Relationships help us to define who we are and what we can become. Most of us can trace our successes to pivotal relationships. Dr. Donald O, Clifton
If someone asked you who was Dr. Donald O. Clifton, even if you are in the business world or maybe even in the psychology or education field, you’d probably not know. However, if I told you that he was the one who turned Gallup from a 5-million-dollar opinion polling company in 1998 to a 50-million-dollar multinational analytics and management consulting corporation in 2001, you might get a little closer to guessing his identity.
Clifton is the one who developed the CliftonStrengths or StrengthsFinder. The American Psychologist Association now calls him the father of the strengths movement. Clifton was very interested in organizational high performance which involved identifying and especially cultivating talent. It was his strong belief that if we want to increase personal and collective performance, we would be a lot better off to pay attention to what people are good at (what’s going well) and getting better still (we can indefinitely keep growing our areas of strengths according to Clifton) rather than going straight to weaknesses and spending all our precious time trying to correct them – it's a lackluster, demotivating deficits approach that he was up against. He would agree with that quote by Robert Heinlein, "Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."
Working with deficits was exactly what everyone was doing and it wasn’t working well. Clifton got irate about school systems which seemed to have no real interest in developing the student, but instead lumped everyone into the same curriculum track. Then little attention was paid (I think it's still too true for some) to what students were getting A’s in, instead students spent hours trying to deal with those subjects they were getting D’s and F’s in. Clifton thought it was not only a waste, but an insult to the well-being of human beings. Remember the Heinlein quote. (However let me make a short comment here that by a person who followed up on the Clifton strengths model and is a current expert and mentor. He uses a sailboat metaphor. You are never going to go anyplace big trying to patch a hole in your boat. Concentrate on the sails - that's is what's going to take you places. But you do have to patch up the hole enough not to sink the boat. These analogies are meant for organizational, learning, and work performance, but I know some of you are experts and coaches in sports. How does that sound to you in the sports world?).
Clifton had another insight which is really what the bulk of this blog is about. It's perhaps even more important than his first insight around identifying and cultivating strengths. His second big contribution to the world was around “buckets and dippers". It was aimed at building cultures of high performance through high engagement. Your grandchildren and perhaps your children may know about this concept (more about this in a moment).
The first introduction of Donald O. Clifton's dipper and bucket concept dates to his 1960 paper, titled "The Theory of the Dipper and the Bucket." This early work laid the foundation for his later development of positive psychology and the understanding of how our interactions impact one another’s emotional well-being and performance. Clifton's paper proposed that each person has an invisible bucket, and every interaction with others either fills or depletes that bucket. This concept emphasized the power of positive interactions and how they contribute to our sense of well-being.
The paper gained traction and was later adapted into a small book or booklet. However, it's not as well-known or widely available as his later works like the New York Times best-selling little book (published after his death in 2004) co-authored with his grandson, Tom Rath, How Full Is Your Bucket?
I’m re-reading the book on its twentieth anniversary. It’s short, like 53 pages or so. But the concept is quite big. The idea that positive words and actions add to a person’s bucket, while negative ones drain it, is easy to understand. We all have experienced it and know it to be true. Clifton’s bucket and dipper theory also emphasized the mutual benefits of filling others' buckets because when we fill others’ buckets, we also fill our own buckets and boost our own well-being and sense of fulfillment.
Clifton is also recognized as being the grandfather of the positive psychology movement. What is positive psychology? It’s so often misunderstood that I’ll quote here from Wikipedia:
Positive psychology is a field of psychological theory and research of optimal human functioning of people, groups, and institutions.[1][2] It studies "positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions... it aims to improve quality of life."[3]
Positive psychology began as a new domain of psychology in 1998 when Martin Seligman chose it as the theme for his term as president of the American Psychological Association.[4][5] It is a reaction against past practices which tended to focus on mental illness and which emphasized maladaptive behavior and negative thinking. It builds on the humanistic movement of Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, which encourages an emphasis on happiness, well-being, and purpose.[5][6]
Positive psychology largely relies on concepts from the Western philosophical tradition, such as the Aristotelian concept of eudaimonia,[7] which is typically rendered in English with the terms "flourishing", "the good life" or "happiness".[8] Positive psychologists study empirically the conditions and processes that contribute to flourishing, subjective well-being, and happiness,[2] often using these terms interchangeably.
