Asking for help

My daughter gave me a book to read: Amanda Palmer's, The Art of Asking. Palmer is a musician/performer whose career has been built around cultivating and understanding the transaction of asking. She makes the case that asking is not an act of risk-taking, but an act of trust; one that we can, in fact, cultivate ourselves by "seeing each other."

Asking is a core component of what makes a healthy library work. I spend a good deal of my time creating thresholds in my library that invite asking by disarming the stakes (Asking takes trust because your perception of my intellect, purpose, and identity hang in the balance. "If I ask this question, will he thing I am ignorant or will he think I want to learn.").  Pretty high stakes.

As our libraries depend so much on helping students overcome the very human reticence to avoid asking, I recommend the book to you...or at least her 15-minute TED talk: