5 Money Lessons We Can Learn From Ramadan

sources: BigPay

During Ramadan, Muslims are obligated to fast and abstain from any immoral acts from dawn till sunset. While fasting plays a big part of the month-long festival, Ramadan is more than just Suhoor, Iftar and Tarawih. Rather, it's an important time for thought, action and change for 1.8 billion people around the world.

The holy month teaches Muslims to be pious, disciplined, and how to maintain self-control. Regardless of religion or faith, there are certainly valuable lessons you can learn from Ramadan that will help improve your financial life.

Religious or not, here are 5 vital money lessons you can learn from Ramadan.

1. Reflect on your financial situation

Every Ramadan, Muslims embark on a journey of self-reflection. They reflect on their promises made during the previous one and look at where they are and where they want to be. What’s gone well over the year? And what hasn’t been good?

Just as Muslims globally stop and focus on how they can be a better version of themselves, you should learn to think about your own financial situation too. It's crucial that you regularly reflect on where you are financially and what you've been doing to achieve your goals.

For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, take the time during Ramadan to also renew or set new financial goals. If you’re like the majority of people who've set New Year's resolutions but didn't see it through, it's also time to reflect on the challenges and how you could reinvigorate any lost resolve.

2. Financial discipline is everything
There's much for you to learn about the immense self-discipline Muslims practice during Ramadan by abstaining from drinking, eating and conducting any immoral acts.

If you adopt the same practice in managing your money, you can definitely benefit from controlling your temptations to spend. In the present world of instant gratification, having financial discipline is more relevant than ever.

We live in an increasingly materialistic society where promotions and discounts are in abundance. Even a religious festival like Ramadan is becoming over-commercialised. If you lack poor financial discipline, you'll end up giving in to your urges and spend unnecessarily on things only to regret after you check your money balance.

Instead you should be focused on other priorities such as saving for an emergency, growing your wealth or purchasing your first house. Similar to the act of fasting, sticking to a budget and saving money doesn't have to feel restricting.

In contrary, it should be liberating; by managing your money well, you can achieve financial freedom. Therefore, having financial discipline will give you clarity on what's important to you so you don't lose track of your financial goals.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t spend on anything at all. It’s okay to treat yourself every now and then. But the takeaway from this is that moderation is key and Ramadan is not the time to go broke.

3. Don't let financial setbacks hold you back
During the holy month, Muslims learn not to give in to hunger and push through the day for the promise of great spiritual reward. From a financial outlook, there's an important lessons for us to learn about this Muslim practice.

Everyone has money problems, period. The reality is that half of the households in Malaysia do not have saving, 47% of Malaysian youths have high credit card debts and the bankruptcy rate has been increasing over the years. 65,000 Malaysians have been declared bankrupt since 2013. And the list of problems goes on...

Acknowledging that your problems are temporary and solvable is the key to bouncing back from a financial setback. With a proper solid plan and the strength to see it through, your money problems will slowly chip away. All you need is a good solid plan and the strength to see it through. This is what is known as financial perseverance - it's the ability to withstand and adapt to hard times.

Financial perseverance and discipline go hand-in-hand. While being discipline can help you stick to your spending and savings plan, it is being persevere that can get you through toughest moments of your financial life. Having both of these qualities are a recipe for financial success.

4. Cleanse yourself of bad financial habits

You might be guilty of the occasional treat yourself day but that's okay. The problem comes when you make a habit of it and soon find yourself difficult to rid yourself of it. Just as Ramadan is a month long detox for the body and mind, you should also look at strive to clean yourself of bad financial habits to keep your finances in shape.

The first step in doing better is to be honest and acknowledge that you've bad habits that you need to break. Pause and recognise that this behaviour needs to change. Overcome and don't let your inner saboteur hold you back.

Stop giving excuses like "If I had more money, I would manage it better" or "I don't have enough money to save and invest". These excuses are actually hurting your own chances for achieving financial freedom.

5. No one has ever become poor by giving

Charity is a core part of Islam and the holy month of Ramadan. Muslims engage in charitable work and donate a percentage of their income to aid. Ramadan teaches everyone to be humble and compassionate to those less fortunate. By participating in charity, we become more appreciative of what we have and understand that money can be a force for good if we utilise it wisely.

You don’t have to be a Muslim to be charitable. Whether you're generous or not, know that only good things can ever come from giving money. No one has ever become poor by giving. Instead, research shows that giving makes you happier. So be generous, share your wealth, there's more than enough to go around.

Technology has made it so much easier and accessible for us to do good. If you feel generous, check out the Share The Meal app by the United Nations World Food Programme. With a tap on your phone, you can "share the meal" with a child in need. It only costs USD 0.50 or approximately RM2.09 (as of 15 May 2019) to feed one child for a day.

