Success

Success
The key to the success is to know what you want and to know how to attain it. Success also does not come through hard to master skills or esoteric knowledge, but through getting the basics right and following through again and again.
Napoleon Hill’s (2004) Think and Grow Rich makes this clear. Hill spent a long time researching the most successful men to write about their methods in his book.  He writes that "wishing will not bring riches." Most of us know that is correct, of course. However, he goes on to state that "desiring riches with a state of mind that becomes an obsession, then planning definite ways and means to acquire riches, and backing those plans with persistence which does not recognize failure, will bring riches." Obviously you can substitute this for whatever your goal is, as long as you are clear and definite about what you want. Then, Hill writes that you should plan what you are going to give back for whatever you receive, as he believes there is no such thing as something for nothing.
Then, you should establish a timeframe, and determine at exactly what date you will reach your goal, as targets need to be smart and time oriented.Next should follow a plan of action, and you should immediately take action towards you goal. The next thing you should do is to write this down. Write a clear, concise description of the previous steps that you can use to remind yourself of the pledge you have made. After this, you must read what you have written aloud, twice a day, before bed and after you wake up. As you read, visualize yourself having met your goal.
This shows us that the most important thing about our quest for success are our emotions and our mindset. It is these things that cause us to be successful, or prevent us realizing what we can be. This is absolutely key. Success is not just about what you do. It is about what you think. This is why these key mindset shifts can be so powerful and effective

Hard work as an opportunity

Hard work as an opportunity

Success in whatever area of your life will take hard, focused work, and if you don’t know this you need to change your mindset to reflect this simple, unalterable fact. It is true that in contemporary society we are fans of immediate gratification, wanting the quick buck, the fifteen minutes of fame. However, genuine success and innovation requires hours of graft and elbow grease.

Take the story Colonel Sanders (Young, 2016). When most people would be looking back on a life well lived and thinking about drawing their pension, Colonel Sanders developed a recipe for fried chicken and he took it on the road to try and sell it. He was told no by a 1000 or more restaurants before he was told yes. Now you would have to search long and hard before you found someone who didn’t know what “finger lickin’ good” meant.

Another example of this hard work and drive is Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz. He must drink a lot of coffee to work as hard as he does! Rumour has it that he gets to work at 6am and stays until 7am. He doesn’t stop at weekends, Skyping employees in different time zones during closing time and from home and generally working around the clock. Likewise, Tim Cook must have found it hard to fill the shoes of Steve Jobs. However, he got the top job at Apple for a reason. Apparently, he has always been a hard worker. It is said that he starts sending emails at the unreal hour of 4:30am! Most at the company say he's the first in to arrive at the office and the last to leave. Likewise, he used to hold full meetings on Sunday night in order to be ready for Monday. These two examples illustrate that to be successful you need to work hard and commit to your goal, and if you are looking for immediate gratification or a quick fix, then you have to change your mindset.
So, to recap, success is a long road and the journey will sometimes be tough. Know though that these small mindset tweaks will provide strategies that can help you on this journey. Not only will they help you reach your destination, they will also enable you to plan the journey more effectively.  So, from one to fifteen:
1.Don’t see challenge as a chore, but as a sign that you are operating outside of your comfort zone, and learning.
2.Focus on the process, and then the end goals will take care of themselves.
3. Never underestimate the power of practice, as this is what makes success, not raw talent.
4.Plan, make prototypes. You may not get it right first time, and that is fine.
5.Be eager for discovery
6.Believe you can achieve
7.Don’t think that success = rich
8.Condition yourself for success
9.Value the important over the urgent
10.Do things today
11.Value others
12. Be thankful
13. Improve yourself and your life will improve
14. Don’t beat yourself up
15.See hard work as an opportunity.

Self - improvisation

One of the mindset shift is to focus on improving yourself.
Many believe that focusing on improving yourself, rather than external things such as your job or your bank balance, will lead you to greater success. Strategies for self-improvement can be incredibly simple: eating more nutritious food, going to the gym, and getting enough sleep are all extremely effective. However, a proven strategy to improve your life that is backed up by a huge number of experts and various studies is the practice of meditation and mindfulness.

