As mom to seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong, Linda Armstrong Kelly learned some life lessons that took her from a life of poverty as a young single mother to making over six figures a year and a corner office as a global account manager with a major corporation.
Kelly is now making between $10,000 and $20,000 per speech to tell her life story, which she chronicled in her book, "No Mountain High Enough: Raising Lance, Raising Me." She was the featured speaker at Wednesday's Women and Business Conference in Salt Lake City.
At 16, Kelly became pregnant with Armstrong. She married the father, then divorced soon after, and the "troublemaker" with the "gleam" in his eye gave up his parental rights to Armstrong. By age 19, Kelly was a high school dropout and a single mother with no skills.
She found a job working in an office as a typist. From then on, she said, hard work and dedication propelled her upward in her career, which led to the upper corporate rungs of Ericsson Microelectronics.
"Lance saw all of this," she told the conference audience.
Throughout Armstrong's life, she sacrificed over and over, forking over a month's worth of rent ($400 at the time) to purchase a BMX bike for him when he was 8. She scraped together money to fly Armstrong and herself to a bicycling event in New Mexico when he was 14.
"I believed in him," she said.
Throughout Armstrong's childhood, Kelly would let her son ride his bike in the street and be on his own a lot.
"I had to let Lance have that freedom," she said.
When her son started riding professionally for $28,000 a year and was ready to move away, Kelly said she poured herself into her work.
"Nights and weekends were devoted to him," she said. "It was like losing my right arm."
She admitted that her life, however, was out of balance as she devoted herself completely to work and rose "up, up, up" the corporate ladder.
Then, when Armstrong was 25, she learned her son had testicular cancer, two tumors in his head and a 40 percent chance of survival. Her job was suddenly much less important than helping her son. The lessons she learned in the corporate world taught her to work as a team with Armstrong during his ordeal, which he came through cured and able to compete and win on the bicycle.
"I had every excuse in the world to fail," Kelly said about the early years with Armstrong. Looking back on that time, she now says, "It wasn't about me. It was about him and the life we could have together."
To the women in the audience, Kelly told them to rise above adversity and stand up for themselves, to ask a lot of questions during life's journeys and to go after their dreams, be they asking for the "big" account, running in a marathon or going to college.
"It's always a 'no' until you ask," she said. "It's never too late ... to make those changes in your life."
E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com