If you are a bright, sensitive and intense person, you can imagine your life as several different buckets. You want to try to keep your sensitivity bucket from overflowing because just as one straw can break a camel’s back, too many drops in the sensitivity bucket can cause a highly sensitive person to be overwhelmed.
Bright, sensitive and intense people feel emotionally nourished when their positivity bucket is full. As the authors of the book How Full is Your Bucket? (Rath and Clifton) suggest, each of us has an “invisible bucket” that is constantly being emptied and filled. Some of the emptying and filling is being done by others according to the way they interact with us, and some of the emptying and filling we do ourselves according to how we treat others. The authors say: “So we face a choice every moment of every day: We can fill one another’s buckets, or we can dip from them. It is an important choice – one that profoundly influences our relationships, productivity, health, and happiness.”
For those of you who reject anything that sounds like “pop psychology,” I encourage you to give this book and its ideas a try. Since reading this book, I have paid close attention to how I feel when I know I have filled someone else’s bucket, and I have tried to prevent others from dipping into my bucket. As a sensitive and intense person, giving freely of my positive energy while preventing others from sapping that energy has had a positive impact on my emotional life.
Since reading How Full is Your Bucket?, I have come across a companion book for children called Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud. I have included McCloud’s message in a writing program I created for an after school writing program, and the sharing of positive “drops” is one of the students’ favorite parts of the week.
There are many aspects of our lives that we can control, and being more positive and supportive of others and ourselves is a great way to begin. Take a moment and think about it, how full is YOUR bucket?