Have we missed any other money lessons? Share your thoughts below...

6 Benefits Of Internships

Great way to get a real-world perspective

By BRIAN CHEAH

A few months ago, as I was studying at university, I pondered what would be an ideal first step to ensure my future success in my career. Sure, my degree (which I hope to complete soon!) would be critical for my future career, but I knew that there must be a better way to prepare myself for success in the future. Having a strong grade point average and being highly involved in campus life would be important too but there must be more.

So, I researched and found a new study by Millennial Branding which postulated that any “real world” experience is your ticket for the surest route to success. And in this study, they showcased that internships increase your probability of success in the workplace as they enhance your experience base prior to you landing your first position.

And so, I prepared my resume and locked in an internship. These past few months, being an intern at one of the most exciting social enterprises in Malaysia, has given me a completely different perspective on life and my career. An internship offers knowledge and lessons beyond the classroom that are invaluable in the real world. For instance, in school, if you make a mistake in a test or paper, it only affects you. This is the mentality that is engraved in the mind-sets of most students, and, it is this exact mind-set that creates problems in the workplace (as I found out much to my dismay!).

In all real jobs, mistakes are much more serious and have an immediate impact not only to you, but a number of other employees and potentially customers. An internship teaches you how to take your work seriously, handle mistakes correctly, and take responsibility to fix them; all lessons that will do me a world of good when I do land my first job.

In my brief stint as an intern here in Malaysia, I have learnt that the benefits of internships are as follows:

1. Gain experience in your field or industry

One of the best ways to learn about your field of study from a real-world perspective is through internships. While the classroom focuses mainly on imparting important information, there’s something different and exciting about implementing that information with real clients or customers.

As a result, you will be given the opportunity to apply the knowledge you’ve gained from the classroom in real life situations, thereby reinforcing these concepts.

2. Attain priceless work experience

Nowadays, it is rare that a university graduate can land an entry-level job without any prior work experience. With the help of internships, students can get this real-world experience while still in school. Internship programmes are a great way to give you real accomplishment stories for your resume and online profiles.

In addition, you will be able to develop and build upon some of your existing skills. Having a good set of skills will help you in future employment opportunities and give you an edge over your competition.

3. Determine if this path is the right one for you

In order to potentially avoid the cost of obtaining a degree you’re not interested in, working for a company in a related field will give you valuable insight into whether or not it is the right choice for you. It’s best to know as early as possible, and an internship can help you do that.

Internship experiences provide a valuable opportunity to showcase your skills and work ethics, and to prove your worth to a prospective employer. In the future, when a job opening occurs, you’ll probably be on the list of top candidates if you’ve impressed them. This is one great benefit of internships.

4. Develop valuable networking contacts

Another great benefit to completing an internship is the contacts you make. Networking is often one of the best ways to land a new job and to learn about unadvertised jobs. Your network of contacts will also help you obtain references for future job opportunities.

For example, your internship supervisor is an ideal reference for future job opportunities because he/she has had the chance to see your skills in action.

5. Experience the world of work

The first time you will probably ever experience the day-to-day work life in your field will be through your first internship. When you intern at a company, you’ll gain first-hand experience on what it’s like to work in an office, interact with supervisors and co-workers, and handle customers and clients. This helps ground you in a sense of reality.

6. Develop your communication skills

In the same study by Millennial Branding when employers were asked what skills they were looking for when hiring, the top answer, with a percentage of 98%, was communication skills. An internship teaches you how to communicate not only on issues related to work, but also on a social basis.

Many don’t realise the importance of communicating especially in the office environment which is different from university and to learn how to make meaningful conversations with people who are older and more experienced than you.

Developing this skill will indirectly grow your confidence, and make you an individual who stands out and carries himself well. It is a skill that will be very valuable in the future especially when meeting clients or supervisors from top management.

Learning Organization Profile

Below is a list of statements. Read each one carefully, then decide the extent to which it actually applies to your organization by using the scale below:

• 4 = applies fully
• 3 = applies to a great extent
• 2 = applies to a moderate extent
• 1 = applies to little or no extent

Be honest with your answers as the goal is to identify where your organization is presently at so that you can make improvements.

Learning Dynamics: Individual, Group or Team, and Organization

1. _______ We are encouraged and expected to manage our own learning and development.
   
   
2. _______ People avoid distorting information and blocking communication channels, using such skills as active listening and effective feedback.
   
   
3. _______ Individuals are trained and coached in learning how to learn.
   
   
4. _______ Teams and individuals use the action learning process. (that is, they learn from careful reflection on problem situations, and then apply their new knowledge to future actions.)
   
