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© Gaye Wilson 2009

What’s that you say? Practical Vladimir sits cheerfully preening seven vampires? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT????

Let me explain.

As I’ve posted before, I’m learning Russian. When studying for my most recent exam, I realised that I still didn’t know the days of the week as well as I wanted to. I kept getting Monday and Sunday mixed up, and I wasn’t too cluey about Friday and Wednesday.

So I thought about what I’ve done previously to learn something that was elusive. I remembered the technique I used in this post, which is to create a sentence using the initial letters of the words I want to remember.

So I thought about the Russian days of the week, and quickly came up with a ridiculous sentence that is not easily forgotten. Practical Vladimir Sits Cheerfully Preening Seven Vampires.

Monday = Понедельник = Practical
Tuesday = Вторник = Vladimir
Wednesday = Среда = Sits
Thursday = Четверг = Cheerfully
Friday = Пятница = Preening
Saturday = Суббота = Seven
Sunday = Воскресенье = Vampires

Can you see Vladimir? Do you have a picture of him in your mind? I do. Actually, the initial draft of this mnemonic sentence didn’t have Vladimir being practical. It had him as something else which made the mental image even more unforgettable, but the dictionary says the word is ‘informal, rude’, so I thought I should probably not put it up in a blog post.

Anyway, as with the previous post about mnemonic helps for learning the Russian case endings, this sentence is based on the initial sounds of the Russian days of the week.

How can you use this technique for learning a new language, or a new subject? Leave a comment about how you have used this technique, plus your mnemonic sentences, so that other people can learn quicker.

© Gaye Wilson 2009

There are two dogs in our family, Meri and Gypsy. Both dogs are elderly, and they have totally different personalities. Watching and interacting with them is a joy, and very interesting in terms of not just animal behaviour, but human behaviour as well.

Meri is nearly 15 years old. She’s been an outside dog all her life. She has to sniff everything. Food offered by someone other than me must be thoroughly but politely sniffed before she will accept it. She starts to yell for dinner about an hour before it’s time. She sleeps a lot. But her most interesting behaviour is her procrastination.

Gypsy is about 11 years old. She, too, has been an outside dog all her life. She loves to run, and dig, and loves to cuddle. Her biggest achievement is to make everyone who meets her fall in love with her on the spot. She’s an action dog - once she knows what she wants, she does whatever is needed to accomplish it.

Both dogs live outside, but in wet or cold weather they are put into dog creates in the garage to keep them warm and dry. They are, after all, old ladies.

When I come to collect Meri to put her inside, she knows what’s coming and is waiting for me. But she insists that we are going for a walk, and invariably overshoots the doorway into the garage. It’s only with coaxing and pulling that I can get her inside (often when it’s freezing and raining, and I’m getting cold and wet too!). That’s not where her procrastination stops. She must sniff everything in the garage, to avoid going into the crate. When we finally arrive at the crate, she will go past it, or attempt to go backwards, or even, cunningly, ask for a cuddle in order to delay the inevitable. When I can finally get her to put her front paws in the crate, she procrastinates even further by sniffing every inch of the crate before she puts her entire body inside enough for me to close the door. The whole performance is classic procrastinatory avoidance behaviour.

Gypsy, on the other hand, waits impatiently for me to come and get her, then hauls me towards the garage at full speed and makes a beeline for the door. Once the door is cracked open, her nose is immediately stuck in the gap to open the door faster, then she scurries inside, races for the crate, barrels inside, and turns around to grin at me. She’s where she wants to be. Mission accomplished, and in the shortest time possible.

Both dogs know what the end result will be. Both dogs are happy when they finally get there. But one dog will do anything to avoid the end result until it’s impossible to avoid it any longer, and the other goes straight for the goal.

Does this sound familiar?

Which dog are you? The one who will do anything to avoid action that will result in the end goal, or the one that goes for it in the fastest way possible? The first one provides endless frustration amongst everyone around her, but still ends up in the same place in the end. The other is a joy to work with, and accomplishes the goal with speed and focus.

So which one are you?

