I didn't start out as a trainer.
I started out as a marketer who kept noticing something. The best idea in the room didn't always win. The most prepared person didn't always land it.
And the difference between the message that moved people and the one that didn't was rarely about the content. It was something smaller, something in the structure, the tone, the moment just before someone opened their mouth.
I've spent my career trying to understand exactly what that something is. I still find it fascinating every single time.
I believe communication is about so much more than words. It's about how we connect with others, how we inspire action and ultimately, how we make people feel.
01 / THE backstory
A Marketer, GM and Facilitator - someone who has definitely been in your room.
Hi, I'm Elaine Schillinger. I grew up in the United States, studied Communications at the University of Pittsburgh, and somewhere along the way built most of my career here in Australia across roles I genuinely loved and a few that taught me more than I expected.
For the first part of my career I was inside organisations, working as a National Marketing Manager, a General Manager, a Head of Marketing. I managed teams, ran P&Ls, led brands through mergers and acquisitions, and spent a lot of time in rooms where a perfectly good strategy was quietly failing because the communication around it wasn't working.
I watched ideas die in boardrooms not because they were wrong, but because nobody could land them. I've been the person at the front of that room, and I know what it costs. That experience, not a methodology borrowed from somewhere else, is what I bring into every workshop and every consulting engagement.
02 / THE shift to facilitation
How I ended up doing this work.
Moving into facilitation and training wasn't a departure from the corporate world. It was a way of going deeper into the problem I'd always cared about. I'd spent years watching communication break down from the inside, and I wanted to fix it at the source, with the people doing the work, not just at the strategy level.
Over the years I've worked with consumer goods companies, heavy industry, pharmaceuticals, financial services, aged care providers, engineering firms and government offices. MARS. MYOB. NAB. Fujifilm. Japara Healthcare. Brookfield Multiplex. Penske Power Systems. Parliamentary offices. The industries are different. The problem is almost always the same.
Talented people who can't quite get the room. Leaders whose ideas are stronger than their ability to land them. Teams that leave a meeting without having moved anything forward. That's what I work on. And I've learned over a long time that it's almost never a knowledge gap. It's a structure gap. A behaviour gap. Often it comes down to one small thing, and when someone finds it, the change is immediate and it stays with them.
"It's never just what you say. It's how people feel after you've said it."
03 / marketing capability
Building marketing teams that think, not just execute.
One area I've become increasingly focused on is marketing communications capability, and it's a different conversation to general communication skills training. Large organisations are realising that having a marketing function isn't the same as having marketing capability. Teams are executing tasks without the strategic framework to understand why, briefing agencies without the language to get what they actually need, and producing content that's disconnected from business goals.
I've spent nearly 30 years on both sides of that problem, as the senior marketer trying to drive strategy through a team, and as the person brought in to build the capability that makes it stick. That combination is what I bring to these programs, and it's why they tend to work in the real world rather than just in a training room.
Why I built the AI workshop.
AI has changed what's possible in communication faster than most organisations have been able to keep up with. The tools are genuinely useful. They're also genuinely risky in environments where accuracy, tone and reputation matter, and most teams are somewhere in between, using them enthusiastically without a clear sense of where the guardrails should be.
I built the Responsible and Practical Use of AI for High-Stakes Communication workshop because I could see that gap clearly and because my background sits right at the intersection of where the problem lives. Senior communications experience, practical facilitation, and a real understanding of what high-stakes environments actually demand.
The workshop has been delivered for parliamentary offices and professional services teams, and I'm building it out further for aged care, corporate communications and marketing functions.
A bit more about me, since you asked.
I'm originally American, which occasionally makes me slightly more direct than people expect. I've been in Australia long enough to know when that's an asset and when to read the room a little more carefully. I'd like to think I've gotten better at the second one, though I make no guarantees.
I'm genuinely curious about people, which is probably why this work suits me as well as it does. Whether I'm coaching a senior leader through a high-stakes presentation or facilitating a team workshop, I'm always looking for the thing underneath the thing. The real reason the message isn't landing. The actual moment that needs to shift. I find that interesting every single time, which after nearly 30 years I think says something.
I've reinvented myself more than once. Moved countries, gone back into corporate when it was needed, built something new when it wasn't. I know what it feels like to be figuring out the next chapter while the current one is still unresolved. That probably makes me better at this work, not worse.
When I'm not working you'll find me on a coastal hike or tracking down a genuinely good coffee. The ocean is my reset button. It works better than most frameworks I've come across, and I've come across a few.
I'm based in Melbourne and work across Australia and internationally, in person and virtually.
If any of this sounds like your world, let's talk.
Whether you need someone to step in at a senior level, build your team's capability, run a workshop that actually changes something, or help your organisation use AI more responsibly in high-stakes communication, I'd love to have a conversation about what that looks like for you.