little in the gym, I wouldn’t be the best because we had such talented students.”

Today, looking at the steady gaze and bright, ready grin, it’s easy to forget that just beneath the surface, Mary Lou Retton is one resolute lady. “In my athletic career I learned discipline. Bela taught us never go into something 50 percent or halfway. When we were working out and doing routines in the gym, when we were very tired and very sore, we had to pretend that we were at the Olympics and give it 110 percent. So I try to do that still. Every speech I give, every appearance I do, I’m trying to motivate them and to make it personal.”

Retton’s journey to immortality was a one-in-a-billion shot. A star lit up in her heaven for a fraction of an instant. When you think about it, she trained for nine grueling years, two with arguably the best and most demanding women’s gymnastics coach in the world, for four seconds of performance on one event that clinched the gold for her by five one-hundredths of a point.

Does she have a weakness? “Sure,” she says. “I’m very emotional and I have a tendency to talk a little too much. I’m a very sensitive person. If there are a thousand articles that come out about me that are positive, and one is negative, that hurts me and I dwell on it and I shouldn’t. I have to teach myself – and it’s a lesson everyone needs to learn – that you cannot please everybody and not everyone is going to like you. And not everyone is going to agree with what you have to say or with what you believe in.”

Before hard work, a positive attitude and an expectation that success will come your way, you must define what success means to you. For Retton it’s having a goal and then “Doing everything possible to make that goal come true. Seeing your way through adversity, going through pain, sacrificing a whole lot, and finally achieving that goal. That is my definition.”

Turning the system on its head has its advantages, but in sales, we can always strive for more and find a way to accomplish it. It’s one of the attractions of the selling life. People who find no meaning in their work remind Retton of a report she wrote in college.

“I did a poll around the university asking: If you were doing a job what would be the most important thing: (a) that you loved the job or (b) your salary? Everybody circled that you’ve got to love your job. It was very surprising to me. But when you think about it, if you would get up every day and go to work at something you dread doing, I couldn’t imagine that. For me, success and money are secondary to doing what you love. You’ve got to live with yourself. Your soul is what’s important. If your soul isn’t happy, you’ve got nothing,” Retton explains.

Many salespeople work long hours to try to land accounts that never materialize. How does Retton deal with all the elements that are out of her control that conspire to bring her down?

“Simple,” she says. “You’ve got to take your chances and not be afraid to fail. You have to push yourself, especially when you’re sick or tired or sick and tired of doing what you’re doing. I talk in my speech about comfort zones. We all live our lives in comfort zones, avoiding risky situations, avoiding the potential to fail. It’s real safe for us. But in order to get ahead of your competition, you’ve got to go out of your comfort zone. Now your comfort zone is something that you live your whole day, your whole life in. You go to work and do what has to be done to get by. You’ve got to try to do more. Try that little new thing, that different approach. Get out of your comfort zone and see if it works. It may, it may not, but you’ll never know if you don’t try.

“I think we all know what our comfort zones are. I think everybody has things they’re afraid of and they’ll never conquer that fear unless they just take the step. Teamwork is a very useful tool. You can really help one another to step beyond your limits as individuals and as a team.

“I say that T-E-A-M is an acronym. T for together, E for everyone, A for achieves and M for more. A strong team helps everybody individually. A manager who sees a team member in a comfort zone, and sees resistance to getting out of that comfort zone, has an obligation to continue pushing for the good of the team and for the good of the individual. It may take a year or two years.

“You’ve got to find your own strengths and capitalize on them. My strengths in gymnastics were speed and power. At the time, all the other gymnasts were pretty and balletic and slender and flexible. That was the stereotype before I came onto the scene. But I capitalized on my strengths. You would never see me doing a floor routine to violin music with ballet moves. That wouldn’t have been me.” Play your best card and develop it to its maximum potential. Stress your strengths and make them stronger.

After her incredible win at the ’84 games, Retton went on a whirlwind ride through every temptation she had shunned during her training years. Reporters wanting to interview her, corporations wanting to hire her, endorsement offers from every corner of the globe, a red Corvette as a prize, magazine covers, trips to the White House, autograph hounds and a life that no longer had any corner for privacy – all this for a 16-year-old girl from a small, coal mining town in West Virginia.

