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Consistency seems to be a boring idea at first sight. It lacks glamour and excitement. But, when you look more closely, consistency is anything but boring. It contains the secret of achievement and success. It is the key to an almost magical power than can transform lives.

Consistency means repeating the same behaviors regularly and without exceptions. Consistent behavior is the opposite of erratic behavior. Skipping workouts is an example of erratic behavior. Performing all or most of your workouts is an example of consistency.

Consistency creates powerful habits; lack of consistency and exceptions mean that you have to start building the habits all over again.

Consistency allows the seeds to grow and the fruit to arrive. Regular, patient, consistent action is necessary to achieve good results. Even winning the lottery requires buying a ticket and entering the numbers.

A woman who won the US $162 million lottery is quoted as saying, that she played the same numbers consistently for two years. She didn’t play it once or twice and give up as so many people do.

She steadfastly believed that her dream of winning the lottery would be realized. Consistency may occasionally work even in the notoriously risky world of gambling.

Recently, I read an outstanding article by T.J. Walker, the public speaking and communication expert. He commented on how often communication breaks down on the internet because of a lack of consistency.

Ezines, blogs and podcasts often only last for one or two issues and then they disappear. Either their creators ran out of material or foolishly expected success after one or two efforts and gave up when the results of their efforts were disappointing.

Most marketing gurus insist that sales only come after about seven email messages have been sent to a list of potential customers.

Many would be entrepreneurs lack the patience and consistency to send out even seven messages to their lists. They are unlikely to succeed in winning the trust of their customers.

Nearly any goal worth achieving demands regular and consistent efforts. If you want to achieve a black belt in a martial art, you need to show up to one training session after another whether you feel like it or not.

I know, from many years of experience, that students who show up regularly for training almost always achieve their goal of becoming a black belt.

However, I have had some very talented students who lacked patience and only showed up sporadically. When their progress up the ladder of success seemed too slow to them, they gave up and disappeared.

When I examine my martial arts students at grading sessions, I often congratulate them for just being there. I tell them that they are already half way through the grading because they have shown up and in the famous words of Woody Allen: “80% of success in life is just showing up.”

By showing up, my students have shown that they have guts and are willing to accept the fact that they might look foolish if they forget their syllabus or perform it badly. Not every one can face this possibility and I even had one student give up the martial art because the grading seemed too worrying.

One person who has never failed to show up in the UK and about a third of the rest of the world is Queen Elizabeth II. For over half a century she has shown up at one formal and informal occasion after another in good and bad times. She has traveled thousands of miles around the world to achieve her goal of being a servant of her country and the commonwealth.

Today was her 80th birthday and most of the country and even the media showed their appreciation for her consistent adherence to duty. One paper actually called her “Elizabeth the Great”.

Greatness only comes when efforts are consistent. Champion teams win championships not because they win every match but because they consistently play well and with determination and, as a result, win most of their matches.

An individual loses weight because they stick consistently to their diet and to their exercise regime. A body builder adds muscle weight because he consistently attends the gym whether he feels like it or not. The champions do not give up when they feel tired or bored or when results seem painfully slow.

Daily efforts create habits and habits make it easier to make those daily efforts but it still takes hard work and the determination to follow through every single day no matter what.

To achieve your goals repeat your efforts every single day. Turn up in the gym or wherever you need to. Don’t be like my step brother who was once told: “You won’t turn up for your own funeral!”

Occasionally you make have to make an exception and miss out on the desired behavior. One way to avoid exceptions is to perform the behavior you have planned as early as possible in the day before the rest of the family and the cat start demanding your attention!

Another way to avoid exceptions is to make a list of your most important daily behaviors in order of importance. Stick it on your wall and read it as soon as you get up. This way, your consistency will not falter because of a poor memory.

Repeat the desired or planned behavior daily and with as few exceptions as possible and you will make gradual but certain progress and eventually achieve your loftiest goals and dreams.

Even if you don’t achieve all your goals and dreams, you will have at least become a great character and a person of value because you did what you planned to do on a daily basis. That, at least, is a goal worth achieving.