This blog is entered in the Best Coaching Blogs of 2009 competition, and has lasted for the first two rounds. Of 45 blogs that started the competition, only 20 are left.

Thanks to all who have visited and voted and commented.

But this blog currently has only 13 votes and 5 comments, compared to the winning blog, which has 297 votes and 38 comments.

This makes me wonder what the top-voted blogs have that this one doesn’t.

Is it the look of the blog? All Paths To Victory is very plain, but it’s not cluttered. Nor does it have bright colours, lots of pictures, or a banner heading. Maybe the appearance of the blog has an effect on the readers.

Is it the number of blog entries? Mine has only 32 entries. One blog in the competition has over 50 categories alone!

Is it the content? Many of the blogs in this competition talk about the Law of Attraction, or how to make money, or how to become a coach, or how to be a successful business owner. Mine doesn’t. My blog talks about a variety of subjects, all loosely connected with goal setting and achievement, and productivity, which are the major pillars of my coaching business.

Is it the lack of social bookmarking? The lack of a subscription list? The lack of readers because the blog is not updated regularly enough or because I don’t market it widely enough? Is it the lack of freebies offered on the blog? (Watch this space!)

Or is it a lack of focus? What does the reader want to read? I’m having a hard time getting people to comment on the blog (and that’s a topic for another post), so I’m blogging away in the dark, not knowing what people want to read.

These are the questions that a blog owner, or a website owner, continually asks when the blog/website isn’t producing the desired results.

Whatever the reasons, I’m grateful for the opportunity to be in this competition. I’m also grateful for the votes and comments I’ve received so far. This whole exercise has been wonderful in many ways.

Please go to the Best Coaching Blogs of 2009 page, and vote for the blogs that float your boat. Then subscribe to those that appeal to you. It might help you, and it will certainly give the blog owners a boost. And isn’t that what blogging is about?

© Gaye Wilson 2009

Do you spend hours every day watching television?

Are you a fan of reality shows like The Biggest Loser or Hell’s Kitchen or The Great Race?

Do you wish you could be one of the contestants: lose weight, become a chef, travel the world following clues?

If so, you’re wasting time watching other people live their dreams. What about your own dreams? Are you living yours?

Take a look at how you spend your time. A good way to do this is to write down in 15 minute increments everything you do for a day. If you can do it for a week, that would be even better, as it would give you a really good idea of where your time is going.

Once you’ve done your time log, have a look at it. Notice the times when you are not actively doing something - watching television, watching sport, sleeping during the day, eating between meals. What are the activities that are not contributing to the achievement of your dreams? What activities are wasting your valuable time?

I’m not talking about the essential activities of daily life: sleeping, eating, exercise, paid work (you need to sleep, eat and exercise in order to function, and paid work hopefully gives you the financial means to live), quality family and social time. I’m talking about the activities that make you a couch potato, or a watcher - a gunna, not a doer.

Once you’ve analysed your time log, and know what times of day you slacken off, and what you do in those slack times, think about what you could be doing instead: writing a book? getting fit? learning a new language? reading a motivational or business book? Playing with your children? Helping a charitable organisation?

Of course, the biggest thing you should be looking at is: what do you want to do? What are your dreams? Or, more importantly, what are your goals?

A goal is a dream with a deadline.

Dreams are all very well and good. Dreams give you hope. But dreams will remain dreams unless you do something to achieve them. Once you start working towards your dreams, they become goals.

So what is your dream? Are you watching other people live their dreams, instead of working towards yours?

© Gaye Wilson 2009
Internet marketers are a persistent lot. Once you’re on their mailing list, they send you offer after offer of stuff you can’t live without.

Or can you?

New products and systems are launched with great hype, and the aforementioned internet marketers all jump on the affiliate bandwagon and, again, send you offers you can’t resist.

Or can you?

Supposedly, all this makes the marketers tons of money. In reality, it leaves you with tons of electronic garbage cluttering up your hard drive.

Each internet marketer and each new product claims to give you what you need to become a success, to make money, to become slimmer, more attractive, a better time manager and all around good sort. There are hundreds of products available on the internet that claim to have the best system for making money on the internet.

