The Sunday News
Leonard Ncube, Sunday Life Reporter
FORMER Miss Tourism Victoria Falls (2005) has started a company which seeks to motivate and inspire people, both at work and socially.
Michelle Gapara (34) registered Bella Bright in January. The company does event management, training, motivational speaking, professional make-up artistry, M Ceeing and image consultancy among other things.
Through the company, Gapara has lined up Nights of Inspiration, and held the first edition of the event last week Saturday at a local hotel in Victoria Falls. She says her vision is to make people “a better version of themselves”.
“People should be the best versions of themselves. Night of Inspiration is about inspiring people. People feel overworked and underpaid at work. They generally are de-motivated in life and at work where they are just doing enough to keep jobs. We won’t grow as a destination or economy if we have minimum attitude, we need motivation and inspiration,” said Gapara, an employee at one of the hotels in Victoria Falls.
She said she targets organisations and individuals and her dream is to transform the community of Victoria Falls.
“My vision is to make people to be better versions of themselves and everyone who interacts with Nights of Inspiration must come out inspired. We are not talking about candy motivation but change of attitude,” she said.
Born in Bulawayo in 1983 where she did her first part of primary education at Moray Primary before moving to Harare and back to Bulawayo for her secondary education at Solusi High and Foundation College, Gapara said she got inspired to motivate others when she enrolled with a secretarial college — BIC Academy in Harare.
“I first learnt about self presentation when I enrolled at BIC Academy, an all secretarial college. They would check on everything in you and that’s how I started learning a lot about life. After college I worked for a local bank where we were also groomed on how to be presentable in life. I then got a job with African Sun as a personal assistant to the operations manager and started applying all I had learnt about self presentation,” said Gapara.
She says for the past two years she has been training hotel staff, churches, and companies as well as schools.
Gapara said although she retired herself from the modelling career, she remains grateful to a woman, renowned modelling consultant and founder of Fingers Modelling Agency Mrs Sarah Mpofu-Sibanda, who opened the door for her when she convinced her to enter a pageant in 2005.
“I met Sarah Mpofu and she told me about Miss Tourism pageant and that she wanted me to compete. There were two of us from Victoria Falls and we flew to Harare where we joined camp for two weeks,” said Ms Gapara.
She said she left in 2007 when she got married and wanted to concentrate on her family and kids, now 10 and five years old, although she is now separated.
Gapara said now that the kids are grown up, she feels she has enough time to pursue her passion and dream, to inspire people.
“I have decided to form a company so that what I do becomes more official. I registered Bella Bright Enterprises on January 19, 2017 and immediately established a website. Bella Bright means bright and beautiful and it’s through this that I have started Nights of Inspiration which will be an annual event,” she said.
She said she is inspired by the fact that the Victoria Falls community has a tendency of relying on events from elsewhere yet “there are a lot of inspirational figures among us.”
On Saturday Shearwater Adventures managing director Allan Roberts and Zimbabwe Tourism Authority (ZTA) chief operating officer were guest speakers.
Roberts spoke about trust and accountability at work saying one should be trusted with smaller things to be honoured. He challenged people to waste no time in pursuing their goals and make things happen for themselves.
@ncubeleo