About the author

John Watson is an award winning teacher and fifth degree black belt martial arts instructor. He has recently written several books about achieving your goals and dreams.

One of these can be found here

http://www.motivationtoday.com/36_laws.php

Your child slips and suddenly he’s about to fall down some stairs.

What can you do?

“Grab him fast!”

Right?

Of course. It’s nearly reflexive, and it’s intuitively obvious.

But why would you ever want to grab onto a bad guy, unless you’re falling off a cliff and you need his footing and stability to save your life?

I realize there are some martial arts that use grabs, extensively.

Aikido, which I respect very much philosophically, is one of them. But my art, Kenpo Karate, as a general rule, sees grabbing as foolish, for these reasons:

(1) It ties up what is otherwise a perfectly good weapon. Why voluntarily disable your hand, arm, elbow, and striking ability by clenching someone’s shirt? Keeping your weapons free seems the superior choice.

(2) A bad guy grabs your shirt, so you grab his. Now, there are two stupid people in this altercation. What is this, Sumo, with clothes on?

(3) You lose blocking capability.

(4) You definitely lose overall mobility. Grabbing him is like he grabbed you. It gives him a third arm and hand, and he can more effectively pummel you with the two he has left over.

(5) It keeps you in dangerous hand range when the best place to be is out of range.

(6) A grab, unless it’s a claw to the eyes or throat does no damage.

Consider these minuses very seriously before you reach out and grab someone, especially in a fight!

Dr. Gary S. Goodman, President of Customersatisfaction.com, is a popular keynote speaker, management consultant, and seminar leader and the best-selling author of 12 books, including Reach Out & Sell Someone® and Monitoring, Measuring & Managing Customer Service, and the audio program, “The Law of Large Numbers: How To Make Success Inevitable,” published by Nightingale-Conant. He is a frequent guest on radio and television, worldwide. A Ph.D. from USC’s Annenberg School, a Loyola lawyer, and an MBA from the Peter F. Drucker School at Claremont Graduate University, Gary offers programs through UCLA Extension and numerous universities, trade associations, and other organizations from Santa Monica to South Africa. He holds the rank of Shodan, 1st Degree Black Belt in Kenpo Karate. He is headquartered in Glendale, California, and he can be reached at (818) 243-7338 or at: gary@customersatisfaction.com.

For information about coaching, consulting, training, books, videos and audios, please go to: http://www.customersatisfaction.com

Insurance Companies are beginning to reimburse for vagus nerve stimulation therapy for depression. Insurance companies are giant bureacracies who have layers of people to whose only job is to say “no”.

Reimbursement decisions are being made on a case-by-by case basis. According to the manufacturer of the vagus nerve stimulator “the first 90 days of the planned year-long launch of this medical device, the numbers of physicians and patients actively pursuing VNS Therapy more than doubled,” stated Mr. Cummins, Chairman of Cyberonics. For vagus nerve stimulation, 1,239 MDs submitted 3,234 prescriptions.

“The more than doubling in the numbers of physicians and patients actively moving towards VNS Therapy in the first 90 days after TRD launch is a testament to psychiatrists’ positive response to Cyberonics’ medical education programs,” continued Mr. Cummins. “With over 2,000 psychiatrists and 250 new VNS Therapy surgeons educated and trained in Q2, we are ahead of our original plan to educate and train over 5,000 psychiatrists and some 1,000 new VNS surgeons in the year 2006.

The manufacturer continued its statement by explaining that in terms of national and regional coverage policies, it had made made good progress with all the major technology assessment organizations and all the major payers to obtain favorable national coverage policy more quickly relative to launch than Cyberonics did in epilepsy. Four factors are important in accomplishing.

1) A rapidly growing list of psychiatrists, patients and patient advocacy groups are becoming increasingly vocal advocates for parity for TRD patients in terms of VNS Therapy coverage and access relative to epilepsy patients.

2)Existing treatment-resistant depressed assessments and coverage policies are based on extremely limited pre-FDA approval, publicly-available information.