A case in point is niche marketing. There’s a new product on the internet that has been met with great acclaim and fanfare. It is a system of making thousands of dollars per month on obscure niches. The price of the system is nearly $500 in US currency.

What bugs me about the marketing copy for this particular product is that the producers of the system don’t care about what they are selling, as long as they are making money. They say upfront on their website that they have used this system in several obscure niches that they know nothing about and don’t care about.

In fact, thinking about it, that seems to be the norm for internet marketers. As long as they are making money, who cares if what they are selling is crap?

So where’s the victory here?

I suppose there’s a victory of a sort for the internet marketer who actually makes money doing this. But is it a victory for the buyer if the product doesn’t do what it promises, or stays on the hard drive without being used, or costs money the buyer doesn’t have or can’t spare, or, worse still, gives incorrect or incomplete information?

Where’s the moral victory for the marketer if they don’t care about the products or the buyers, as long as they make money? Where’s the sense of achievement (apart from having tricked the buyers into thinking there’s something special about the product and its marketer)? Where’s the pride in the marketer’s work?

And don’t get me started on the high prices for these products. $97 for an ebook? $497 for a one hour teleseminar?

Why would you do it? Is it just about the money?

I don’t make any money online. I haven’t actually set myself up for it. I intend to, sometime, but under strict guidelines. These are:

• the products I promote MUST be connected with my core business
• the products I promote MUST have value
• the products I promote must have good information
• I must be interested in the topic
• I must agree with what is said
• if I buy resell rights, I will check grammar, punctuation and spelling etc (after all, I AM an editor) before I put the product up for sale

So many internet marketers get free or low cost products to sell and simply offer them “as is” to their customers without checking that the writing makes sense, there is good information, or that there are no grammatical or spelling errors. They simply don’t care what they sell, as long as they are making money.

I think that’s wrong.

Call me stupid, call me idealistic, but I think that’s wrong. We should be helping each other in this world. If people were more interested in helping other people than in making money, the world wouldn’t be in the global financial crisis that exists today.

I think the internet marketer who tries to make money from products they haven’t tried and don’t care about are making money simply for the sake of making money.

So let’s start a discussion about this. Is it moral for internet marketers to sell stuff, any old stuff, just to make money?

© Gaye Wilson 2009
I just finished reading one of the most appalling stories I have ever read: Carolyn Jessop’s tale of escape from a polygamous religious sect in the USA. It’s called Escape and it is a chilling account of rape, physical and mental abuse, child molestation and repression that is happening right now.

After seventeen years as a plural wife in horrible circumstances, Carolyn Jessop managed to escape the community with her eight children. She fought to gain custody of them against the considerable financial and other power of her husband and the cult in which he was a highstanding member.

How does this relate to All Paths To Victory? Heaps.

In order to escape from an intolerable situation, Carolyn Jessop did a number of things, all of which were essential to her success.

She made the decision to leave the cult.
When things became too intolerable to bear, and she was in constant fear for the safety of herself and her children, she made the monumental and scary decision to get out.

She prepared herself for action.
Although she owned nothing in her name, she managed to save medications for her handicapped son, and prepared herself as much as possible mentally for the action required.

She took action.
When the time came, when circumstances were the best they would ever be, she took action, and secretly bundled her eight children into a van and drove away, despite the protests of some of the children.

She enlisted help.
Her sister and brother had already left the community, and she asked them for help, which they gave. She also asked for help from politicians, once she was out of the community.

She fought for what she believed in.
She fought for the custody of her children. She fought her eldest daughter who was so brainwashed that she returned to the cult when she became a legal adult. She spoke out against the cult and its manipulative and abusive members, and was heard.

She followed through.
She’s now a member of an organisation that is dedicated to assisting members of religious cults who have been abused. In other words, she not only worked for and obtained her own victory, but is also helping others with theirs.

I salute you, Carolyn Jessop.

Go here to read the book.

Over at the School for Coaching Mastery, there’s a competition on at the moment for the best coaching blogs for 2009.
The competition is open to all blogs with a coaching theme or are written by coaches.

If you have found this blog to be useful with your endeavours, please vote for me!

