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“The Dipper and the Bucket”

Traditionally, doctors and scientists study what is wrong with people. Clifton decided to take a different tack when he began to wonder about an interesting statistic: the high death rate in North Korean prisoner of war camps was partly due the result of their terrible treatment of prisoners—doctors believed that desolation caused some captives to give up. By giving attention to positive things, we can improve our health, so Clifton posed a question: Can positivity have more impact than negativity?

Clifton’s research led to the Theory of the Dipper and Bucket. A bucket is a metaphor for how you feel. It fills up when people do positive things for you, or it gets emptied when they are negative towards you. Likewise, everyone has an invisible dipper that they use to fill or empty other people’s buckets. This means every choice we make in our interactions with others adds to or takes away from their feelings about themselves.

Creating a Positive Work Environment

Managers need to give their employees two things: recognition and praise. People who get these things are more productive, have better working relationships with co-workers, receive better feedback from customers, and are less likely to leave or commit fraud. Unfortunately, most people don’t get enough of either at work because managers fail to recognize good work or praise it when they do.

Most workplaces are negative places, as people often make critical comments about each other’s work or appearance. Laura was preparing for a presentation when she overheard two of her colleagues talking about her and saying something negative. Her boss then made an even more critical comment that drained all the energy out of Laura.

Customer service is a sensitive field, as it involves dealing with people. In one study of a call center, some employees were able to make customers feel good about their experience while others just made them want to leave. A few other employees gave the customers a positive experience and needed praise and attention in order to keep doing so. Managers can easily generate positive emotions among employees, which will lead to great results for everyone involved.

At Home and in School

Every day, people have the opportunity to fill or empty someone else’s bucket. Sometimes these interactions are neutral, and sometimes they’re positive or negative. If you look at a person’s whole day, you can see how many opportunities there are for them to either fill or empty buckets.

In the morning, a single mother of three named Tammy is rushing to get her kids off to school. Her six-year-old drops her toast on the floor and Tammy scolds her for it. She then leaves them at school and drives to work. When she gets there, she sees that someone else has parked in an open space right next to hers. In order not to make trouble with this person, she decides not take that spot and holds the door open for another driver who’s walking into the building as well. This other driver thanks her and they have a pleasant exchange as they both walk into the building together. After that experience, Tammy feels better about herself until later when she realizes that she has a performance review coming up soon which will determine how much money she makes each year at work. At this point in time, however, nothing good seems likely because during one of these reviews last year none of her achievements were mentioned even though everyone knows about them since they’re so great! Feeling down again after thinking about all this bad stuff happening today at work (and also feeling like no one appreciates what you do), Tammy walks past an executive who tells her how great he thinks she is even though he doesn’t know anything about what’s going on inside of his company or outside either really but he just likes talking to people anyway so it doesn’t matter if something isn’t true or not because sometimes things are just said without regard for whether or not they’re true because some people don’t care enough about being truthful anyway especially when dealing with strangers so why bother worrying too much? As long as everything looks fine from afar then everything must be fine even if it isn’t actually fine but only appears fine from far away.