ARE YOU A BUCKET FILLER OR A BUCKET DIPPER?

You have heard of the cup that overflowed. This is a story of a bucket that is like the cup, only larger and it is an invisible bucket. Everyone has one. It determines how we feel about ourselves, about others, and how we get along with people. Have you ever experienced a series of very favorable things which made you want to be good to people for a week? At that time, your bucket was full.

A bucket can be filled by a lot of things that happen. When a person speaks to you, recognizing you as a human being, your bucket is filled a little. Even more if they call you by name, especially if it is the name you like to be called. If they compliment you on your clothing or on a job well done, the level in your bucket goes up still higher. There must be a million ways to raise the level in another's bucket. Writing a friendly letter, remembering something that is special to her, knowing the names of her children, expressing sympathy for her loss, giving her a hand when her work is heavy, taking time for conversation, or, perhaps more important, listening to her.

When one's bucket is full of this emotional support, one can express warmth and friendliness to people. But, remember, this is a theory about a bucket and a dipper. Other people have dippers and they can get their dippers in your bucket. This, too, can be done in a million ways.

Lets say I am at a dinner and inadvertently upset a glass of thick, sticky chocolate milk all over the table cloth, on a lady's skirt, down onto the carpet. I am embarrassed. Then a "perceptive" person across the table says, "You spilled that glass of chocolate milk."

I made a mistake, I know I did, and then the person feels it necessary to point out the obvious! He got his dipper in my bucket! Think of the times a person makes a mistake, feels terrible about it, only to have someone tell him about the known mistake

Buckets are filled and buckets are emptied.  They are emptied many times because people don't really think about what they are doing or saying. When a person's bucket is emptied, it is very different than when it is full.  Even when given a compliment, the person with an empty bucket may respond in an irritated, defensive manner.

Although there is a limit to such an analogy, there are people who seem to have holes in their buckets. When a person has a hole in her bucket, she irritates lots of people by trying to get her dipper in their buckets. This is when she really needs somebody to be a bucket filler for her, because her bucket is emptying fast!

The story of our lives is the interplay of the bucket and the dipper. Everyone has both. The unyielding secret of the bucket and the dipper is that when you fill another's bucket it does not take anything out of your own bucket. The level in our own bucket gets higher when we fill another's, and, on the other hand, when we dip into another's bucket we do not fill our own ... we lose a little.

For a variety of reasons, people hesitate filling the bucket of another and consequently do not experience the fun, joy, happiness, fulfillment, and satisfaction connected with making another person happy. Some reasons for this hesitancy are that people think it sounds "fakey," or the other person will be suspicious of the motive, or it is "brown-nosing."

But don't worry about those things... let us put aside our dipper and resolve to touch someone's life in order to fill their bucket.