Is your bucket full or empty?

I just finished a book -- “How Full is Your Bucket?” -- written by Tom Rath and Donald Clifton, both students of positive psychology. That’s the scientific study of what happens when things go right in life rather than what happens when things go wrong.

The authors use the metaphor of a bucket and dipper to describe the choices we make every day that affect our outlook on life. This is how they explain it:

“Each of us has an invisible bucket. It is constantly emptied or filled, depending on what others say or do to us. When our bucket is full, we feel great. When it’s empty we feel awful.

“Each of us also has an invisible dipper to fill other people’s buckets; by saying or doing things to increase their positive emotions, we also fill our own bucket. But when we use that dipper to dip from others’ buckets, by saying or doing things that decrease their positive emotions, we diminish ourselves.”

We can either choose to fill others’ buckets or dip from them. 

Take a critical look at yourself to see how you most often interact with others. Then take a closer look at the people you surround yourself with on a regular basis. Do they fill or dip from your bucket?

When I look at my own circle of friends, I’m thankful that most are “bucket fillers.” But one couple that comes to mind is not. Whenever I’m with them I see the emotional damage they inflict on each other and the negativity it creates for those around them.

It’s so easy to get caught up in a death spiral of negativity and so hard to stop once you begin down that road.

Barbara  Fredrickson, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, has come up with a positivity ratio based on the impact positive emotions have on our daily life. She says that on average, “we all need at least three positive emotions to lift us up for every negative emotion that drags us down.”  

Another happiness researcher, Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Riverside, says that roughly half our happiness is genetically determined. About 10 percent comes from our life circumstances, and the remaining 40 percent is under our own conscious control.

Artist Henri Matisse said, “There are always flowers for those who want to see them.”

You are the product of your thoughts and actions. Next time you find yourself reaching for the dipper, make sure you’re adding to the bucket and not taking from it. 

Think positive and spread the joy!