But it didn’t turn her head for more than an instant. Within a few months after her victory, she was back at the Karolyi gym in Houston to train for the McDonald’s Cup. No gymnast had ever come off an Olympic gold coup and gone on to prepare for another big meet, much less win it. But Mary Lou Retton wasn’t just another gymnast. She was – and is – a very special lady who sticks to her principles and her commitment. She thought about it, trained for it and won.

To create a success circle, Retton suggests starting off with small goals. “Work hard to get your first one, then go on to the next. Keep your focus clear. I think people should set smaller goals for themselves first, achieve those and then move on to bigger and better things. Just because I accomplished my lifetime goal at age 16 doesn’t mean I’m going to stop. “

To make those goals a reality Retton uses techniques that include visualization. “I used a lot of visualization in gymnastics. If I were going on sales calls, I would definitely go through the approach or what the salesperson plans to say before the call. Do it at home. Do it in front of the mirror. Be prepared to take a different tack if things don’t go as expected on the call,” Retton suggests. “Anticipate what you think the prospect will say to you and be prepared for a variety of situations and answers.

“Be prepared to stay flexible in the situation. In your visualization, prepare for all possibilities, even the possibility that the sale might not go well. But assume that it will go well. Always prepare yourself for a perfect 10. When I visualized myself going through a beam routine, I didn’t imagine myself falling. I visualized myself on the beam – perfect. Always picture it perfect. But I would also picture myself on beam, which is not my strongest event, if I was off a little bit – and we’re talking about a quarter of an inch – and if you are off just that little bit it can throw your whole routine off and you could fall – I would visualize how I was going to make myself stay on the beam. I would find myself tucking my stomach in, squeezing my bottom and making sure I was very tight. So always visualize yourself doing the perfect 10 or the best that you possibly can be – which is getting that sale. But also visualize what you can do if something does go wrong. That’s IF.

“One person can really put a big black cloud over you. So I try and surround myself with positive people.”

What do positive people like? “I really think positive people like a challenge,” says Retton. “When things get tough, don’t run as you expected, that’s a challenge. The positive person will approach the situation with the attitude ‘Here’s an opportunity – I’ll make the most of it.'”

The coach’s crucial role doesn’t escape this seasoned veteran of intense competition. “Although I’m a very motivated person,” Retton says, “my coach also motivated me to reach inside to get that last drop of energy. With all the pressure and the situation the way it was at the Olympics, he really motivated me to accomplish my goals. I can remember him saying to me: ‘Mary Lou, it’s now or never. I want to see what you can do. The best vault that you can do.’ And that just psyched me up and I said, ‘All right. I’m gonna do it!’

“A good coach is number one a good motivator. A good coach works with each individual on the team in the way that person needs. Bela knew how to coach me. When I wasn’t doing well in workouts, maybe not making the correction he wanted me to make, he would ignore me. Not so much yell at me but just ignore me. Because he knew that would eat me up. I strove for his attention and discipline. It would make me so mad that I would do what he wanted just to get his attention.

“My teammate, Julianne McNamara – the two of us trained together six months before the Olympics – was a very shy and timid person. Bela would be extremely gentle with her, never yelling, never raising his voice. A good coach or teacher finds those qualities within a person and brings them out and works with those qualities. Bela’s wife, Martha, is as good a coach as Bela but she doesn’t like the limelight or cameras at all. When I went to Karolyi’s I was not very good on beam at all. She really worked with me and turned me around.

“I can honestly say that at the Olympics, balance beam won me my all-around title. I knew I could do the other three events, but I also knew that I had to stay on beam. And by gosh when I got there she had me prepared. Her style of coaching was in the quiet preparation and in the repetition – doing it over and over and over. Bela and Martha believe that workouts are just like the competition. We would do full routines – with a mount and a dismount. We did not work just on separate parts of a routine – just a turn or a flip, because when you get into the competition, you can’t say: ‘OK, Judge, watch this little beauty of a flip.’ You do the full routine. And that’s something they really embedded in my mind.

“So, in sales, if you have trouble asking for the order, don’t just practice that. Practice the whole sales call and then ask for the order so it’s part of a whole and not just out of context.

“The work ethic, discipline and determination they taught me at the gym have really carried over. I expect to work hard to achieve anything.”

What keeps her going? “The motivation to succeed should last all your life. Finding something in the job you’re doing that is worthwhile and meaningful to you creates motivation. New challenges keep motivation fresh. So come up with new ideas, develop new accounts, seek out new people and maybe do some cold calling. Reach out to new areas where you haven’t sold before. Be bold. Step out of your comfort zone.”