Speaker I admire - chapter 1 post 3

A speaker who I admire is my boss, Mike Burges. I work for a company called the United Spirit Association, and in order to be hired within the company there is an audition process. They evaluate you not only on your dance ability, but also your personalty and teaching ability. Although hundreds of people try out throughout the country, only 7 new individuals are chosen every year. Our boss personally contacts each individual and explains to them how excited he is to have them as an instructor.

Each year we have a staff training event where employees from all over the country come together. Within the training, he speaks to us on a number of occasions. When he speaks, he has a way of making a person feel important. Through pathos, he is able to make every employee feel like a family member and motivates us to not only be better teachers, but better people. To me it seems as if he is not the typical boss. It really seems as if he has our own personal success in mind. Since he started out in the same position as us and has experienced many of the same situations as us, we are able to identify with his personal character.

He also does a great job using ethos. As soon as he opens his mouth, it is clear that he is very passionate about his job. He explains the impact that we have on some of our students and evokes many emotions within us. Each year he also sets up an awards ceremony where he honors people who have been with the company for many years. Within those ceremonies many tears are expressed and you can her the true emotion in his voice while speaking about each person.

He also does a great job organizing his thoughts. Everything he says has a logical order and he does not include useless information. He also doesn't get sidetracked easily or carry on about useless information. He only provides the most useful examples and cracks jokes that apply to our situation. Overall I think that Aristotle's classification scheme works great for him.

I don't believe I am quite as persuasive as him, but I still do have my moments. While teaching I try to push my students to a place where they can accomplish reasonable goals. I use ethos by explaining my own experiences with the task they are trying to overcome. This way my students get to know me better. I also have a great passion for what I am doing so I sometimes may use pathos in exess. Since dance commonly expresses emotion, I try to proke as many emotions in my students as possible. I try very hard to use logos, but my thought process isn't always logical. I have been known to be a very random person, so at times random things pop out of my mouth. That is the one area I should work on improving. Overall, I try to persuade my students to be as successful as possible.