3)All of the data and analyses that compelled FDA to approve VNS Therapy as the first and only treatment for TRD are now readily available from multiple public sources, including the product’s labeling, FDA’s Summary of Safety and Effectiveness and a growing list of peer-reviewed publications in well-respected psychiatric journals.

4)Payment rates for VNS Therapy services, such as the 2006 Medicare payment rates that were posted in the CMS website last week, continue to increase indicating that VNS Therapy is widely regarded as a safe, effective and cost-effective therapy.

In the first 90 days after the launch of vagus nerve stimulation therapy, 22 different payers, including large payers such as:

• Aetna
• Alliance
• Seven different Blue Cross or Blue Shield organizations
• Cigna
• Healthnet
• Medicare
• Medicaid
• and United Healthcare have approved or reimbursed between one and 12 VNS Therapy TRD implants

You can learn more about this remarkable treatment at http://www.VagusNerveStimulator.com

Charles Donovan was a patient in the FDA investigational trial of vagus nerve stimulation as a treatment for chronic or recurrent treatment-resistant depression. He was implanted with the vagus nerve stimulator in April of 2001. He chronicles his journey from the grips of depression thanks to vagus nerve stimulation therapy in his book:

Out of the Black Hole: The Patient’s Guide to Vagus Nerve Stimulation and Depression with Forwards by John M. Zajecka, M.D. and Nancy Williger, Ph.D.

The book was exhibited at the U.S. Psychiatric and Mental Health Congress in November 2005. It is available on his web site, 24 hours a day/7 days a week through the toll free number 1-888-VAGUS-88, and Amazon.com He is founder of the http://www.VagusNerveStimulator.com Web Site and Bulletin.

Google is engaged in a war. It is a war on spam. With new strategies and filters ready to put into place, the search engine is adding new firepower to its arsenal almost daily. Webmasters and SEO Consultants alike are terrified; fearing what the future holds for them. But for those of us that believe in the cause, the future isn’t scary. In fact, the future looks very bright.

My ten year old son is fascinated with war. He has a dozen buckets full of army men, and makes everything a battlefield—the kitchen, my bedroom, and even the bathroom. He has a new bicycle helmet that’s army green. For Halloween, when other kids were Spiderman and Batman, he was a soldier. He constantly plays computer games like Soldiers of WWII and Battlefield 1942; he even turns brooms and mops into weapons to combat the invisible enemy. War is all he talks about. He loves movies like Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, and Platoon. He knows more about both World Wars and Vietnam then I’ll ever hope to, or care to, know. His obsession with war got me thinking about how it applied to what I do every day. What does SEO and war have in common? More to the point, how does Google implement strategies that declare war on spam?

SEO is a constant struggle to get our clients’ websites to the top. We combat lousy SEO companies that give us a bad name, flagrant ads that claim they can do what we do for only $29 by submitting your site to a thousand search engines, and other little annoyances that pop up every day. Even still, my small battles are really nothing when you compare it to the war that Google is waging. Google’s number one goal is to bring the visitor the most relevant results possible in a search engine. This means filtering and sorting through all the junk out there, so that you, the visitor, doesn’t have to.

“It’s an arms race,” Steve Linford, director of the London-based SpamHaus Project, said. “The more we lock (spammers) down, the more techniques they try to get around us.” The SpamHaus Project is a nonprofit organization that posts information about the groups behind the majority of unsolicited e-mail, and maintains a “black hole” list of domains from which spammers operate. Spam accounted for at least one in four email messages a business received in 2002. The U.S. Attorney General’s website has an entire page on the subject. “Almost 45 percent of all email is now spam and that number is growing each year. Nearly three trillion spam messages are sent each year - 13 times the total snail mail delivered by the U.S. Postal service. The average wired American is hit with nearly 2,200 spam messages annually - this after most ISPs have filtered 80-90 percent of the junk messages. Some reports indicate that these numbers could increase by five times in the near future.”

Market research firm, Gartner Inc., estimates that their company of over 10,000 employees suffers more than $13 million worth of lost productivity because of internally generated spam. This is just email spam. Throw in the spam on the internet, and it’s a huge productivity drain. It causes companies financial losses because they have to purchase more high tech software like spam blockers and spy-ware removers, and it’s a strain on system servers and bandwidth.

