Prophetic Prose: FleurDeLisSpeaks says “We Make People Feel Seen, Heard and Understood.”

If prophetic prose, Motivation Mondays and Inspirational Tuesdays are your thing, there is no doubt you have heard of FleurDeLisSpeaks. “On my page we make people feel seen, heard and understood,” says Faith Broussard Cade, the woman behind the Instagram account and author of “Shine Bright Anyway.”

You probably recognize her posts - simple torn pieces of paper with words of wisdom or as she calls them “devine downloads” to help people navigate their day.

Cade, a mental health counselor and advocate, formerly worked in schools until a car accident left her with a traumatic brain injury and post-concussive syndrome. Her recovery process took longer than her job allowed, forcing her to reconsider her next steps.

“So I'm sitting at home, not able to work, not able to really do anything,” explained Cade. “I can't rely on my doctors to fix me. I have to figure out how to heal mentally, physically, emotionally, even if they don't assist me in that process. And so I challenged myself to a 15 day self-love challenge where I would write a positive affirmation to myself, take five minutes to do it and post it on Instagram for accountability.”

Instagram Success

“I literally started broke trying to figure out how to get our mortgage paid. One income instead of two, a kid that needed to be able to go to preschool and how am I gonna afford it?,” explains Cade. “I literally started with paper and pens that was already in my house that I didn't have to go out and buy 'cause I wouldn't have had the money to buy it. That's it. It started with nothing. And, it's possible to affect change with very little resources.”

As Good Morning America anchor Robin Roberts often says, Cade “made her mess her message.” The response was overwhelming.

“I received a lot of positive feedback from them and I kept writing. And so here I am, six and a half years later, still writing those little notes on torn pieces of paper, and posting them, not so much for accountability now, but I think more so because I feel like people need them. They need them now just as much as I needed them back then.”

Today, FleurDeLisSpeaks has more than 300K followers, she’s given TEDx talks and has been featured on CNN and Yahoo.

“I say that my friends, my internet friends, my social media friends are the kindest people in the entire world because it's like this little community that we rally behind our people and we support them and we love on them.”

Cade says she truly cares about her followers and often personally responds to those who send her DMs, especially those reaching out in distress.

“I feel that as a society, we don't understand or recognize enough just how many people we pass every single day that are like right on the edge. Like they are hoping and praying for someone to smile at them or to say, Hey, how are you? Or hold the door open for them. Or any small act of kindness. And those have been the biggest blessings for me throughout this experience.”

As the account grew, she was approached by HarperCollins to write a book, “Shine Bright Anyway: 90 Affirmations That Declare You Are Enough When the World Says You’re Not.” The concept she says is based on snippets, little nuggets of mental health that you get everyday, bite-sized bits of inspiration.

Advice for Young People

As a former school counselor, Cade worries about the younger generations getting caught up in the Influencer craze. With AI distorting reality on social media, her advice to young people is this:

“Everything that you need to be the incredible person that you are is already inside of you. You just have to give yourself the time, the space, the empathy, the compassion and the love and the grace to be able to uncover it.”

She adds, “they just want someone to tell them that they have it right. To tell them that they are good enough – they are pretty enough, smart enough, witty enough, and they already have it.”

And as Cade reminds us, “You don't have to have anything to be kind. Kindness is free. Just be kind.”