   
5. _______ People are able to think and act with a comprehensive, systems approach.

Organization Transformation: Vision, Culture, Strategy, and Structure

1. _______ Top-level managers support the vision of a learning organization.
   
   
2. _______ There is a climate that supports and recognizes the importance of learning.
   
   
3. _______ We learn from failures as well as successes.
   
   
4. _______ Learning opportunities are incorporated into operations and programs.
   
   
5. _______ The organization is streamlined--with few management levels--to maximize communication and learning across all levels.

People Empowerment: Employee, Manager, Customer, and Community

1. _______ We strive to develop an empowered workforce able to learn and perform.
   
   
2. _______ Authority is decentralized and delegated.
   
   
3. _______ Managers take on the roles of coaching, mentoring, and facilitating learning.
   
   
4. _______ We actively share information with our customers to obtain their ideas to learn and improve services and products.
   
   
5. _______ We participate in joint learning events with supplies, community groups, professional associations, and academic institutions.

Knowledge Management: Acquisition, Creation, Storage and Retrieval, and Transfer and Use

1. _______ People monitor trends outside our organization by looking at what others do--for example, by benchmarking best practices, attending conferences, and examining published research.
   
   
2. _______ People are trained in the skills of creative thinking and experimentation.
   
   
3. _______ We often create demonstration projects to test new ways of developing a product or delivering a service.
   
   
4. _______ Systems and structures exist to ensure that important knowledge is coded, stored, and made available to those who need and can use it.
   
   
5. _______ We continue to develop new strategies and mechanisms for sharing learning throughout the organization.

Technology Application: Information Systems, Technology-Based Learning, and EPSS (Electronic Performance Support Systems)

1. _______ Effective and efficient computer-based information systems help our organizational learning.
   
   
2. _______ People have ready access to the information superhighway--for example, through local area networks, the Internet, ASTD Online, and so on.
   
   
3. _______ Learning facilities such as training and conference rooms incorporate electronic multimedia support.
   
   
4. _______ We support just-in-time learning with a system that integrates high-technology learning systems, coaching, and actual work into a seamless process.
   
   
5. _______ Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) enable us to learn and do our work better.

_______ Total (Maximum Score 100)

Scoring

81 - 100: Congratulations! You are well on your way to becoming a learning organization!

61 - 80: Keep on moving! Your organization has a solid learning foundation.

40 - 60: A good beginning. Your organization has gathered some important building blocks to become a learning organization.

Below 40: Watch out! Time to make drastic changes if you want to survive in a rapidly changing world.

Growing And Sustaining A Virtual Team Takes Extra Effort

Ah, virtual teams. They’ve been around for quite some time, but are more common in this day and age when technology affords us the ability to work anywhere, any time of day. But it’s important to remember that virtual teams are made up up many different and diverse team members. And building that team into a cohesive unit can be a real chore. Here are some tactics you can implement to ensure your team is building in the right direction.

• Have regular team meetings. A weekly teleconference that everyone is required to attend goes a long way in bringing a virtual team together. Have a regular agenda and make sure you keep the meeting on track. You could alternate the meeting leadership to help every team member feel involved.

• Mix and match team members. As your company takes on new projects, don’t just keep the same old team members together to accomplish the new objectives. Look deep into your team and ensure you leverage the strengths of each and every team member. Give team members opportunities to work with people they’ve never met before.

• Stay in touch virtually. Send out a weekly email newsletters to let everyone on your team know what’s going on in the company. Conduct (at least) quarterly webinars to help team members stay in touch with the big picture of your company.

• Allow face-to-face interaction. Whenever possible and financially feasible for your company, get team members together face-to-face. There’s nothing that can cement a relationship faster and build a stronger team than pairing a face with a voice you’ve only known virtually.

10 Trust Secrets You Need To Practice In Business

By Martin Zwilling on November 19, 2014

 

One of the first harsh realities that every entrepreneur has to learn is that most of the things that are critical to startup success are outside of their direct control. Just because you dream it and build it, doesn’t mean they will come – that encompasses not only customers, but also investors, partners, team members, and even your own family. They won’t come if they don’t trust you.

In my experience, trust is the most powerful tool that an entrepreneur can wield, both inside and outside of his own realm of control. I’ve seen many examples of this in my own business life, and yet I gained a whole new perspective on how it works from a recent book by successful entrepreneur August Turak, titled “Business Secrets of the Trappist Monks.”

