- Question is, what is pathos, and what does it have to do
with your public speaking skills?
Those are the questions we're going to answer
in this video, so let's get into the details.
(explosive mysterious music)
Hello there and welcome back.
I am Alex Lyon,
and this channel is called Communication Coach.
And we are in the middle of a three-part series
on ethos, pathos, and logos.
And these are all ways that we can persuade our listeners,
ways that we can appeal to our listeners
and bring them along and convince them of our message.
So there's much more here than just academic concepts.
They have direct practical application
for us as professionals.
So in this video,
we're going to talk specifically about pathos.
And I would like to say upfront
that I think pathos is the most powerful tool you have
to persuade your listeners,
because it's all about emotion and heart.
And I think we're much more convinced by our emotions
than we are by our logic.
So this is about hearts, not heads.
Logos is a video about heads, and we'll get to that next.
And also I want to recommend that you stick around
to the end of the video.
I'm gonna recommend a couple of the resources
that you can use to help bring your public speaking skills
to the next level.
So in terms of pathos, let's define what we mean.
Pathos is where we appeal to the audience's emotions.
We draw out or involve listeners' feelings.
This is, again, appealing to the heart.
This does not mean, by the way,
that you as a speaker need to show your emotions
and cry or do something like that.
In fact, I've seen many speakers who get really emotional
in the moment, and it absolutely does nothing for me.
And then I've seen other speakers
communicate in a very straightforward, matter-of-fact way,
but it still hits me in the heart.
So it's not about the speaker's emotions.
It's about whether or not the speaker is appealing
to the audience's emotions.
That's a key distinction that a lot of people miss.
So pathos is about communicating in a way
that touches your listeners' emotions,
that evoke an emotional response from listeners.
And it could be inspiration.
It could be compassion.
It could be humor.
I suppose it could be anger,
but I don't recommend necessarily going in that direction.
So let's look at three concrete ways
that you can appeal to your listeners' emotions.
And the number-one way, by far, is telling stories.
Stories transport us.
A well-told story will sweep us away
into the world of the narrative.
There's something about a story
that we as listeners can see ourselves in personally,
and it gets us all caught up in it,
much more so, for example, than a statistic or a fact.
And in fact, I saw a statistic not long ago about dogs.
This is really crazy, but 3.9 million dogs
are abandoned every year in the United States.
That's a huge number, 3.9 million.
That goes to my head.
But what even persuades me more
is one particular story I heard.
And I saw a video of a dog
that was being abandoned by its owner
at a shelter in the middle of the night.
And the guy got rid of the dog, ran back into his car,
closed the door and was trying to drive away.
And that little dog was pawing at the car door
trying to get back into the car with his owner.
And as the car was going away,
the dog chased down the owner.
And it was so heart-wrenching.
It stirred up so much compassion for me
and for my own dog in my life,
a golden retriever, by the way,
that it really touched my heart
way more than a statistic, 3.9 million.
So stories have a way of reaching into our hearts
and pulling out those emotions.
And I use this same strategy
to get my wife to watch football, by the way.
She doesn't care about football,
or she didn't care about football.
But what I did is I started telling her real stories
about the players.
Instead of just, oh, this team wants to beat that team,
I would say, oh, you see that player right there,
and how they keep showing him,
and he looks really intense today?
That's because his dad is sick and in the hospital,
and he's dedicating today's game to his dad.
And my wife will sit down on the couch
and watch that game now, that football game,
because she cares about the person's story.
So stories about people are very compelling.
That's the best way, above all,
to appeal to people's emotions.
The number-two way is to visually demonstrate
what you are saying.
So you have words, and those are important.
But if there's any way you can bring it to life
in a way that appeals to people's eyes,
that's what you wanna do.
You can show an image, like a photograph perhaps,
or other kind of painting, to bring out people's emotions.
But you can also, with your words, paint an image.
You can act something out for them, bring something to life.
I've seen people do simple magic tricks
that are very visual, and you go, oh!
And it really delites you and draws your emotions in
because you saw something visual.
You can also take something that could just be shared
with words, but you act it out a little bit,
like a skit, you make it theatrical.
In a way, you dramatize it.
There's a speaker called Nicole Johnson,
and she did an incredible speech
called The Invisible Woman.
You can find it on YouTube.
And she was talking about how moms
are often underappreciated, but that was okay with her,
because she was still trying to build a beautiful family.
And to act it out, she had this huge book of architecture.
And she was talking about the different cathedrals
that had been built over the years
and how so many of the works of art
were credited to unknown authors.
And she was flipping through the pages,
and it said builder unknown,
builder unknown, builder unknown
for these beautiful cathedrals.
And she said, "You know, that's okay.
"I don't need credit for my child's life.
"I just want them to love being at home
"and to grow into their own person someday."
But when she acted it out visually with the huge book,
turning the pages, that's what really pumped it up
and brought it to life.
That's what appealed to my emotions.
The third way to appeal to listeners' emotions
is through vivid language.
The way you choose your words is really critical,
because you can choose dry, ordinary words,
or you can use metaphor and simile
and different language strategies that tap into our hearts
more than our minds.
So there's an example that I use in a different video
about Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech,
which is a very emotional speech.
And an old professor friend of mine, Peter Marston,
said, "If he had called that speech I Have an Idea,
"nobody would have remembered it."
But he chose his words carefully.
He said, "I have a dream," because a dream
is a powerful emotional image,
much more than the word, idea, is.
So you wanna choose words that fire us up emotionally
and involve us that way.
Another great way to use words like this
is to find a good quotation that really resonates
with people's emotions, because quotations,
the author has worked on those words very carefully
and deliberately, and so they will cut through in a way
sometimes that our own words will not.
I saw a great quote that a friend
shared with me the other day by Tom Fuller.
The quote is "Great hopes make great men."
And there's a lot going on there in that quotation,
even though it's really short,
like the idea of greatness and hopes
and wanting to be a great person.
Quotations have a lot of emotional appeal in them
compared to our ordinary words.
So pathos is all about appealing to our audience's emotions.
And I think the top-three ways to do that
are to tell good stories, to use visual demonstrations
in ways that appeal to people's eyes,
and also to use vivid language,
really to tap into their heart that way.
Pathos is about heart, not head.
And it's one of the most powerful ways.
So let me tell you a little bit more
about these resources that I mentioned.
There are two resources that I want to recommend
to help you become a better public speaker.
The first one is a free PDF download.
They are tips to help you become a more confident,
composed public speaker.
You put your email in, and I send you that download.
And the second is a full course that I have created
called Present Like a Pro.
And the goal of the course
is to help you become a top-10% speaker
in your professional setting.
I'll put links to both of those resources
in the description below this video.
And question of the day about pathos,
what do you think the best ways are
to appeal to your audience's emotions?
I would love to hear your suggestions to that question
in the comment section below this video.
So take care, and I will see you in the last video on logos.