Google defines Internet Spam as any unwanted information or propaganda that may have been received through deceptive measures on the part of the sender. To a search engine, spam is hyperlinked pages that are intent on misleading the search engine. It is estimated that 80% of search results for any keyword phrases entered into a search engine are considered spam.

During World War II, the term propaganda earned the negative connotation because of intended deceptions used to dispirit those on the front lines by Nazi Germany. Soldiers and citizens were constantly bombarded with this new psychological weapon. Most propaganda in Germany was produced by the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, or PROMI. Joseph Goebbels was placed in charge of this ministry shortly after Adolf Hitler took power in 1933. Hitler was impressed by the power of Allied propaganda during World War I and believed that it had been a primary cause of the collapse of morale and revolts in the German home front and Navy in 1918. Nazis had no moral qualms about spreading propaganda which they themselves knew to the false and indeed spreading deliberately false information was part of a doctrine known as the “Big Lie”, the theory he wrote about in his book, Mein Kampf. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that people came to believe that Germany was defeated in the First World War in the field due to a propaganda technique used by Jews who were influential in the German press.

“British and Allied fliers were depicted as cowardly murderers and Americans in particular as gangsters in the style of Al Capone. At the same time, German propaganda sought to alienate Americans and British from each other, and both these Western belligerents from the Soviets.” –World War 2 Propaganda (www.world-war-2.info) The propaganda was effective to a degree; however, it was repudiated by the Allied Powers’ own positive and truthful doctrine.

Now, the term propaganda has come to mean, “information that is spread for the purpose of promoting some cause, such as a doctrine in a war.” It’s ironic that Google used this word when it defined Internet Spam.

Google trademarked the term “TrustRank” and is working on a new spam removing model that they explain in what forum posters are referring to as the Stanford White Paper. “Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually identify the reputable seed pages, we use the link structure of the web to discover other pages that are likely to be good. In this paper we discuss possible ways to implement the seed selection and the discovery of good pages. We present results of experiments run on the World Wide Web indexed by AltaVista and evaluate the performance of our techniques. Our results show that we can effectively filter out spam from a significant fraction of the web, based on a good seed set of less than 200 sites.” This comes from a 12 page abstract, called “Combating Spam with TrustRank”, on Stanford University’s website that outlines the methodology of TrustRank.

In summary, TrustRank is a way to cut down on spam and filter out content that is not relevant to the searcher in order to bring them results they really want, by branding good sites with a high trust rating, and by stamping the spam sites as untrustworthy, including any site that links to these delineated sites. Google’s abstract says, “Human editors help search engines combat search engine spam, but reviewing all content is impractical. TrustRank places a core vote of trust on a seed set of reviewed sites to help search engines identify pages that would be considered useful from pages that would be considered spam. This trust is attenuated to other sites through links from the seed sites.” Google’s famous PageRank seems to have lost meaning, as sites are easily able to produce back links or purchase them, which defeats the purpose of PageRank. In my opinion, TrustRank makes more sense. It makes a webmaster more careful with whom he or she links to in the first place, making back links harder to get, but well worth the reward once they are earned.

Another way Google is fighting Internet spam is called the “Sandbox Effect”. The Sandbox Effect is essentially a delay of a few months once a site is spidered before it is indexed. Sometimes, a new site may initially receive a high ranking in the search engines, and then drop into search engine obscurity. They may receive no page rank, and can be virtually invisible in the search engines for up to 120 days. While this may seem like a penalty to new website owners, especially if they are unaware of the new filters or how they work and why, it is Google’s way of fighting spam. Their methodology is that in the “sandbox” (named such for the analogy of a bunch of new kids playing in the sandbox together away from the grownups), spammers won’t see the results of their efforts in the search engine, and may possibly be fooled into thinking they’ve either been caught, or their efforts have been futile. Google hopes the spammers will then simply give up and go away. In war, we call this technique flanking, hoping to catch the enemy off guard by coming around behind their line, causing them to panic or withdraw. The desired result of the Sandbox Effect is that the spammers most likely will do both: panic and withdraw; or better yet, surrender. Flanking is one of the most effective plan of attack, and the most difficult to achieve, as it requires finesse, secrecy, and being able to know your enemy’s moves before they do.

