A few years ago, I came into the orbit of a public speaking coach, and he and I worked together for a few weeks. Your comment fascinates (and reassures) me, because he was emphatic that I had to abandon my own natural way of speaking entirely, and adopt a "persuasive persona" that sounded to me like a Saturday Night Live parody of a TED talk. This has exactly the opposite of the intended effect, because any anxiety I felt about speaking was multiplied by my anxiety about how I sounded and "staying in character". By comparison with the linked post, however, I was attempting to stay in a character that I didn't understand, with no thought given either to understanding what I was saying or, crucially, understanding who I was speaking to.

This got me thinking about the people who find value in his style, and I realized that the consistent feature was that they didn't care about understanding the material and, in some cases, were so incapable of doing so that the notion wouldn't occur to them. Not dumb, just not interested. They were simply transactional, and almost always very, very scared of talking in public, and this coach's method allowed them to get through it.

This also helped me realize that I don't particularly suffer from stage fright or public speaking anxiety, which has been a benefit, though it's important to note how insignificant that actually is. A family member has worked on stage with some extremely successful actors, and it's REMARKABLE how many of them have absolutely crushing stage fright. To me, that's more interesting than the line-learning thing: you take a person, someone most people in this thread would have heard of, and imagine them hiding out in a bathroom because their terrified of going onstage, then they get out there and utterly blow the room away. Something about pretending to be someone else unlocks so many actors.

This ties right back to my friction with this public speaking coach, because he was attempting to coach me into playing pretend, though without any empathy or understanding. So this guy is producing two categories of students: people like me who want to understand the material and the audience and simply speak like a better version of ourselves, and people who sound like they're selling you a car they've never driven but doing so competently, checking more "good public speaker" boxes at a superficial level.

I'm guessing the great actors and public speakers do both: love the material AND love the act of becoming a person you want to listen to.