Author has motivational message

Thursday, January 14, 2010

By JESSIE SALISBURY

Correspondent

Local author, motivational speaker and former real estate agent James Goddard poses a question on his Web site that provides some interesting food for thought.

“What if you believed for just one day that everything would work out perfectly?”

How much would that change your life, the way you look at the world, the way you perceive yourself?

Goddard says he always knew he would write a book, and now he has.

“Freedom For a Day,” released in November, details one day in Goddard’s life, how he came to believe what other motivational writers had told him, and how you can be successful if you only believe that you can. That day, he writes, changed his life.

Goddard, who spent much of his young life in Wilton, where his parents are owners of the garden center House By the Side of the Road, was the top-selling real estate agent and a co-owner of Coldwell Banker Ashton-Kilgore Realty Inc. of Amherst. In 2006, he sold the company for 12 times what he’d paid for it 10 years prior. He had worked in real estate for 16 years.

Two years later, he wrote his book.

“In April, I knew I was supposed to write it,” he said recently. “In May I lived it, and in June I wrote it. In February of 2009, I went to a mega-event, a seminar in Los Angeles, and ended up working with Mark Victor Hansen (of ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’ fame).”

At that event, he found his publisher and by November, he was a published author.

“On the plane ride home, I knew I was done with real estate,” he said.

After finishing writing his book, Goddard began work on his next endeavor. He spent a couple of months driving around the country talking to people in preparation for a radio show he is starting.

“It was incredible,” he said.

For the next year, he will interview people for a radio show out of Chicago, he said, called “Slow Down and Achieve.” The idea, he said, is for people to take their energy and focus it on what they want.

Goddard is temporarily living in Keene, but is embarking on a nation-wide tour.

“In February I’ll be in Florida, then on to California, doing interviews for the radio show.”

He also speaks at many functions and to many organizations and focuses on two topics: How to use social media (“Facebook, Twitter, all that electronic stuff,”) and motivation he said. The media, he said, “is a market segment and you have to know how to use it.”

He added, “The future is wide open. Appreciate the moment. How can you be happy in the future,” he asked, “if you don’t appreciate the now? Whatever you want to achieve you can.

“You have to refocus yourself on what is important to you,” he said.

The book provides checklists to help the reader along the way, listing things the reader is grateful for, things he or she appreciates. The main theme is: Slow down and appreciate what is around you, especially those you love. Look at the flowering bush by the driveway, not the litter underneath it.

The book is available at Toadstool Book Stores for $14.95, or through The Intermedia Publishing Group (imprbooks.som) or JamesGoddard.com.

To book a speech, contact Goddard at www.JamesGoddard.com.