Deciding what increasing Taqwa means for us and setting it as an aim for our month of Ramadan:
This tip is deliberately underlined to indicate its importance and the fact that it is the core requirement for those who want to attain more Taqwa in the month of Ramadan. If we want to truly aim for the real objective of the month of Ramadan, then we need to carefully study our soul (Muhasiba) in an attempt to recognise its weaknesses. This can be anything: becoming angry easily, offending others, getting offended very easy, being lazy in our prayers, becoming worried very easy, having a bad behaviour with others, not minding about the rights of others, eating a lot, sleeping a lot, wasting too much time, etc... No one can tell us better than ourselves what these weaknesses are. We will then decide that in this month of Ramadan we want to eliminate or improve (not all but) one, two, or only a few of these weaknesses. If we manage to use the opportunity of the month of Ramadan to take the selected weakness(es) out of our system for good, then by the grace of God we have managed to meet the real aim of the month of Ramadan.
 This point is really the backbone of the idea behind this article. It, therefore, deserves some elaboration. There are a few points that can help with the above:
    * Starting the month with repenting (Tawbah): Since we want to get rid of some bad habits and practices in this month it makes perfect sense to start the month and in fact enter the month after offering a repenting prayer. This simply means to perform two Rak’ah prayers and then to ask God to forgive us for that or those habit(s) or practice(s) that we are now determined to purge out of our system during the month of Ramadan and for good.
  * Praying to be successful in our repentance: Obviously, we have general requests in our prayers plus specific requests for others and ourselves. However besides these, we also need to specifically ask the Almighty to help us with our decision and determination to get rid of that/those selected weakness(es), as discussed above. Even when we read the Qur’an, while generally learning and benefiting from it, we will see if we can get any inspiration or guidance from the Qur’an with regard to this challenge that we have decided to face.
   * Controlling and monitoring: In order to be successful in our determination to remove one or more of our weaknesses, we need to closely and carefully review our performance every day to see whether we are doing well, whether we need to adjust a few things to assist with our aim and whether we need to correct and rectify any shortcomings in our progress towards the aim.
   Courtesy of Column ForeignAffairs