How Full is Your Bucket?

Summary (from the publisher): Organized around a simple metaphor of a dipper and a bucket, How Full Is Your Bucket? shows how even the briefest interactions every day profoundly affect people's relationships, productivity, health, and longevity. Coauthor Donald O. Clifton, hailed as the grandfather of positive psychology, spent half a century studying the effects of emotions, interviewing people around the world. His discoveries are at the heart of How Full Is Your Bucket? Written in an engaging, conversational style, the book includes colorful stories, five strategies for improving personal emotions, and an online test that measures readers' emotional change. How Full Is Your Bucket? is a quick, breezy book that helps readers boost the amount of positive emotions in their lives, and in the lives of those around them.

Review: I read this book for a Strategic Leadership group I'm a part of at work, which I only reference because I know that I probably would not have ever chosen this book to read on my own. However, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it and how applicable it is not only to your professional life, but to all relationships and interactions with anyone you may encounter. 

The premise of this book is that in all interactions, we are either filling up someone's bucket or dipping from it. In other words, you can build someone up through positive interactions, or reduce them through negative ones. I was astounded by the wealth of information to back up this theory of the importance of positivity. Children do better in school with praise, businesses increase productivity, lives are lengthened through optimism, and marriages are strengthened through this approach. I really appreciated the frequent references to studies that backed up and illustrated how critical this idea is and how damaging constant negativity and criticism can be. For example, companies would be better off paying negative employees to stay at home because of the effect that their poor outlook has on productivity and morale across this board. This book urges readers to focus on praise, not criticism, and carefully consider how your interactions with others may be impacting them. Rather than focusing on what is wrong, focus on what is right and recognize the people responsible.

While this book certainly made me think and made me want to improve on how often I recognize others through simple things like an email or a kind comment, I'm frustrated by it in the same way I am all books in its category. Unfortunately, you will only get out of this book what you want to get out of it. In other words, those that want to be better people, better employees, wives, friends, neighbors, citizens of the world, will benefit from this book. But its the people who are negative and critical who probably won't really try to change their ways, or who won't even bother to read this book or to read it with an open mind. However, I do think this book's advice is true - you don't know what changing your own behavior and what impact extending positivity to others may have. I'd like to think that, while it can't fix everybody's bad attitude, it may improve someone's. On another note, I could see how some people would find this book as overly simplified and common sense type advice, and it is, but unfortunately not advice that everyone follows and thus worth repeating.

This was a really quick, light read with a simple premise and metaphor that can have a big impact. I really want to try to incorporate its lessons into my daily life. While these are lessons most people know, its good to have a reminder, and scientific back up, of just how critical it is to be kind to others.

Stars: 4