As in any war, it can be long, bloody, and both sides can sustain heavy casualties. While spammers are filtered out, some legitimate websites can be annihilated as well, due to inadequate SEO, mistakes in their pages (like broken links), or just simple ignorance to the way search engines work. It is the responsibility of your five-star General to guide you and develop your strategy. Your SEO consultant can lead you through the minefield of search engine optimization techniques without triggering any of the mines, and keeping you safe. If you inadvertently set off a mine, you lose your hard earned ranking, the traffic that goes with it, and the resulting sales from that traffic. You will then fall into the multitudes of spam casualties; possibly earning a Google ban forever. Will the casual observer see these casualties? No. On the surface, everything feels peaceful. In fact, the war only helps the average citizens and their relevant search results, and in the end, brings a better search environment for all. This is, after all, what Google really wants. Peace.

Jennifer E. Sullivan is an Internet Business Consultant who specializes in search engine optimization and web marketing. Her emphasis is on small to medium business marketing. She has written several web marketing articles, including “Hiring an SEO Consultant: 10 Reasons Why You Should”, “Let’s Not Forget About the Little Guy”, and “PageRank for Websites: Is There More To the Web?”. You can find more information on her services at First Class SEO, http://www.firstclass-seo.com.

Costs: The Ignored Remedy

When Canadian taxpayers are charged with criminal offences such as evasion: §239(1)(d); or false reporting: §239(1)(a) under the Income Tax Act (“ITA”); they need skilled legal defence counsel to defend them and protect their interests.

While the process is unquestionably traumatic for anyone charged, it is even more so, if the taxpayer happens to be innocent.

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees that, “§11. Any person charged with an offence has the right… d) to be presumed innocent until proven guilty according to law in a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal.”

Having a right, however, is not the same as exercising that right. Unless, and until, a taxpayer fights for their rights the presumption of innocence will do them little good; the proverb that “he who fails to plan, plans to fail” has never been truer than in criminal litigation.

While exoneration will be a welcome result for any accused, that result will prove insufficient compensation for enduring such a horrific experience.

An innocent taxpayer charged with such offences potentially can recover more, if they structure their affairs properly.

By being able to prove innocence, from the outset, with objective independent evidence provides an accused with a means to potentially recover some part of their economic expenditures – once the charges are dismissed.

Possible Remedies

There are two (2) remedies, which ordinarily can result from unjust criminal charges: a lawsuit against the Crown for the tort of malicious prosecution and an award of costs (e.g., under §24(1) of the Charter).

Malicious Prosecution

Irrespective of whether an acquitted accused may have such a claim, any detailed examination of this topic is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say that such lawsuits are expensive, lengthy and difficult to win.

Although the Crown is not entirely immune from such legal proceedings, the cases in which a plaintiff will be able to meet all four criteria necessary to succeed, will be rare: Nelles v. Ontario, [1989] 2 S.C.R. 170 Lamer, J. and Proulx v. Quebec (Attorney General), [2001] 3 S.C.R. 9 per Iacobucci and Binnie, JJ.

Costs – Civil Cases

Typically costs are awarded by civil courts to a successful party. Costs awards can cover both legal fees and various out-of-pocket expenses.

What percentage of a successful litigant’s expenses are recoverable will be discretionary with the court; depending on a number of factors unique to each case. Orders for costs can range from zero to one hundred percent (100%).

A particular award will usually cover only a portion of legal fees paid by the successful party and a percentage their out-of-pocket expenses.

In civil matters costs normally follow the cause; that is, a successful party will get some of their costs back from the other party, or parties.

An award of two-thirds of the actual amounts expended is routine, but if unsuccessful party’s conduct warrants it, a higher percentage of recover may be ordered by the judge.

