Product Details

How did you feel after your last interaction with another person?

Did that person -- whether it was your spouse, best friend, coworker or even a stranger -- "fill your bucket" by making you feel more positive?

Or did that person "dip from your bucket," leaving you more negative than before?

The #1 New York Times and #1 BusinessWeek bestseller How Full Is Your Bucket? reveals how even the briefest interactions affect your relationships, productivity, health and longevity.

Organized around a simple metaphor of a dipper and a bucket and grounded in 50 years of research, this book will show you how to greatly increase the positive moments in your life -- and reduce the negative.

The Theory of the Dipper and the Bucket

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. When we use that 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.

A full bucket gives us a positive outlook and renewed energy. Every drop in that bucket makes us stronger and more optimistic.

But an empty bucket poisons our outlook, saps our energy and undermines our will. That's why every time someone dips from our bucket, it hurts us.

So we face a choice every moment of every day: We can fill each other's buckets, or we can dip from them. It's an important choice that profoundly influences our relationships, productivity, health and happiness.

Compelling, Extensive Research

How Full Is Your Bucket? is based on more than 50 years of comprehensive psychological and workplace research.

Coauthor Don Clifton -- Father of Strengths Psychology and Inventor of CliftonStrengths -- and his colleagues at Gallup surveyed 4 million workers and found that individuals who receive regular recognition and praise:

• increase their individual productivity
• increase engagement among their colleagues
• have better safety records and fewer accidents on the job
• are more likely to stay with their organization longer
• receive higher loyalty and satisfaction scores from customers

Drawing on Clifton's lifelong research, Gallup's massive database and discoveries from the world's leading social scientists, How Full Is Your Bucket? distills decades of discoveries into a book that you can read in about an hour.

The expanded anniversary edition includes a guide to applying How Full Is Your Bucket? in teams and organizations.