 Meditation is an extremely effective self-improvement method, and it can enrich your whole life. It has been known to reduce anxiety and has been used for millennia by a myriad as different civilizations, as most spiritual and religious groups have meditation as a way to connect with and centre yourself.

 Meditation improves your cardio vascular fitness, encourages your body to more quickly recover from illness and injury, and has countless other health benefits.
World-renowned neuroscientist Richie Davidson (Wolkin, 2015) has shown through his research that practicing meditation can actually change the structure of your brain. Scientists have discovered increased grey matter in the prefrontal cortex of those who meditate. This part of the brain is in charge of executive function, i.e. planning, and it is easy to see how development in this area of your brain will help you be more successful.  Likewise, practicing mindfulness and meditation will allow you to focus more on the present, which will stop you putting things off until tomorrow. Some believe that if there is one thing that you are going to pursue to improve yourself, then meditation is the thing.

 As well as this vitally important strategy for self-improvement, Learning Mind (Guest, 2015) suggests some simple strategies for improving yourself than can lead to greater success in any area of your life. One of these is to start your morning in a way that is fresh and lively, by eating a nutritious breakfast and where possible exercising. This is something that Tony Robbins (Meier, 2015) also recommends when he suggests people commit to ‘an hour of power’ (of fifteen minutes to fulfillment or thirty minutes to thrive) in the morning. This will keep you juiced and productive for the rest of the day. The second recommendation by learning mind is to ensure you take some free time no matter how busy you are, or how tight your deadlines are. This will help you to recharge your batteries for your next workday...

Learning assessment

The Assessment for Learning is the process of seeking and interpreting evidence for use by learners and their teachers to decide where the learners are in their learning, where they need to go and how best to get there. Nine Principles of Good Practice for Assessing for Learning:

i) The assessment of student learning begins with educational values. Assessment is not an
end in itself but a vehicle for educational improvement. Its effective practice, then, begins with and enacts a vision of the kinds of learning we most value for students and strive to help them
achieve. Educational values should drive not only what we choose to assess but also how we do so.

ii) Assessment is most effective when it reflects an understanding of learning:
as multidimensional, integrated, and revealed in performance over time. Learning is a complex process. It entails not only what students know but what they can do with what they know; it
involves not only knowledge and abilities but values, attitudes, and habits of mind that affect both academic success and performance beyond the classroom. Assessment should reflect these
understandings by employing a diverse array of methods, including those that call for actual performance, using them over time so as to reveal change, growth, and increasing degrees of integration.

iii) Assessment works best when the programs it seeks to improve have clear, explicitly stated purposes. Assessment is a goal-oriented process. It entails comparing educational performance with educational purposes and expectations -- those derived from the institution's
mission, from faculty intentions in program and course design, and from knowledge of students' own goals.

iv) Assessment requires attention to outcomes but also an equally to the experiences that lead to those outcomes. Information about outcomes is of high importance; where students "end up" matters greatly. But to improve outcomes, we need to know about student experience along the way -- about the curricula, teaching, and kind of student effort that lead to particular outcomes. Assessment can help us understand which students learn best under what conditions; with such knowledge comes the capacity to improve the whole of their learning.

v) Assessment works best when it is ongoing not episodic. Assessment is a process whose power is cumulative. Though isolated, "one-shot" assessment can be better than none, improvement is best fostered when assessment entails a linked series of activities undertaken over time. This may mean tracking the process of individual students, or of cohorts of students; it may mean collecting the same examples of student performance or using the same instrument semester after semester. The point is to monitor progress toward intended goals in a spirit of continuous improvement.

