PS&L Blog

“You have to move people’s hearts before you move their wallet or their minds.” That is what the Hollywood Mogul Peter Gruber says. How? Through MAGIC. That’s his acronym to help leaders stay focused on the story they need to tell to reach their goal.

MAGIC = Motivating your Audience to a Goal Interactively with great Content. All stories have a goal. Some scare you, some teach you about life, some inspire. As admissions counselors we need to be able to tell stories that motivate, teach, inspire. (If you want to scare, talk about that other school)
Guber said he has learned that to lead and succeed, you need to manage three inevitable “states”: fear, uncertainty and change. Everybody has fear, he says, “but does it catalyze you or paralyze you? You cannot afford in leadership today to be risk averse. You cannot. Otherwise you’ll just be out of business.” And even while embracing risk, he said, it is important to keep in mind that certainty is an illusion. “As soon as you’re certain, you calcify all the thinking. Uncertainty is the cauldron in which creativity lives.”

That certainly sounds like the life of an admissions counselor now-a-days. Everything is uncertain. The student prospects we talk to are afraid of the changes to come, the price of your school and maybe a big geographic move. They come from a life of uncertainty. Who really knows whether their job is safe, and whatever the family saved, almost half of it is gone. And, going to college is one of the biggest changes for a family and a student – that only compounds their sense of uncertainty.

So inspiring stories are even more important now. The stories we tell aren’t random. They speak to a person. If you listen to your audience you will know what stories to tell. It is the story that will show that person what it feels like to live and study on your campus. It will make them believe they can be a success at your school and afterwards in life. As crass as it sounds, when you move the heart of that student you are talking with (as well as the hearts of his/her mom and dad) –- you are that much closer to enrolling them and moving their wallets.

You can hear or read an interview with Peter Guber on Knowledge@Wharton.  He won’t give you any stories you can use in your in your job but his success with stories will certainly inspire.