How does this competition fit with the All Paths to Victory philosophy? Very well! If you have a presence on the internet, you need traffic. You need people to come and look at your site or your blog, and one way to do that is to enter competitions such as the Best Coaching Blogs of 2009 competition.

So that’s why I’ve entered.

Please vote for me! And let other people know about this blog, so that they can vote for me too.

Thanks!

© Gaye Wilson 2009
I’ve just discovered a really wonderful online tool if you’re a writer who gets easily distracted. I found it through Ankesh Kothari’s blog: http://www.blogclout.com/blog/cool-tool-writing-without-distraction/ .

The tool is called Writer. When you enter the site, you are faced with a black page with green writing. You simply start to type, and you will see your words appear on the screen, just as if you were in a word processing document.

Ankesh’s suggestion of using it as your home page is an interesting one. If you do that, he suggests that you will then get the impetus to actually write something. He might be right. When I went there, it was impossible not to try it out.

This page allows you to start and save as many documents as you like. It will also print your writing, or send it to you by email. It was actually quite fun to play around with it.

It has a pdf button, which didn’t work when I tried it. It also has a Download button (I didn’t try that one), and a Send button, where you have a choice of sending it as an email, or to a blog or other places.

How can the use of this online tool help you?

• If you use it as your home page, you will always get the reminder to write.
• You can use it to jot down notes while you’re online, without having to open your text editor.
• You can make to do lists, and email them to yourself.
• You can write a book, or an article, or notes to yourself.
• You can copy and paste interesting URLs.

You can change some options, such as the colour of the writing, the font type, and the spacing. You can create an account, although you don’t have to. You can delete your writing. You can even get a word count. 

It also seems to remember you when you close the page and come back in again.

Use is free, but there is a donation button at the bottom of the screen. I think it would be well worth a donation if you find it useful. 

As with all online tools, there may be privacy issues. Read the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy to decide whether it is for you.

As a fun way of getting yourself writing, I think this is a good one. If you are having trouble getting to writing, it might be worth checking it out. Here it is again:

 Writer at http://writer.bighugelabs.com/.

 

© Gaye Wilson 2008
As I’ve posted before, I’m learning Russian.

The Russian language has six cases:

• Nominative
• Accusative
• Genitive
• Dative
• Instrumental
• Prepositional

Each case requires different word endings.

In order to make yourself understood in Russian, or to understand Russian, you need to know all the possible endings for all six cases for nouns, pronouns and adjectives (at least - that’s as far as I’ve got so far in learning the language).

I’ve been having trouble learning the case endings. We were introduced to two cases in first semester: nominative and prepositional. In second semester, we were introduced to the other four cases. Next semester we will learn all cases in the plural.

That’s a lot of case endings to learn in three months. Well, I think so, anyway.

So, here I was, studying for my end of semester exam, and having trouble remembering the case endings. I searched the internet, with no luck. I emailed Nathalie Fairbanks of SpeakEZ Languages if she had any tips on learning case endings. She did (thanks Nathalie!), but her method wasn’t going to get them into my brain quickly (the exam was approaching fast!).

Then I remembered a technique that I was introduced to when learning the order of the planets. Mnemonics.

When I went to school, we learnt the order of the planets from the sun using a silly sentence:

My Very Earnest Mother Just Sat Upon North Pole.

Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto.

You might have learned it using a different mnemonic sentence, but the point is, mnemonics work.

So I wondered if I could learn Russian case endings using the same technique. Turns out, I can.

The first problem I encountered was that no-one seems to have written about this on the internet. If you search on Russian case mnemonics, you get ways of learning colour names in Russian (Wikipedia), or suggestions to use mnemonics to learn vocabulary by associating the sound of a word with a silly picture, such as associating the German word for lobster (der Hummer) with a mental picture of a lobster with a sense of humour (see German by Association (Link Word) by Gruneberg for this example).

That’s fine, and useful, but didn’t help me learn the Russian case endings.

So I decided to write my own Russian case ending mnemonic sentences. Apparently no-one has done this before.

