Self-Application
Now a day, our fast moving life creates a lot of unpleasant feelings such as worries, stress, anxiety…etc. All these feelings lead to negative thoughts and attitude toward our lives, which makes it harder on a person to move on, achieve his/her goals and struggle to live a happy life.
In the middle of all these feelings, a person forgets to fill his and other people’s buckets through praise and acknowledgment, by not seeing the positives and opportunities and sometimes the stress that a person go through makes him/her focus only on the limitations and negativity where only criticism appears in their interaction with others as well as on themselves. So it ends up with having a world that is full of attack-defensive attitude that drains a person’s energy and takes away from everybody’s bucket.
Other times a person doesn’t have the strength or desire to give or accept any feedback, where he/she completely ignore his/her own achievements and other’s as well
Lets take an example on that:
In a study that was conducted by Dr.Elizabeth Hurlock in 1925 to explore what would be the impact when 4th & 6th grade students get different type of feedback on their work. The objective of the study is to find out if it was more effective to praise, criticize or ignore the students. The study was conducted on Math class, so it was measured by how many math problems each student had solved in 2,3,4 & 5 days later:
A control group was held out of the room from the beginning of the test, they took the same test but they received no comments.
What do you think the result was?
Group 1&2 had better results after the 1st day. Then their performance changed dramatically, where Group 2 showed a major decline in their test scores by days 3&4 they were performing on par with Group 3.
So…what does that tells us?
When people get praise and acknowledgment on their good performance, they work hard to make their performance better, when they get criticism they try to improve but after a while they loose interest, and when their effort is ignored they loose hope. They don’t do any effort to do better.
The above example is applicable on a person’s attitude toward other’s as well as towards himself. If we don’t see the positives in what we do, and the opportunities around us we will have an empty bucket, we won’t be able to move on and achieve the desired change.
Lets have another example/self application:
When our kids come back with their report cards, what are the grades that we stop at usually? The general attitude is to check which subject the grades are low to try to improve it, however, we don’t pay attention to the high grades to praise and encourage, we don’t treat it as a sign that this kid is good at this subject and if we motivate him and encourage him he might be a star at it.
So, if we believe that every situation we go through has its bright side as well as its dark side we will be able to practice to see the bright side, to see the opportunity which will open up a lot of doors that we haven’t even thought that its there.
How to fill our buckets as well as other people’s buckets?
1. Prevent Bucket dipping:
