Politeness Strategies Used by Mario Teguh in Handling Questions in MTGW Program

Mario Teguh was one of the motivators in Indonesia whose fans are considered the most. He was also issued as the most expensive motivator in Indonesia at this time being. As a great motivator, he must have some strategies to be close and motivate his audience. This research aimed to figure out the strategies he used, focusing on handling questions. The data was collected by observation method and documentation technique. The data was analyzed based on the politeness strategy of Brown and Levinson. From the analysis, The researcher found that at least there were ten strategies used by Mario to share the motivation. These made the audience did not feel to be lectured when he shared it. They feel like a friend to him.


INTRODUCTION
Mario Teguh is one of the motivators in Indonesia. His complete name is Sis Maryono Teguh. In 2009, he was nominated as the most influential agent of change by Republika. One of the programs he leads is called MTGW, which stands for Mario Teguh Golden Ways. It is a program of motivation sharing led by Mario Teguh. This program is usually broadcasted by Metro TV every Sunday from 07.30 pm until 09.00 pm. It has some sessions in which Mario will share motivation, polling about the topic of the day, sharing problems by the audience answered by Mario, question and answer session, and closed by the conclusion. In the question-and-answer session, he will invite the audience to ask a question. To answer the question, he usually asks the other audience to participate.
When leading the program, he has to create positive politeness to maintain relationships with the audience. Therefore, the audience gets the answer they need 55 | E n l i t without feeling being lectured. Besides, the audience will feel that they are accepted.
His ability to handle the Audience' questions has been known as the polite but fun and funny style. Thus, he was once invited to be a comic in the Stand-Up comedy program at the end of 2011. Seeing these facts, I am interested in figuring out his strategies as a motivator when communicating with other people. As a motivator, he must have some great ways to encourage and make people interested in listening to his communication style. Thus, I would like to describe his strategies and share the results to apply in my and readers' real life.
In daily communication, everyone, including Mario Teguh and us, will face a social fact in terms of 'face.' According to Yule (1996), the face is people's self-image which each society member claims. There are two concepts of face, positive and negative face. A negative face is addressed to people's wish that what he wants is not impeded by other people around him. A positive face is a face where each member wants his wants to be desirable to other people. In a society, a speaker will say something that may threaten others' face or other people's wish, which is called Face Threatening Act (FTA), when he is communicating to other people. To minimize the threatening of others' faces, we are not separated by the term 'politeness. ' Leech (2016) stated that politeness concerns a relationship between two participants that he called self and other. These two participants are demanded to fulfil the concept of politeness. Therefore the face-threatening acts can be minimized. Politeness itself is not a 'gift of birth' possessed by people when they are born. Watts (2003) stated that it has to be acquired. People should learn and be socialized, and after that, politeness will be acquired. Brown and Levinson (1987), in their book, "Politeness" classified fifteen strategies for creating positive politeness in our daily life: 1) Noticing, attending to hearer, 2) Exaggeration, 3) Intensifying interest to the hearer, 4) Using in-group identity makers, 5) Seeking agreement, 6) Avoiding disagreement, 7) Presupposition/ raise/ assert common ground, 8) Joking, 9) Asserting or presuppose speaker's knowledge of and concern for hearer's wants, 10) Offering and promising, 11) Being optimistic, 12) Including both speaker and hearer in the activity, 13) Giving (or ask) 56 | E n l i t reasons, 14) Assuming or asserting reciprocity, 15) Giving gifts to the hearer (goods, sympathy, understanding, cooperation). These fifteen strategies will be the basis for my research in analyzing the data.

RESEARCH METHOD
This research is descriptive qualitative research. The data was collected by finding the recording of this program from www.youtube.com with MTGW as the keyword.
I chose a topic from all video collections of this program, "Hidupku, pilihanku", as the sample. From this recording, I made a script of a conversation between an audience named Dimas and Mario Teguh. After making the script, I will analyze the words used by him to find politeness strategies based on the theories stated by Brown and Levinson (1983).

RESULT AND DISCUSSION
Having analyzed the conversation, I found that most of the politeness strategies were used by Mario Teguh in handling the question from the audience named Dimas. The result and the discussion will be as follows.

Politeness Strategies in Answering Questions
Mario's first politeness strategy was the 'Notice.' This strategy refers to Mario's taking notice of the aspect of the Audience' condition. This strategy was applied both to Dimas and other audience present in that place.
Here is an example of the strategy applied in interaction with Dimas.
(They love to learn from those who have been successful) Mario : Good.
From the data above, we can see that Mario used some words such as 'Super' and 'good' and non-verbal like repeating the origin of the audience 'Dari Kendal' and gave applause to give notice that the audience comes from a distant place. These two acts made the audience felt being respected by him. Therefore, he did not hesitate to continue asking Mario about his problem. He also applied this strategy to the other audience, like in the example below.
(Dare to try)
(Dare to try. Good)… Do you agree?
The second strategy used by Mario Teguh was the 'Exaggeration.' This strategy refers to the praise of the audience in the program. This strategy also made the one who talked with him felt that they were respected. An example of this strategy can be seen in the part of the conversation below.
(The difference is that the first young man is a disciplined person…) Mario : Super Sekali. Ini pertanyaan yang very smart.
Great. This is a very smart question) In the example above, we can see that Mario praised the audience by saying From the examples above, we can see that Mario looked for an agreement many times. It made the audience feel they were having the same idea and just helped them think more systematically. It made the gap between him and the audience are small.
The sixth strategy applied by Mario in the question and answer session was the 'joke' strategy. It made him and the audience felt that they were close and made the gap smaller. It also made the people assumed that he was friendly and easy to close. In the conversation, he used two long jokes that I took as an example of this strategy. The first joke was when he gave an example of a brave kid who opened a cage door, hit the tiger inside, and then closed it again. It resulted in the laugh of the audience. The second was when he told a story about himself when he was young.
He said that if he disagreed with other people, he would say let us meet in the yard.
Brave. However, in front of women, he was weak. He said that fortunately, no woman ever rejected him -any woman. They just disobeyed him. It also made the audience laughed and felt closer to him. In the example, we can see that he asked the audience to explain why they decided and how that choice could stand strongly. By doing this, the emotional relationship between the audience and him can be maintained better.
The tenth strategy used by Mario in the program was 'giving the gift' to the audience. In this case, he often gave an appraisal to the audience. The words he used were like super sekali (great), smart, and baik hatinya (kind-hearted). Besides using words, he also used non-verbal activity like giving applause to the audience when they were from far places or gave the right answers.

Conclusion
As a motivator, Mario Teguh understands that his position is not as a center or the only one who can solve the problems. If he is against those points, the people will not listen and consider him not to follow. Besides, one of the most important things in sharing motivation is that the motivator should make the audience not feel being lectured by him. When the audience understands and follows the advice given, then the motivator is considered as successful. Based on the analysis, we can see that he succeeded in doing his role as a great motivator.
In sharing motivation, the relationship between the motivator and the audience should also be maintained. In the conversation, we can see that Mario did this by giving an appraisal, involving the audience in solving the problem, calling the audience with nice words such as sahabat saya yang baik hatinya, sharing stories about his life in the past, and telling some jokes. It made the audience felt no big gap and felt that he is so close to them.

Suggestion
It is suggested to the next researcher interested in the same field as the one I did to see the problems from other views. For example, seeing the politeness strategy by seeing the Curhat session or the Polling session. Therefore, the strategy used by