vi) Assessment fosters wider improvement when representatives from across the educational community are involved. Student learning is a campus-wide responsibility, and assessment is a way of enacting that responsibility. Thus, while assessment efforts may start small, the aim over time is to involve people from across the educational community. Faculty play an especially important role, but assessment's questions can't be fully addressed without participation by student-affairs educators, librarians, administrators, and students. Assessment may also involve individuals from beyond the campus (alumni/ae, trustees, employers) whose experience can enrich the sense of appropriate aims and standards for learning.

vii) Assessment makes a difference when it begins with issues of use and illuminates questions that people really care about. Assessment recognizes the value of information in the process of improvement. But to be useful, information must be connected to issues or questions that people really care about. This implies assessment approaches that produce evidence that
relevant parties will find credible, suggestive, and applicable to decisions that need to be made. It means thinking in advance about how the information will be used, and by whom. The point of
assessment is not to gather data and return "results"; it is a process that starts with the questions of decision-makers, that involves them in the gathering and interpreting of data, and that informs
and helps guide continuous improvement.

viii) Assessment is most likely to lead to improvement when it is part of a larger set of conditions that promote change. Assessment alone changes little. Its greatest contribution comes on campuses where the quality of teaching and learning is visibly valued and worked at. On such campuses, the push to improve educational performance is a visible and primary goal of leadership; improving the quality of undergraduate education is central to the institution's
planning, budgeting, and personnel decisions.

ix) Assessment through educators meet responsibilities to students and to the public. There is a compelling public stake in education. As educators, we have a responsibility to the publicsnthat support or depend on us to provide information about the ways in which our students meet goals and expectations. But that responsibility goes beyond the reporting of such information; our deeper obligation -- to ourselves, our students, and society -- is to improve. Those to whom educators are accountable have a corresponding obligation to support such attempts at improvement. There are ten Categories of Assessment Techniques.

I) Assessing Prior Knowledge, Recall, and Understanding Techniques in this category assess content learning; that is, how well students are learning the content of the particular subject they are studying.
II) Assessing Skill in Analysis and Critical Thinking Techniques in this category assess procedural learning; that is, students' skills at analyzing
information or questions or problems to understand more fully or solve more effectively.
III) Assessing Skill in Synthesis and Critical Thinking
Techniques in this category stimulate students to create, and allow faculty to assess original intellectual products that result from a synthesis of the course content and the students' intelligence, judgment, knowledge, and skills.
.IV) Assessing Skill in Problem Solving
Techniques in this category allow faculty to assess and promote problemsolving skills of various kinds.
V) Assessing Skill in Application and Performance Techniques in this category assess conditional knowledge; that is, students' understanding of when and where to apply what has been learned. VI)Assessing Students' Awareness of Their Attitudes and Values
Techniques in this category are designed to help faculty better understand and more effectively promote the development of attitudes, opinions, values, and self-awareness. VII)Assessing Students' Self-Awareness as Learners Techniques in this category focus on students' awareness of goals, interests, or ways of learning.
VIII) Assessing Course-Related Learning and Study Skills, Strategies, and Behaviors Techniques in this category focus attention on the ways students carry out their work; that is, the
actual behaviors in which they engage as they try to learn.
IX)Assessing Learner Reactions to Teachers and Teaching
Techniques in this category provide context-specific and teacher-specific feedback that can be used to improve teaching.
X) Assessing Learner Reactions to Class Activities, Assignments, and Materials
Techniques in this category are designed to provide faculty information that will help improve course materials and assignments. Some assessment methods can also cover more than one level of learning at the same time, depending upon how well the objective or learning outcome has been written.

How To Build Trust With Your Employees

As a leader, what can you do to create a culture of trust within your team?

"Trust is an essential element of team productivity. Without it, you're unlikely to get anything meaningful done. But with it, teams can accomplish everything they set out to do... and more.

As a leader, it's important that you set an example. Show your team members how critical trust is to you by demonstrating your trust in them, as well as in your colleagues.

Next, make an effort to help everyone get to know each other on a personal level. Encourage conversations on values, family, or hobbies. Last, discourage cliques, if you feel that they're damaging to the group's trust and morale."

