Who is Yvette Alcott Ph.D?

Yvette is an academic, researcher, business person and an actor. She has spent the last two decades observing and helping people in business and industry navigate the complexities of human interactions. Her background as a professionally trained actor saw her start her professional life performing Shakespeare in repertoire in Australian schools and communities, sometimes carrying over 18 characters and six plays in her head at one time. She has since performed in hundreds of other live theatre shows, as well as film and television productions. The art of creating and performing characters sparked a two decade interest in the notion of identity and how it can help or hinder our capacity for growth. How do we learn to become who we are? Can we really become someone or something else, someone new, and remain authentic? Why do we begin developing an identity, and does adhering to an identity hinder or enhance our growth and development?

Yvette utilised her acting and improvisational skills as a business actor and corporate role-player. Over the last 20 years she has been involved in literally thousands of business conversations covering hundreds of characters and scenarios that present themselves over and again in the work environment. Spurred by a fascination to understand why some of these conversations achieved the desired outcomes and why some did not, she pursued a higher degree in psychology, completing her Ph.D. on impression formation, cultural identity and belonging.  She has worked as an academic, lecturing and coordinating the Social Psychology unit at the University of New England, and she has authored and facilitated programs on mental health, resilience and wellbeing. Her considerable expertise focuses on helping people develop heightened communication skills. Her aim is to improve awareness of what we bring to a meeting or an interaction and an understanding of the cause and effect in critical and difficult conversations. Yvette firmly believes such skills are not only essential components of finessed leadership and people management, but are life changing personal attributes. 

Her most recent endeavour is to promote the power of play and performance as a methodology for personal, group, and organisational development, with a particular focus on Communication, Wellbeing and Creativity. She has come to realise that improv, play and performance allow groups and individuals to discover that they can do things, through performing, that they never thought they could do. Play is a most powerful developmental tool and is equally successful for individuals looking to grow and change, teams looking to work better together, and organisations looking to change and develop culturally. She has extended her services to include Applied Improvisation, Applied Theatre and Play as superior methodologies to deliver research based L & D programs - effectively delivering the tools and the results, or the process and product, simultaneously.

Affiliations.

In 2015 she co-founded Corporate Actors Australia providing professional, experienced corporate actors to the business world to provide experiential learning utilising role-play and improvisational skills.

In 2020 she co-founded The Global Play Brigade.  She was invited to investigate a global response to the COVID pandemic by Cathy Salit, Emeritus CEO of Performance of a Lifetime. This involved late night zooms with strangers from around the world integrating play, improv/theatre techniques and social therapeutics as a methodology for creating hope, boosting mental health, well-being and positive development for people across the world. The GPB is still growing and thriving, offering free experiential workshops to whoever chooses to turn up.

In 2022 she joined the ensemble at Performance of A Lifetime which helps people and organisations grow through the art of performance. POAL’s work is rooted in a set of fundamental principles that combine breakthroughs in the science of human development with insights and practices from theatre and improvisation. These provide the lens through which POAL sees and conducts all of their work with clients.

In 2023 Yvette was invited to become an Associate of the East Side Institute, New York.   After successfully completing the ESI International Class, Yvette gained a deeper understanding of the power of play and performance to explore and to experiment with new relationships, and to build communities. The ESI has its roots in Performance Activism and Social Therapeutics and it continues to play a significant role in using performance for social change throughout the world.

In 2021 she founded Psychologies for Change which is a niche consultancy drawing on science based strategies and combining experiential methodology as the best way to manifest growth and long term change. This is offered not just to individuals and organisations, but to entire communities. She believes the best way forward for those seeking long term development and change is to lean on what social psychology and the behavioural sciences offer, and then embed that learning via a unique performative approach. Yvette’s mission via Psychologies for Change is to promote heightened communication skills, robust wellbeing and accessible creativity as the three pillars of success for all aspects of organisational, professional and personal lives. 

 Yvette is an experienced facilitator. She designs and delivers experiential programs for large organisations or workforces. She also creates workshops and seminars for conferences or smaller business. She is also an engaging keynote speaker – relating her knowledge about human development, interactions and communication with passion and humour.