CHARLOTTE -- Struggling with a chemistry class and feeling down one evening two summers ago, Caitlin Boyle decided to turn her mood around.
"You are beautiful!" she scribbled on a piece of notebook paper, which she stuck on a community college bathroom mirror for a stranger to find.
"I remember thinking, 'I wonder who will find this note, and how it will make them feel?' " says Boyle, 27, who moved to Charlotte from Orlando, Fla., last year. "I was just having a really bad day and I wanted to do something nice for somebody else."
She posted what she'd done on her food-and-fitness blog, healthytippingpoint.com, and asked her readers to do the same. They did. And a movement, of sorts, was born.
Within three days, 75 of Boyle's blog readers told her about anonymous notes they'd left.
Within weeks, Boyle started operationbeautiful.com. There, Boyle posts photos of the self-affirming anonymous messages others leave or find, along with the stories behind them.
Within months, Boyle had a book deal with a major publisher, Gotham Books. "Operation Beautiful: Transforming the Way You See Yourself One Post-it Note at a Time" came out last summer, and two more books are in the works.
She's captured big media attention, including the Oprah Winfrey Network and NBC's "Today Show."
She speaks about Operation Beautiful at colleges nationwide and updates the site almost daily with correspondence she gets from people who have both left and received the anonymous notes. They have spanned the globe, reaching as far as Australia and the South Pole.
Boyle says her goal is loftier than simply brightening strangers' moods. She's trying to banish "fat-talk" or the negative thoughts people have about themselves, and replace them with affirming messages.
It's good for both the receiver and the sender, she believes.
"The sneaky thing about Operation Beautiful is that when you write down these messages for other people, you're really saying them to yourself," Boyle says.
A positive impact
Psychologists say that while finding an affirming Post-it note probably won't change how a woman feels about herself, it can have a positive - if unmeasurable - impact.
Melinda Harper, an associate professor of psychology at Queens University of Charlotte and a licensed clinical psychologist who works with adolescents and young adults, says she asks patients to place affirming notes on mirrors or in calendars where they can see them every day.
It's part of what psychologists call Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which challenges people to identify positive things about themselves so that, over time, they will reframe how they see themselves.
Finding an anonymous post-it left by a stranger may make more of an impact, Harper says, because people often dismiss compliments from friends or family members.
"What I like is the anonymous piece of it," Harper says. "Here's someone anonymously putting that out there and encouraging you to believe that about yourself."
And research shows, Harper says, that "kindness, altruism, taking a moment to give something back to someone else or to extend a compliment can generate a boost in one's mood or self-esteem."
Boyle says she's received emails from readers who say Operation Beautiful has changed their lives.
The most haunting, she says, came from a Canadian teenager who was frail from a deadly eating disorder. She went into a bathroom stall to throw up a sandwich after a therapy session and found a Post-it: "You're good enough the way you are. You're beautiful. Operationbeautiful.com."
She wrote Boyle, saying that the note was the inspiration she needed to get healthy. Within months, she'd gained 30 pounds.
World of a blogger
Boyle says she's not getting rich from her life as a blogger; when asked where she and her husband live, she's quick to point out that their home in Myers Park is a rental.
She says it was her first book deal that gave her the financial push she needed to quit her job as an urban planner for a small consulting firm and focus on her blogs and book writing full-time. She says she'd considered becoming a physical therapist for a while - hence the chemistry class where Operation Beautiful was born - but decided to follow the path to full-time blogging and book writing.
And write she does. Three times a day, Boyle updates her healthytippingpoint.com blog, often posting photos of what she ate that day, healthy food recipes, notes about an upcoming race, or books she's reading.
She says part of what she believes has made her blog successful is that she's willing to blog about most everything going on in her life, with the exceptions of details about her marriage or "secrets that are not my secrets to tell."
Learning through life
Now that Operation Beautiful has caught flight, Boyle says she'd like to develop a curriculum for girls or young women who are starting Operation Beautiful clubs in their middle schools, high schools and colleges.
"You look at media today and it is hyper-sexualized," Boyle says. Society tells little girls "that how good they are with the opposite sex is more important, as opposed to how smart they are or how funny they are."
Boyle acknowledges that she has no psychology training, but she says her life experiences and hearing about others' struggles through online communities have given her the background she needs to write about issues like raising confident children, handling bullying, choosing friends and dealing with toxic family members.
Her blog carries a disclaimer stating that she's not a medical expert and that the advice she gives is based only on her life experience.
"So much of Operation Beautiful is hearing other people's stories and ... validating those stories and giving them a voice."