1. Lead by Example
If you want to build trust within your team, then lead by example, and show your people that you trust others. This means trusting your team, your colleagues, and your boss. Never forget that your team members are always watching and taking cues from you – take the opportunity to show them what trust in others really looks like.

If you manage a virtual team, aim to treat your team members just as you would if you were working face to face. This means making every effort to be on time for conference calls or video chats and letting your remote team members know when you'll be absent or on vacation.

It's important to follow through on the promises you make and to set an example for everyone else. Keeping your promises is incredibly important in a virtual team because your word is often all you can give. Positive follow-through builds trust quickly and can raise the entire group's tone and expectations.

2. Communicate Openly
Open communication is essential for building trust. You need to get everyone on your team talking to one another in an honest, meaningful way, and you can use several strategies to accomplish this.

First, create a team charter to define the purpose of the team, as well as each person's role. Present this charter at the first team meeting, and encourage each team member to ask questions, and discuss his or her expectations.

Next, consider organizing team building exercises. When chosen carefully and planned well, these exercises can help "break the ice" and encourage people to open up and start communicating.

Meet regularly, so that all team members have a chance to talk about their progress, and discuss any problems that they're experiencing. This is an important part of getting to know each other. It also creates opportunities for team members to talk, and to help one another solve problems.
Make sure that you "walk the talk" here: whenever you have important or relevant information to share, do so immediately. Demonstrate that open communication is important to you by consistently sharing with the group. The more you share with your team members, and thereby prove that you have no hidden agenda, the more comfortable they'll feel trusting you and each other.

3. Know Each Other Personally
One way to build trust is to encourage your team members to see their colleagues as people. Think about creating situations that help them to share personal stories, and to bond.

Do this by asking sensitively about their family, or about their hobbies. Start by sharing some personal information about yourself, and then ask someone else about a hobby, or a musical interest.

Another way to get the team acquainted, and to form stronger bonds, is to socialize after work or at lunch.

For example, you could set aside time each week for informal group discussions. Consider asking team members to put forward suggestions on topics you could all cover. To start with, you could start a discussion around values. Share some of your own values, and encourage others to share theirs. Values are important to most people, and starting a conversation that allows people to share them highlights your team's humanity.

If your team works remotely, schedule an online "meet and greet" if it's a new team, to help everyone get to know one another as individuals. Ask everyone to write a paragraph or two in their online profiles about their expertise and skills, their personal history, and their interests, and use chat or instant-messaging applications to keep the channels of communication open.

4. Don't Place Blame
When people work together, honest mistakes and disappointments happen, and it's easy to blame someone who causes these. However, when everyone starts pointing fingers, an unpleasant atmosphere can quickly develop. This lowers morale, undermines trust, and is ultimately unproductive.

Instead, encourage everyone in your group to think about the mistake in a constructive way. What can you all do to fix what happened, and move forward together? And how can you make sure that this mistake doesn't happen again?

5. Discourage Cliques
Sometimes, cliques can form within a team, often between team members who share common interests or work tasks. However, these groups can – even inadvertently – make others feel isolated. They can also undermine trust between group members.

Start an open discussion about this with your team members, and see what they think about cliques and their effect on other group members. Only by addressing the issue openly can you discourage this damaging behavior.

6. Discuss Trust Issues
If you manage an established team that has trust issues, it's essential to find out how these problems originate, so that you can come up with a strategy for overcoming them.

Consider giving team members a questionnaire to fill out anonymously. Ask them about the level of trust within the group, as well as why they think there's a lack of trust. Once you've read the results, get everyone together to talk about these issues (but make sure that you respect the anonymity of the survey!)

Marks are neither the measure of Education nor the Success….