Costs – Criminal Cases

In the majority of criminal cases resulting in an acquittal the accused will not be entitled to costs: R. v. M. (C.A.), [1996] 1 S.C.R. 500, Lamer, C.J. at §97 quoting Berry v. British Transport Commission, [1962] 1 Q.B. 306 (Eng. C.A.), at p. 326, per Devlin L.C.J.

The court does have discretionary authority to grant a request for costs, in appropriate circumstances: R. v. M. (C.A.), supra at §97; both in summary conviction cases: R. v. Trask, [1987] 2 S.C.R. 304 (costs denied); and in indictable cases: Olan v. The Queen, [1978] 2 S.C.R. 1175 (costs allowed).

The Standard

For a court to exercise its discretionary authority in favour of the applicant (i.e., an accused making the request) there must be a finding of “oppressive or improper conduct” against the Crown, something that makes the case remarkable: Trask, supra per McIntyre, J. at §7.

This remains true even if the Crown withdraws the charges, provided there exists “abuse or some other flagrant impropriety on the part of the Crown…”: R. v. Fach, Docket C41070, 2004-11-12 (Ont. C.A.)

Absent a finding, in fact or law, of such abuse by the Crown costs will be denied: R. v. Morton, Docket C41069, 2004-11-12 (Ont. C.A.)

It will be up the court to determine whether, in all of the circumstances, there is anything ‘remarkable’ about the defendant’s case, or if there is any ‘oppressive or improper conduct’ by the Crown to justify an award of costs: Trask, supra at pp. 307-8.

Awards Have Been Made

An award of costs was made against the Crown [Canada Revenue Agency (“CRA”)] by the Ontario Court, General Division in R. v. Saplys [1999] O.J. No. 393. In granting a stay of proceedings, under §24(1) of the Charter, the court held that CRA’s investigation was so unfair as to contravene fundamental notions of justice. To allow it to proceed would undermine the integrity of the justice system and compromised the accused’s right to a fair trial.

In another unreported case in the Superior Court of Justice (Ontario), the judge gave an order under §24(2) of the Charter excluding evidence, plus an award of C$160,000.00 for costs. CRA has appealed.

What About Other Cases?

This is where the planning comes in.

Since the accused knows, as CRA evidently does not, that they are innocent, they should plan from the outset to establishing a track record.

Defence counsel should write to CRA, the Crown Attorney and the Department of Justice, advising them that the facts do not support a conviction. Telling the Crown that when an acquittal is entered, that the defence will be making an application for costs is key.

Defence counsel must be specific and back up their claims with credible objective evidence to support their contention that a conviction cannot be entered (e.g., the taxpayer acted on legal advice).

By keeping a record of all the letters written, and how they were received or acknowledged, counsel will have a log of opportunities that the Crown had to reconsider its case.

According to the Department of Justice’s (“DOJ”) policies (found in their Federal Prosecution Service Deskbook), “Crown counsel [have an] obligation to ensure the integrity of the prosecution continues throughout the litigation process” (§9.3 ¶3, ll. 7 – 9). In other words, there is a positive duty on the Crown to investigate defence allegations which undermine the integrity of the prosecution: R. v. Ahluwalia (2000), 149 C.C.C. (3d) 193 (Ont. C.A.)

Thus, if the defence counsel can establish that the Crown breached its duty to inquire, or investigate – when faced with exculpatory evidence of a probative character – then this greatly improves the prospect for recovering costs upon dismissal of the charge(s).

When the day comes that the charges are to be dismissed, defence counsel can make an application for costs, supported by the various copies of the correspondence to CRA and the Crown.

With evidence that the Crown knew, or ought to have known (from the correspondence given and the evidence provided) that a conviction couldn’t be entered against the accused, they may be able to establish non-compliance with the DOJ’s Deskbook.

If the Crown’s prosecution violated DOJ policy, then arguable it was “oppressive” or an “abuse or some other flagrant impropriety on the part of the Crown.” If the presiding justice is persuaded by the evidence presented, then they than may make an award for costs.

Most acquittals will not merit an award of costs, but for those rare cases where serious Crown misconduct is present and demonstrable, defence counsel will recommend that their clients to make an application for costs.

Staff Writer
For Tax Evasion Resources
http://www.taxevasionresources.com