Rhetoric and Sports Psychology

I just finished reading an article for my Sports Psychology class about the development of coach-training programs. The following sentence was found under the section heading credibility and persuasiveness: "The perceived similarity between a communicator and the target of the message affects the power of persuasion" (Smoll and Smith, p. 468). I found this interesting because of our class discussion involving a long conversation about rhetoric and persuasion. We were trying to decipher the difference between these two words. Smoll and Smith's article, even though they are psychologists, suggests that the most important aspect of rhetoric and communication is the relationship between the communicator and his/her audience. If rhetoric is meant to persuade then the environment the communicator creates affects his/her ability to persuade. Since Smoll and Smith's article is about creating workshops to improve coaching behaviors, the person who will be speaking at these workshops must know how to approach the art of persuasion without purposefully letting the audience, which would be the coaches, know that this is his/her intentions. The following sentence even suggests something else: "With respect to trusting a communicator's intentions, credibility increases when the communicator does not appear to be purposefully trying to persuade the target" (Smoll and Smith, p. 468). This suggests that rhetoric is meant to trick the audience into being persuaded and that this is what makes a good communicator and someone the audience trusts.