Tennis great Margaret Court encourages businesswomen to follow their dreams

She said many people did not realise the power of the mind to overcome obstacles.

After retiring from tennis in 1974, Court became a Pentecostal Minister and formed the Victory Life Centre, which operates from Osborne Park.

The church also has a |centre in Forrestfield and other locations around Perth to help the homeless and destitute.

Court was the first Australian woman to win Wimbledon and won an incredible 62 Grand Slams in her career.

She is also the only player in tennis history to win a singles, doubles and mixed doubles, and she is unsurprisingly named in Sports History as one of the world’s Top Sportswomen in the 20th century.

Speaking in Brigadoon, Court said it was the power of the mind and the words people used that made or broke them.

“You have to control your own mind and if you believe in something you can achieve it,” she said.

“I had a tennis coach when I was 13 years old who said to me ‘you are good enough to be the first Australian woman to ever win Wimbledon’ and that became a part of my thinking and I just focused on that sentence and believed in it.

“I made it my mantra, if you like. The mind is the most powerful tool we have and it can achieve anything but you must think positively.”