How to Live Intentionally

by

Nicholas Linde

culled from:https://www.linkedin.com
A few weeks ago I was in Dallas having dinner with a great friend of mine. Our conversation was about positivity and how positive people create the momentum to achieve great things in their personal and professional lives. My friend referenced Tom Rath & Donald Clifton’s book How Full is Your Bucket? which I hadn’t read (a motivational book I haven’t read?...I was as shocked as you.) When I left Texas to fly back to inexplicably cold Minnesota I conveniently found a copy of the book snuck into my briefcase and by the time I was somewhere over Columbia, Missouri I was compiling all of the notes I wrote into the margin into my travel journal for safe keeping. The theme is about being intentional about who you are and what you want from yourself in others. To keep your momentum going in a positive direction, you need to be intentional about making it go that way.
The Theory of the Dipper and the Bucket
This theory is very simple, but requires each of us to really take stock of how we affect other people’s buckets in our own life. The book explains this theory as follows:
Each of us have 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 have 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.
Like the cup that runneth over, 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 one another’s buckets, or we can dip from them. It’s an important choice—one that profoundly influences our relationships, productivity, health and happiness.
5 to 1: Positive to Negative
The golden ratio for our interactions with our friends, co-workers, or significant others is 5 to 1. For every negative thing you say, the counterbalance needs to be five positive things to keep a relationship level. This has been scientifically proven through psychologists, most notably John Gottman who found that marriages that end in divorce have a 1:1 positive to negative ratio. Let’s face it “I love you” followed by “I don’t love you” is not only confusing, but incredibly toxic to those involved.
I have a personal rule when it comes to two things I do regularly, working out and journaling, that I don’t allow any negativity into those two activities. When it comes to working out I have found that it’s already a physically straining and emotionally taxing exercise for me. When I’m 5 miles into a run, out of breath and sweating from every pore in my body, why would I want to re-live a moment in that week where I disappointed somebody? The same goes for journaling, which I do to keep my mind free of clutter and get my ideas and action plans on paper. Why would I want to write down something that upset me and commit it to history? That’s not who I want to be and not what I want my history to sound like.
How was your day?
A subject I wrote about last week included a section about emotional responses. When we interact with co-workers or family members we are inevitably asked “How was your day?” Have you ever noticed those people who never seem to have anything positive to say when asked that question? Surely something positive had to have happened, why not focus on that before piling your emotional baggage on somebody else?
Psychologists have shown that we each have around 20,000 moments in a day. This is a moment that elicits a positive or a negative reaction out of us. For each moment where we might have dropped our phone getting out of the car, we have a moment where somebody holds a door for us. Focus on the moments that register on the positive and share them with others. Use these opportunities to compliment them or thank them for something they’ve done for you. You’ll be filling their bucket and yours in return.
Don’t wait for the funeral
One of life’s greatest tragedies is that when somebody dies all of the people who knew and loved them gather in their honor and say the most heartfelt things this person could have ever heard about themselves. Why do we wait until people are dead before we tell them these things? Maybe more importantly, why do we wait until they are dead before we actually show up to see them?
I spend a lot of time on airplanes and one thing that I try to do on every flight is handwrite a letter to somebody thanking them for the role they’ve played in my life. Sometimes I write to my parents, sometimes I write to my wife, sometimes I write to a friend of mine I haven’t seen since college. But I want them to know that I took the time out of my day, I thought of them and I had something positive to say. I also try to call my grandmothers as much as I can. Let’s face it, there is going to come a day where one of us isn’t around to call. I take a lot of pride in taking time out of my day to say hello to somebody who really needs it. It may only be 10 minutes to you, but it could make their week.
Live intentionally
Ultimately, life is made up of extremely small interactions. There are big moments we’ll all remember: our graduation, our marriage, the birth of a child, or the death of a loved one. But how we ultimately remember one another is by how we lived. Will you be the employee that is always remembered as being a curmudgeon or the one everybody could rely on for a laugh and a smile? Positivity starts with you and when you’re filling others’ buckets, you’ll find yours overflowing in no time.