Turak first visited the monks for spiritual guidance, but realized as he talked to them about their business, that many of their secrets crossed over all boundaries. I was particularly struck by the lessons he gleaned on how to get and maintain trust. The best entrepreneurs I know seem to have learned every one of these, so start on these now if you want to survive among the best:

1. Become trustworthy before you start a business. We are hard wired to seek out trustworthy people, and to test others to see who we can trust. But the first step is to be become trustworthy ourselves. Like attracts like, and if you invest early in becoming a person others can trust, business people who you can trust will be attracted to you.
   
   
2. Keep your promises to yourself and others. The surest mark of a trustworthy person is one who keeps promises to others and to oneself, no matter how small or seemingly trivial these may be. Keeping promises to yourself is closely correlated with will power and self-control, and these virtues are essential to being business trustworthy.
   
   
3. Under commit and over deliver. Make sure that you only make business commitments that you know you can keep. Many entrepreneurs over-commit because they are desperate to have business constituents like and respect them, yet the quickest way to lose respect is to fail to keep commitments.
   
   
4. Be willing to make commitments. One of the stratagems of notoriously unreliable people is refusing to make promises in the first place, thinking that making no commitments relieves them of any worry about breaking them. People see through this strategy quickly, and will tag you not reliable and indecisive, as well as not trustworthy.
   
   
5. Protect your personal brand. As a new startup, you the entrepreneur are the brand. Get in the habit of asking yourself, “How will this decision affect my personal brand?” Everything you do or don’t do affects your brand, and in the long run your trustworthiness is your most valuable asset.
   
   
6. Avoid fuzzy commitments. Nothing undermines trust faster than ambiguity or soft commitments, through phrases like “I’ll try” or “I’ll do my best.” These are heard as attempts to stay off the hook, and furnish plausible deniability for anticipated failure. Don’t be afraid to write down what you expect, and what you are willing to commit to.
   
   
7. Formalize business promise keeping. This simply means making it standard practice in your new startup of building a paper trail of contracts (no verbal contracts) between partners and vendors, customer transactions, and internal processes with team performance metrics.
   
   
8. Never make people ask. If you make people hound you about a commitment, you have already lost half of your credibility. Nothing builds trust better than anticipating your obligations and delivering on them without being asked. A debt repaid before it is asked for reaps a huge dividend in trust.
   
   
9. Communicate, communicate, communicate. No one can anticipate all risks and keep all their promises, but there is no excuse for a failure to communicate when contingencies arise, so there are no surprises. Lack of communication leads others to assume that you had no intention of keeping your promise, and were hoping no one would notice.
   
   
10. Aim past the target. It is impossible to be trustworthy in business if you are unreliable in the other aspects of your life. The monks teach that trust is not a business strategy or tactic; it is the natural by-product of living for a higher purpose. If you have no higher purpose as an entrepreneur than to make money, you will most likely fail in your efforts.
    

In business, as in your personal life, an entrepreneur must offer his own trust before reasonably hoping to have it reciprocated. Don’t try to “game the system,” and don’t expect blind faith to save you. The power of real trust is that if your constituents trust that you can change the world, you probably will. Isn’t that why you signed up for this lifestyle in the first place?

Marty Zwilling

This post was originally published on this site

Six Ways To Motivate Students To Learn

Scientific research has provided us with a number of ways to get the learning juices flowing, none of which involve paying money for good grades. And most smart teachers know this, even without scientific proof.

1.   Fine-tune the challenge. We’re most motivated to learn when the task before us is matched to our level of skill: not so easy as to be boring, and not so hard as to be frustrating. Deliberately fashion the learning exercise so that students are working at the very edge of your abilities, and keep upping the difficulty as they improve.

2.  Start with the question, not the answer. Memorizing information is boring. Discovering the solution to a puzzle is invigorating. Present material to be learned not as a fait accompli, but as a live question begging to be explored.

3.   Encourage students to beat their personal best. Some learning tasks, like memorizing the multiplication table or a list of names or facts, are simply not interesting in themselves. Generate motivation by encouraging students to compete against themselves: run through the material once to establish a baseline, then keep track of how much they improve (in speed, in accuracy) each time.

4.   Connect abstract learning to concrete situations. Adopt the case-study method that has proven so effective for business, medical and law school students: apply abstract theories and concepts to a real-world scenario, using these formulations to analyze and make sense of situations involving real people and real stakes.

5.   Make it social. Put together a learning group, or have students find learning partners with whom they can share their moments of discovery and points of confusion. Divide the learning task into parts, and take turns being teacher and pupil. The simple act of explaining what they’re learning out loud will help them understand and remember it better.

6.   Go deep. Almost any subject is interesting once you get inside it. Assign the task of becoming the world’s expert on one small aspect of the material they have to learn—then extend their new expertise outward by exploring how the piece they know so well connects to all the other pieces they need to know about.

For more about the science of learning, go to AnnieMurphyPaul.com