These days we have good research to reinforce Clifton’s budding research on the importance of strong relationships and treating each other as they want to be treated (he slightly re-worded the golden rule, some call this the platinum rule) in terms of making organizations prosper. Clifton had the numbers to show how much money organizations lose when people are unengaged because of not having a friend at work or because they have difficulties with their direct supervisor. He also had the budding research how these negative environments affected physical maladies…and he suspected contributed to shortened lifespans.
So why all this Clifton stuff, especially the bucket and dipper theory today? It’s not only because it’s the 20th anniversary of the publishing of How Full Is Your Bucket?
It’s actually because there are a bunch of kids’ books published now using the Bucket and Dipper theme including a journal to happiness. Carol McCloud got the permission of Donald Clifton’s family to use it as she developed about 10 books using the theme. The folks in our family, along with others in our church and our community, are going to start implementing it in November. We want to put the theory to test. Experiment. See if what Clifton proposed is true.
I know we agree with that first part that negative comments and actions by others do affect us. For example, John had a person whom he looked up to, thought the man seemed to care about others, and be highly principled. But then John started to notice that each time he had an interaction with the man, he came away feeling worse about himself. I think we can all identify if we are self-aware. Dippers feel bad.
What some of us may also have noticed is that we feel better, are happier, when we fill someone else’s bucket. The harder part is noticing how we fill our own buckets and how we dip into our own and others’ buckets.
What we are using to guide our experiment is Carol McCloud’s My Bucket Filling Journal: 30 Days to Happiness; it’s a companion to the book, Growing Up with a Bucket Full of Happiness: Three Rules for a Happier Life, which guides people in noticing what’s going on with buckets and dippers…and also lids. (The subject of lids I haven’t spoken to yet. Still to come. It’s a bit more nuanced but essentially is about protecting your bucket of happiness from dipping).
But for today, I’ll leave you with the encouragement to buy Clifton and Rath’s book, How Full Is Your Bucket? (questions are answered, nuances proposed, and real stories offered to cement the ideas). And, if you are serious about experimenting, I urge you to think about buying the journal which has eight good questions that build your awareness around how you impact others and how they impact you and gives you bucket filling ideas. Also, I recommend buying the teen book, Growing Up with a Bucket Full of Happiness: Three Rules for a Happier Life. It’s good for all ages. There’s a lot more to it than the 3 rules. But if you’re eager to hear those three rules, here they are:
Rule 1 - Be a bucket filler. (Be thoughtful, be kind.)
Rule 2 - Don't dip. (Use self-control and self-awareness about how negative thoughts and actions affect us human beings.)
Rule 3 - Use your lid. (Protect yourself against dippers.)
(I've added a rule of my own which is hang out with bucket fillers at least five times more than I hang out with known dippers. I get this from the work of John Gottman in his mathematical work on the impact of negative versus positive conversations on emotional well-being and strong relationships.)
Even though I haven’t officially begun the experiment, I’m noticing how good it feels to fill a bucket with little things like remembering someone’s birthday with a flower and becoming more aware of how I’m dipping, yeah, me I’m dipping. I noticed myself doing it twice yesterday with John. The good news is that I started to dip today but caught myself. That’s an improvement in self-control, so okay, bravo (see how I’m noticing what’s going well instead of lingering on my deficits, that’s an improvement too). Every little bit according to Clifton can create a huge ripple effect.
Imagine that we fill two people’s buckets today. And each of them fills two other’s people’s buckets (that’s part of the bucket and dipper theory as well – when our buckets are filled by others, we often pay it forward and fill other people’s buckets). You see how this can multiply rapidly to strengthen our families, our communities, our country, and our world and create high performance and flourishing.
All of us have many stories of getting our buckets filled and dipper stories too. Feel free to share and help us all journey forward together.
How might we take advantage of the twentieth anniversary of How Full Is Your Bucket? and journey together to The Good Life by learning more about the Bucket and Dippers theory and by implementing the three rules that lead to happiness (and while you're at it, why not start noticing your own and others' strengths instead of ruminating on our weaknesses)?
A short p.s. Someone out there is surely saying, "But I have serious things that my husband or wife or child or neighbor or employee needs to change. I must dip into their bucket. I must criticize them for the sake of...." Here's John Gottman's response. "There is NO such thing as constructive criticism. It hurts people mentally and physically and harms their performance."
What's a person to do? Talk about your feelings and needs. Here's an instagram that might help. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DAtWQJ5vpS9/?igsh=MWo0NmljMXpqZGRpeg==
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