7 Lessons From a 7-Minute Speech – Part 1
Last year, I reached the semifinals of the World Championship of Public Speaking (WCPS).
A 7-minute-long speech called “One Life, Fully Lived” took me there.
This is the first in a four-part series in which I share the lessons I learned about public speaking along the way.
A Great Speech Starts As A Terrible Speech
This is not the first lesson; it’s just an observation. I lived it.
In May 2024, I stood before my Toastmasters club and gave a speech called “The Gift of One Life.” I shared four lessons I learned from watching my wife Uzma live fully during her final years with cancer.
My content was okay.
My delivery? Meh!
When I decided to compete in 2025, that’s the speech I used. Over multiple rounds of the contest, my speech evolved into “One Life, Fully Lived.” I dropped a lesson, sharpened the content, and improved my delivery. That’s what took me to the semis.
The seven lessons about communication that I am about to share apply far beyond any contest stage. They apply every time you present at a department meeting. Every time you make a case to your C-suite for resources. Every time you stand in front of your team to deliver difficult news. Every time you try to move anyone toward anything.
Contest Speech vs. Monday Morning
Before we dive in, let me clear something up.
Most of you will never enter a speech contest.
Why should you care about lessons from a contest speech?
Fair question.
Think of a contest speech like the finale of a reality TV cooking show. It’s not enough for food to taste good. Every element must be timed, plated, and presented perfectly.
What should most other presentations be? Serve pizza out of the box and drinks from 2-liter bottles in red plastic cups? No!
Most of the talks we give should be like a special-occasion meal. They don’t have to be presented perfectly. But they should be delicious and filling enough to leave people satisfied.
Here’s what I noticed: If you train like you’re preparing for a cooking show finale, you become the kind of communicator who can deliver a remarkable meal on any given day.
And in leadership, that ability matters. It matters when presenting data. It matters when rallying a demoralized team after a bad outcome. It matters when trying to convince a skeptical CFO that your program deserves funding.
A quote attributed to President Kennedy says that the only reason to give a speech is to change the world. When a speech informs, persuades, entertains, or inspires even one person, the world is changed just a bit. Every time you step up to communicate as a leader, you have that chance.
Lesson 1: A Speech Must Serve Only One Master — The Audience
Your only obligation when you speak is to the people listening.
That sounds obvious. It’s not.
A speech is not about showing off your talent or expertise.
It’s not about impressing your colleagues or winning a contest round.
It’s not even about becoming a better public speaker.
The only thing it’s about is — moving people.
This was the most important lesson I learned from my contest journey.
In the first version of my speech, I had all these details about Uzma. About how she wasn’t just a doctor. She wrote a blog and eventually a book. She wrote poetry, spoke two languages fluently, and understood at least 3 more. She played a couple of musical instruments, painted acrylics on canvas, and watercolors on paper. She dabbled in plaster sculptures.
But why should the audience care?
My speech wasn’t supposed to be about Uzma. It was about what I learned from her. My desire to honor her memory was competing with my duty to the audience. And in that battle, the audience must always win.
So I trimmed it. Instead of listing everything she was, I started my speech with one line: “My wife Uzma was a doctor, an artist, a writer, and many, many other things.”
That single sentence does heavy lifting. It establishes who she was without drowning the audience in unnecessary details. The phrase “many, many other things” lets the audience fill in the gaps with their own imagination.
It was painful to cut. But the speech got better.
What This Means For Leaders
If you lead in healthcare, you already know that communication is a core part of your job. But here’s where most physician leaders get tripped up.
We make our presentations about ourselves.
Not intentionally. But it happens.
We present data to show our thoroughness. We load our slides with evidence to prove we’ve done our homework. We include every caveat and qualification because we’re trained to be precise.
And the audience? Their eyes glaze over by slide four.
When you present a quality improvement initiative, the audience doesn’t need to see every data point you analyzed. They need to understand what’s changing, why it matters, and what you need from them. They can ask for the underlying data later. It can be an appendix, a handout.
When you deliver bad news to your team, they don’t need a detailed timeline of every decision that led to this moment. They need to feel heard and to know what comes next.
When you pitch a new program to leadership, they don’t need your literature review. They need to see how this solves a problem they care about.
Every time you communicate as a leader, ask yourself one question: Who is this for?
If the answer is “me” — to prove my competence, to show I’ve done the work, to honor my effort — you’re serving the wrong master.
If the answer is “them” — to help them understand, to move them to action, to make their decision easier — you’re on the right track.
Why This Is Especially Hard For Physicians
Medicine trains us to be comprehensive. In clinical work, leaving out details can be dangerous. An incomplete differential is a missed diagnosis.
But leadership communication isn’t clinical work. In communication, thoroughness is the enemy of clarity. The more you include, the less people absorb.
This was one of the hardest shifts for me to make when I stepped into leadership. The instinct to be thorough at the bedside actively works against you in the boardroom.
I’ve sat through countless physician presentations where brilliant clinical insights got buried under mountains of unnecessary detail. The speaker knew their stuff. The audience left confused about why they spent an hour on it.
The fix isn’t to dumb things down. It’s to respect the audience enough to give them only what they need.
The One Practice
Before your next presentation, meeting, or even important email, pause and ask: “If my audience could only take away one thing from this, what would it be?”
Build everything around that one thing.
Cut everything that doesn’t serve it.
If one thing seems too restrictive, make it three things. But no more.
It will feel like you’re leaving important stuff out. That’s the point.
The audience doesn’t need everything you know.
They need the one thing that will move them.
This is Part 1 of a four-part series: 7 Lessons from a 7-Minute Speech. It is based on a 25-minute interactive presentation with the same title that I have given in multiple settings, including at District 30 (Chicago Region) Toastmasters Leadership Institute in December 2025. Leave a comment if you would like to explore whether it could be a good presentation for your team.
Next week: Why every word must earn its place, and how telling the truth doesn’t mean telling everything.