Tina Vansteenbergen is not just your average motivational speaker! Tina, hailing from Indiana, got Miami University’s sorority community Phired Up last Monday with her words of wisdom. She took a break from her usual scene living with frat guys to speak to Miami’s sorority women about the power of recruitment on behalf of Phired Up Productions. When describing her work, she tells people that she works in the relationship business, not the sorority business. A huge takeaway from her speech was that, “people don’t join organizations, people join people”.
Throughout her talk, she highlighted the importance of joining an organization with people you feel supported by in a very interactive manner. At one point, she had attendee’s turn to their neighbor and tell them about the woman who made them want to join the sorority they were in, and then prompted everyone to yell out her name. The room became full of cheerful energy with everyone shouting out different names of women who had inspired them. She kept people moving throughout her speech when she asked everyone to get up and mingle with new people, working to prove a point about the importance of first impressions, circling this activity back to recruitment.
She had the crowd laughing when she went into a description of the various types of handshakes people tend to have including: The Crusher, The Little Lady, and The Dead Fish. Her suggestion for a proper handshake was to bump, then squeeze. On the topic of first impressions, she also mentioned eye contact, power of a smile, and body language. Her tips for the above were swapping a cracked-out recruitment smile for more of a grandma smile that is warm, genuine, and inviting. She challenged sorority members to attempt not speaking about sororities or fraternities during the first two rounds of recruitment this February, and instead to work towards incorporating the following “F” words into our convo’s–topics even a nervous Potential New Member (PNM) will be able to chat about:
- Family/Friends
- Fun
- Favorites
- Future
- From
During the recruitment process, Tina mentions the ease of asking primarily yes/no and short-ended questions. If we can keep Tina’s advice in mind and generate more open-ended questions along the lines of “How”, “Why”, “Tell me about”, “Explain to me”, Help me understand”, then we can begin to change the way we have conversations and work towards becoming more curious, generous, authentic, and vulnerable. By choosing to be more curious, we can then see every person as an opportunity for growth and to learn something new.