‘Be the change you want to see’

The theme for this year’s Barbados Association of Office Professionals’ (BAOP) Conference, “Holistic Professionals-Igniting Positive Change”, may seem odd but President of the BAOP, Clovine Leslie, believed that it played a critical role in the development of office professionals.

Speaking during the opening ceremony of the conference which was held at the Hilton Hotel yesterday morning, Leslie said that as professionals, she believes it is not only
important to focus on the academic and technical or vocational skills relating to one’s profession, rather, that it was equally important to ensure that individuals develop holistically in all spheres of their lives whether it be spiritual, social, physical, mental and financial.

Featured speaker, Chris de Caires, managing director of the Fednav Groups in Barbados said that he believed that persons needed to focus on their lives and keep track of the most important aspects.

He mentioned that about a year ago, a nurse in Australia wrote a book which was a compilation of regrets from her dying patients and the top five regrets of persons were: they wished they lived a life true to themselves, they wished they hadn’t worked so hard, they wished they had the courage to express their feelings, they wished they stayed close to their friends and they wished they had made themselves be happier. He noted that if these were the things that people were regretting on their death bed, then they should be considered now that they have the chance to change the way that they live their lives.

He noted that in Barbados, there were two types of people. He said that there is a mix of negative and positive people. However, he expressed that the negative tended to dominate. He said he believed that the solution to this problem lays in the way persons view their actions; explaining that people needed to take more control of their lives
and hold themselves accountable.

Quoting the late Excellent Errol Walton Barrow’s speech, De Caires asked, “what kind of mirror image do persons have of themselves?” He noted, that even though the speech was over 30 years old, there were still parts of it that were still relevant today.

De Caires explained that there are aspects of ourselves that we do not take control of and urged persons to take account of the things that are important to them and start living their lives in such a way that would prohibit them from having regrets on their death beds.