Here’s what I did:

I wrote out the case endings for nouns, and looked at the patterns. I discovered that feminine nouns have fewer case endings than masculine ones, but that didn’t help me learn them quickly (although the same observation about Russian feminine adjective endings was a godsend!).

I decided that, since I knew when each case should be used, I should write one mnemonic sentence for each case. The next problem was how to make an English sentence using Russian letters. This didn’t work. For instance, the Russian letter “Я” is pronounced “ya”, but there is no English letter that is equivalent. So I had to devise a system whereby I used a word starting with a “ya” sound. The only one I could think of was “YAK”. As it turned out, this wasn’t particularly helpful, because I couldn’t necessarily fit the same word into each case sentence.

My first try at a Russian case ending mnemonic sentence was for the Accusative Case. It won’t make sense to anyone but me (but feel free to use it or change it if it helps you):

	Nominative Case	Accusative Case	Angry	(1)
Masculine	-	-а	Arguing
	-ь	-я	Yaks
	-ии	-	Don’t	(2)
Neuter	-о	-й	Hoy	(3)
	-е	-о	Over
Feminine	-а	-у	You
	-я	-ю	Using
	-ь	-ь	Velvet	(4)

 Notes to Accusative Case mnemonic:

1. I used a word starting with A so I know I’m using the Accusative case
2. The ending doesn’t change, so I used “don’t” to convey that there is something on this line of the table, but it doesn’t have a sound value
3. I couldn’t think of an English word that starts with this sound, so I made up a word. Hey, it works!
4. I told you this doesn’t make sense, but I was trying to convey the soft sound ь here.

The Genitive Case was a little easier, and uses the Russian sounds in English words:

	Nom. Case	Gen. Case	Great	(1)
Masculine	-	-а	Armies	(2)
	-ь	-я	Yak
Neuter	-о	-а	About
	-е	-я	Yaks
Feminine	-а	-ы	We
	-я	-и	Idiots
	-ь	-и	Ignore	(3)

Notes for the Genitive Case sentence mnemonic:

1. The “Great” at the beginning shows me which case I’m talking about, and it worked out quite nicely in this sentence.
2. This one evokes images of armies in the frozen wastes of Mongolia, arguing (or not) about the military uses of yaks.
3. The sentence reads: Great Armies Yak About Yaks We Idiots (presumably a not-so-great army) Ignore.

The Dative Case gave me more trouble and it took me a couple of weeks to come up with this gem, which I’ll NEVER forget:

	Nom. Case	Dat. Case	Dammit!	(1)
Masculine	-	-у	Oooh
	-ь	-ю	You!
Neuter	-о	-у	Oooh
	-е	-ю	You!
Feminine	-а	-е	Execrable
	-я	-е	Elephant
	-ия	-ии	Eeking
	-ь	-и	Inside!

Note on the Dative Case mnemonic sentence:

1. This sentence is my favourite. It is an exclamation of frustration and reads:
   Dammit! Ooh you - ooh you - execrable elephant eeking inside! (as opposed to making eeking noises outside, I suppose)
   This sentence works on how the case endings sound.

 The remaining two cases I’m not bothering with, because they are easier to remember than the others.

The Instrumental Case is a series of oms, ems, oys and eys, with a byoo at the end. If I know the adjectival endings, I can extraploate the Instrumental noun endings.

The Prepositional Case endings are mostly -e.

So, that is how I learned the case endings of nouns in Russian. Now, when I am doing an exercise or writing a sentence, I simply think of the appropriate mnemonic sentence to remember which ending I need to use.

Please make a comment if you find this technique useful.

  

© Gaye Wilson 2008
I’ve already posted one strategy for learning numbers in a foreign language here.

This is another strategy that will help you become proficient in numbers.

Ask people you know to help you learn. Ask your children, your parents, your spouse, your friends, your work colleagues, to write several, non-consecutive numbers on an index card. If you need to practise particular number ranges, define what range.

Then, use the index card to practice saying aloud, or writing out, the numbers your helpers have written.

Do this every day for a month, and you will know how to say numbers in your target language!

Don’t forget to learn both ordinal (e.g. first, second, fifty-third) and cardinal (e.g. one, two, fifty-three) numbers.

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