CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- A Charlotte woman is on a mission to change the world, one Post-it note at a time.
Her mission is called Operation Beautiful and her message is "you are beautiful just the way you are."
She delivers that simple message through Post-it notes posted in random places for strangers to find.
"That's part of what Operation Beautiful's success is about. You never know who's going to find the note or how deep it will affect them," said Caitlin Boyle, the Myers Park resident who started it all.
Boyle unintentionally started the movement a year ago. She was working full-time, going to night school and blogging in her spare time.
She was stressed out.
"I was really struggling with negative talk in terms of my professional career," she explains. "I was standing in a public bathroom at the community college one night and I thought, 'If I do something nice for someone else, it will make me feel so much better.' So I posted a note on the bathroom mirror and I put that note on my personal blog."
That note led to others -- 7,000 others from around the world.
"The result was just instantaneous," Boyle says. "I had all these great notes in my inbox and I knew I was on to something that was really touched people."
The Post-its started popping up in odd places like stop signs, apples in the grocery stores and in the mall.
"It's really about: you are beautiful on the outside and the inside as well," she said.
Boyle compiled the notes into a book that was just published.
"When I posted that first note I never thought, 'Oh, I'm going to post this note and it's going to become a website, then it's going to be a book,'" she explains. "I just wanted to do something nice for someone.”
It's turned into something nice for her, too.
"I see these amazing stories. Literally, people say things like, 'You changed my life' or 'This saved my life,' and it's a wonderful feeling," she said.
Boyle quit her job the day the publishers called offering her a book deal. She now handles Operation Beautiful full-time and continues to blog.
You can check out her website, http://operationbeautiful.com/, to learn more.