Every year, the CBSE 12th Class Result  come as an Eye opener to all of us and the bitter reality dawn  on us about the stress and the pressure which has become an indispensable part of our children’s lives…
Thousands of students across India securing above 95℅, is compelling enough to make us sit together to introspect the situation.
The admission to many prestigious Colleges and Universities is becoming much tougher every year  with a large no.of students securing 95% and above.
Then what about the students who have not been able to fare well?
Where is it going to take our children to?
Shouldn’t we consider some other options, other than the traditional ones, Engineering, Medical or MBA?
Marks or the knowledge without creativity is meaningless.
if knowledge is the tool in one’s hands, creativity is the expertise or the skill to use it effectively.
So, one must try to acquire one or the other skill which fascinates him the most and should try his level best to attain proficiency of higher order in it.
When one’s hobby or anything of his interest becomes his profession, nobody or nothing can stop him from reaching the top rung of the ladder of success.
We can find hundreds of such examples of such people around us who are excelling in their respective fields as they chose their hobby or the area of their utmost interest and had even developed and groomed it to the fullest without bothering about their marks or their rank in the school, state or the Board.
The most glaring example is that of the Great Physicist and Nobel Laureate, Elbert Einstein, who was compelled to leave the school as he resisted the traditional methods of teaching with undue emphasis on memorization and rote learning only. There was no room at all for creativity or imagination.
And the rest is history. The theory of Relativity, as invented by him, is the basis of all the nuclear operations.
To sum it up, the students must sharpen their creativity or imagination, hone their skills in the areas of their interest and the rest will come to them naturally, effortlessly, whether good marks, high rank or admission in any course in any prestigious College or University!!!!

Significance of Eid- Milad - un - Nabi

Eid Milad un Nabi or Mawlid Al-Nabi Al-Sharif is being observed by people across the world. The festival marks the birthday of Prophet Mohammed, The founder of Islam, also believed to be a messenger of God by Muslims. His birth anniversary is commemorated in the month of Rabi' ul-awwal- the third month in the Islamic calendar.

The festival is recognized as a national holiday in a number of Muslim-majority countries. 'Mawlid' is derived from Arabic and it means 'birth'. However, in contemporary usage, it is commonly referred to as observance of the birthday of Prophet Mohammed. Mawlid Al-Nabi Al-Sharif is observed in India, among other countries like Sri Lanka, Canada, United Kingdom, Nigeria, France, Italy, Germany and Russia. The celebrations of Mawlid see followers take out large street processions and homes and mosques may be decorated to mark the day.

The events for Milad or Mawlid may vary according to the country, but in general the day is observed by Muslims on the 12th or the 17th day of the Rabi' ul-awwal Islamic month. While 12th Rabi' ul-awwal is the accepted date among most of the Sunni scholars, Shi'a scholars regard 17th Rabi' ul-awwal as the accepted date.

The most important aspect of the day is to focus on the teachings of Prophet Mohammed. Families gather together and prepare a feast, which is then served to the guests and is also meant to be donated to the poor. Donating to charity is also considered an important aspect of the Eid- e-Milad-un-Nabi.

Apart from decorations and illuminations of mosques and houses at night, people also engage in singing salutations and songs in the praise of Prophet Mohammed. Different kinds of foods and dishes are prepared during Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi, among which desserts have a special importance. In Tunisia, a dessert prepared from honey, Smen (a type of fermented butter) and semolina is usually prepared during Mawlid.

Desserts play a big role in Mawlid observance. There is no singular recipe to prepare thairda and the dish has multiple variations and versions in different parts of the world. Honey is said to be the sweetener of choice, during this time. Other desserts served during Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi include Bakhlava and rice or semolina puddings. Tharid or tharida, may also be prepared during Mawlid. Tharida is an Arabic soup dish, which is prepared from broth, stewed meat and bread crumbs. The bread crumbs are roughly crumbled using one's fingers and added to the dish, in order to thicken the soup.

May the magic of this Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi bring lots of happiness in your life! May your heart be filled with love of Mohammad and joy of sharing!

‘EID’ is the combination of 3 meaningful words:
E – Embrace with open heart
I – Inspire with impressive attitude
D – Distribute pleasure to all

May the magic of this Eid Milad-un-Nabi bring lots of happiness in your life!
And may your heart be filled with love and joy!

Wishing you and your family a very happy Eid Milad-un-Nabi!