Learning Resources

This event is for you if you are thinking of starting a business, worrying about the unknown challenges of starting in a down economy, struggling with finding viable business ideas, thinking about scaling up your small business or just looking for inspiration and purpose.

Discover for yourself what you "don't know that you don't know"

Pick up tips and valuable advice on the business fundamentals for a successful start-up and scale-up
How to 'win with fears' mindset and scale up with the principle of People First, Always!
Learn from proven start-up processes


Karen Tok shares her struggles and successes of how she grew a 10K shoestring start-up into a thriving multi-award-winning business with a 10 million dollars valuation.

Karen start-up weathered the storm of two recessions: she first started her business during the 2001 recession post-dot-com bubble crash and was further hit by the Global Financial Crisis in 2009 during the scale-up stage. Tons of near-fatal business mistakes were made with six-figure sums spent on an expansion that went down the drain. With escalating overheads, fierce competition, high staff turnover, and unfavorable economy, they didn’t just weather the storms, they thrived.

Discover for yourself her secrets of turning her crippling fear into a significant success. How as a failure in school, with no degree, no financial backing, and no relevant industry knowledge, she was able to build a multi-award-winning biotech recruitment business.

Synopsis
We live in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. Our planet, our world faces many unprecedented challenges. Along with prosperity, we have population explosion, poverty, violence, conflicts, increasing inequality, the environment, and global warming. We also face an epidemic of diseases of the modernized society, diseases of both the body and the mind: cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, autoimmune, autism, ADHD, chronic stress & anxiety, and depression.
Mental health is now a clear and urgent issue - the next major epidemic. Research shows that fully one in four youths in the industrialized world suffer from some form of mental health issues while growing up. Youth suicides and attempted suicides have gone up steadily over the years. Another shocking statistic: 22% of children in Singapore think about suicide. What we're seeing is only the tip of the iceberg, as the pressure, the expectation, and the stress of living in modern society continue to grow. For many, life increasingly feels like a treadmill that they can’t get off, while others experience a growing sense of loneliness, isolation, and disconnect despite living in an age of digital super-connectivity - with Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, gaming, e-sport, etc - with everything going digital and all the attendant mental health challenges that come with it.

The current reality is clearly unsustainable; the need for a new approach is clear and urgent. We need a new way of thinking, a new mindset, new skills, to make new choices. Life is about making choices. The thoughts we think, the words we speak, and the actions we take – choices that we make individually – and collectively – create the reality of our world.

As parents, what roles do we need to play - what new seeds do we need to plant - what new choices do we need to make - what new skills do we need to teach - for ourselves and for our children - to help point the way to a new kind of reality for a better tomorrow - the reality of a kinder, gentler, more just, more inclusive and more sustainable world.

To support the businesses during this pandemic, the Singapore government is ramping up the funding support for companies to take on transformative digital automation projects. Automating your processes through digitalization can lead to revenue growth, cost savings, and improved customer and employee experiences.
During this session, the panelists discussed grant eligibility criteria and explored the purpose, the pros, and the cons of various grant programs, as well as how to improve the chances of grant approval.
They also discussed how you and your employees can tap on the SkillFuture Credits to upskill and train and be ready to adapt to the changes in the market, acquire the skills required during the implementation of these digital automation projects.

As 2020 comes close to a wrap, we looked back at how the COVID-19 situation has created a disruption in lives everywhere that we have never experienced before. “New norms” came one after another. When work-from-home measures first started, many wanted to go back to the workplace. Months later, 8 out of 10 then wished to stay at home (Straits Times, 11 Oct 2020) even as workplaces are reopening. School holidays descended upon us again and this not-so-new norm of having almost every family member in the house all day long will be here to stay.

While our family members may be our closest and dearest, the last few months have been trying times for most families. Many have felt either:

“I do not have space for myself”
or
“Everyone is getting in my way”
or
“Responsibilities seem endless.”


Personality differences, children’s misdemeanour, parental restrictions - everything got magnified. Our home, which we should be our Home Sweet Home, became at times a


FRANTIC HOUSE

Deriving insights from “Mindfulness – a practical guide to Finding Peace in a Frantic World”, the life-changing bestseller by Prof Mark Williams and Danny Penman, mindfulness instructors Ming Hui, Charlene, and Khai Imm discussed how Finding Peace in a Frantic House, beginning from our own house.

In this session, participants:

* Gained an understanding and awareness of the workings of the mind that contribute to the franticity in their lives.

* Learned how mindfulness helps them bring awareness and to relate differently to difficult thoughts and feelings.

* Learned simple mindful breathing exercises as a useful tool for daily use..

Although mentoring in the workplace has been there for a long time, the way it is structured is sometimes complicated.
Sometimes supervisors are required to be mentors and sometimes mentoring is really another word for managing performance.
What are the best ways to set up mentoring in the workplace?

Facilitators
-Lita Nithyananda
-Deepali Jain

Sir John Bittleston is the Founder, Executive Chairman of Terrific Mentor International and the only honorary member of Asia Institute of Mentoring.
He's an active octogenarian who loves mentoring and the hero for Yen-Lu Chow (AIM's Co-Founder).
Sir John believes in AIM's 5 pillars: Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Career Resilience, Personal Well-Being and Parenting.

He shared his testimony on the launch of AIM 21 challenge about his personal mastery of mentoring, what it meant to him & how he advocates mentoring to everyone.

A video on the benefits of mentoring to partner with the article from http://learningyourdevelopment.com entitled Mentoring: A Win-Win-Win for Mentees, Mentors and Organisations at http://bit.ly/1gMMrBc