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| Gillian McAuley MA, BA (Hons), LRAM, Dip. DSL Equity: 13938 | |
| | For over twenty years Gillian McAuley has enjoyed a wide-ranging and prolific career as a successful working actress, classical singer, presenter, director, drama teacher and vocal coach. She has extensive experience in various areas of her profession ranging from lead roles in opera, West End musicals and classical theatre to film, TV, radio and live comedy. She is also a highly experienced, widely employed voice-over artist and has worked both in the UK and overseas providing countless voice-overs for advertising, radio, TV, film, talking books, online language sites and corporate multi-media campaigns.
Concurrent to this she has also spent over twenty years as a voice teacher, acting coach, singing teacher, accent coach and dialect coach teaching voice production, speech, singing, drama and performance skills both to private students and within major corporations, schools and drama colleges.
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 | She now dedicates her time and passion to VoiceMatters, a specialised voice coaching, voice training and consultancy practice that Gillian founded to address the needs of business professionals who wish to make significant and lasting improvements to their vocal impact, presentation skills, communication skills and public speaking abilities. |
After graduating in English Language and Literature from Manchester University in 1988, Gillian won a prestigious Harper Trust Singers' Bursary to study Opera on the Advanced Performers Course at the Royal Academy of Music where she also achieved a First Class LRAM as a voice teacher. It was here that she first developed a keen interest in vocal physiology and the use and care of the human voice and she has developed this knowledge over many years. Voice production and vocal health along with accent-modification, phonetics and dialect coaching are among her areas of specialisation and she has a wide range of knowledge and expertise in these areas. |
| Having worked for some years as a freelance opera/classical singer, she went on to achieve a Masters in Text and Performance at RADA / Kings College London, completed her drama training on the Accredited Postgraduate Actor's Course at Drama Studio London and made the move to a more diverse career in theatre, screen acting, voice-over and live comedy theatre, including time spent studying and performing long-form improvisation techniques with Second City alumni in the US. On returning from America she began to combine her mainstream work as an actress with providing performance skills in corporate environments. This included providing visuals and voice-overs for corporate multi-media campaigns - along with providing training in voice-over techniques and screen acting for the in-house participants - providing role-play and improvisation techniques for sales staff, teaching voice production and vocal impact skills to public speakers and running workshops in presentation skills training and public speaking coaching for senior executives. |
| In 1997 Gillian was asked for some advice and voice coaching by a friend who was an executive within a large multinational corporation. He had a number of important upcoming presentations in front of large audiences and was suffering some anxiety about his presentation skills in general and about his voice and other aspects of his verbal and non-verbal communication in particular.
On working in some detail with this friend and subsequently with a number of his colleagues she became acutely aware of two specific problems that were clearly endemic in many workplaces:
* | That many business executives at the very highest levels of their careers regularly suffer acute nerves, anxiety, panic and a worrying lack of self-confidence because of concerns over their voice, communication skills and their ability to address an audience of any size. | * | That the very skills that actors and singers take for granted as part of their initial training are not widely on offer to those from other professions who also rely heavily on having a strong voice and effective communication skills in the workplace. |
|  | It was this experience that prompted Gillian to launch VoiceMatters Coaching and Consultancy, dedicating herself to teaching voice production and public speaking techniques and providing presentation skills training and confidence coaching to business professionals both in the UK and in the US. |
| She offers individually tailored, one-to-one voice coaching to private students from her studio in West London. Her clients cover an extremely wide range of professions from MPs, lawyers, senior executives and managers, teachers and lecturers, leading media and sports personalities, financial professionals, doctors, authors, clergy, HR professionals, consultants, etc. She also works extensively with major corporations and organisations, either on in-house private contracts or as a freelance consultant to PR firms. Corporate clients include: IBM, Microsoft, The British Council, BP, NHS Direct, Carlton Television, Wrigley UK, The Bank of Bermuda, The United Bermuda Party, Stolichnaya Ltd., Proctor and Gamble Europe. (For a more comprehensive client list see Corporate page.) For corporate and public sector clients she can provide voice and impact coaching, expertise, advice and appraisal in a format tailor-made to the client's needs with group workshops, training days and one-to-one sessions. Gillian has written and contributed to numerous published articles on various aspects of voice development. She has also featured as a voice coach / expert voice consultant on many national TV and radio shows and given numerous interviews in her field of expertise. |
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