What happens when you tell someone they matter?

Helice Bridges has a formula for telling people they matter, and it takes less than a minute. She shows the person a blue ribbon that reads “Who I am makes a difference”. Then she tells them exactly how they make a difference. She places the ribbon above their heart, because, as she puts it, the heart tells the mind what to do. Finally she hands them two more ribbons and asks them to go and honor someone else.

What she receives back is the reason she has kept doing it for decades. “You are the first person that’s ever told me that I mattered.” She says that is not one person. Of the hundreds of thousands she has honored, she says they say that 99% of the time.

What is the origin of the blue ribbon?

Helice was 37, with two pre-teen sons and a husband who was a beloved and brilliant entrepreneur who behind closed doors was controlling, intimidating and verbally abusive. She decided her only option out was to take her own life. But a voice in her head stopped her. It was, she says, a little sweet voice inside telling her, “You can’t take your life.” So she left her husband. She shares her story in (Grandma Sparky) She Survived Abuse to Start a Movement with a goal to reach 1 Billion kids.

While volunteering as co-chair of the San Diego Hunger Project, she met kids who told her they were starving themselves because they were going to lose their home, or because a dad was going to lose his job. One girl came over and said her mother had cancer. Bridges was going through a divorce and did not know how to help anyone. All she had was one idea. If they felt as loved as she had felt as a child, maybe that love would make them feel like they mattered.

So she made the ribbon.

What happened when someone handed out hundreds of them?

Chicken Soup For The Soul author  Jack Canfield met Bridges for the first time in 1984, when she came up to him and said she wanted to honor him with the ribbon. He was so inspired he wound up giving hundreds of them out at his seminars. Within three months, 35,000 people had been honored.

One of those ribbons went home with a man who had been honored at work. He had two extra ribbons and decided to honor his teenage son. He called the boy into the study and said he wanted to honor him. Then he told him how much he loved him and how proud of him he was. The boy started to cry and ran out of the room. He came back holding a pistol. He said he had planned to end his life that night because he did not think anyone cared. Now that he knew his father loved him, he said, he did not need to.

Jack asked Bridges if he could include that story in a book of his own. Bridges said yes, and it ran in Chicken Soup for the Soul. Letters came from around the world.

What does it do for someone who receives a blue Ribbon ?

What Helice keeps hearing is the same thing over and over. “You are the first person that’s ever told me that I mattered.” Of the hundreds of thousands she has honored, 99% of the time that is what they tell her.

She learned how much is riding on that minute from a woman at one of her seminars, where everyone was pinning ribbons on each other. Being honored brought the memory up. The woman had graduated number two from Caltech, and the only thing her father said to her all day was, “Why weren’t you number one?” She started to cry telling it. That, Bridges says, was when she saw how these ribbons can help heal generational wounds.

“Everybody has a bucket that needs to be filled with love, esteem, acknowledgement, and appreciation,” Bridges says. “And most people are just not receiving that.”

How can I participate?

Blue Ribbons Worldwide will send free ribbons, and will take an order of them for a school or a workplace. Its school programs run from elementary through high school and teach kids to honor each other in 60 seconds or less. When the kids honor their teachers, Bridges says, the teachers tell her they finally believe they are making a difference. That is the same ground as Youth Mentorship, How does having a mentor change a kid’s life? and How Can Young People Make a Difference in Their Community?

The number Bridges is working toward is one billion people honored. The film cites suicide as the second-leading cause of death for ages 10 to 34, and that number is why the work runs in schools. Mental Health Recovery gathers the rest of that ground.

Her own book, Who I Am Makes a Difference, published in 1997, is a collection of what has happened to other people in that minute.

If any of this is close to home, talk to someone you trust, or to a crisis line where you live.