Tag: communication

Patient Case Presentations: Public Speaking Skills for Doctors

Emily Schwartz Speaks

Key Insights

  1. Tell a story, not just a medical history.
  2. Know your audience, and adjust your level of detail.
  3. Deliver with confidence, clarity, and purpose.

As a doctor or other medical professional, your job is to protect and improve the health of your patients, but doing that requires communicating their story to others. A patient case presentation feels simple, but it’s a deceptively specific and specialized skill. When doctors struggle to present a case clearly, they often feel ashamed or frustrated. “I went through years and years of medical school, I’m a world class physician and yet….I get tripped up by telling others about my patients? What gives!?”

Use the following three tips to help elevate your communication skills:

Tell A Story, Not Just a Medical History

Every patient is a person beyond the numbers in their chart. Tell their story. Start with the problem, give the diagnostic journey, highlight the critical decisions, and the outcome. Rather than overwhelming your audience with every clinical detail, select the information that helps them understand the case and its significance. A helpful exercise: If you turned this patience case into a children’s book, what would it say?

Know Your Audience and Adjust Your Level of Detail

Are you presenting to specialists? Residents? A multidisciplinary team? Consider what your audience already knows, what they need to understand, and what you need them to remember. Remember, it’s not about the amount of information you share. The way you wrap it up and present it will vary based on your audience. If you’re saying the same words in the same way to all audiences, you’re likely not speaking as effectively as you can.

Deliver with Confidence, Clarity and Purpose

As you’re telling the story of your patient, speak clearly, slowly, and with appropriate pauses and emphasis so it sounds like you’re communicating a story you know, not reading it from a chart for the very first time. Confident communication doesn’t feel hurried, and it has an underlying passion and purpose that conveys your connection to the material. If you find yourself speaking quickly to get through all of the information, you need to find a way to say less, not speak faster.

I have clients who meet with me before every case presentation to practice and get feedback. If you’d like to give that a try, reach out to Emily@EmilySchwartzSpeaks.com for more information.

How to Speak Better in Meetings

Emily Schwartz Speaks

Key Insights:

  1. Get to your point faster.
  2. Make your points and ideas repeatable.
  3. Speak confidently and listen thoughtfully.

Speaking clearly, confidently, and concisely in meetings is an underrated form of public speaking. Presenting to a room of a few decision makers at your work takes just as much skill and preparation as speaking at a conference in front of 1,000 people. If you find that your comments in meetings are going unnoticed, your ideas aren’t being acted upon, or you’ve received feedback that you need to have more “confident executive presence” during meetings, try these three tips.

Get To Your Point Faster

Summarize your main idea or recommendation first and then provide the details. We often do the opposite, especially if we’re afraid of our idea being shot down. We tend to lead with disclaimer language. It might sound like this:

“Now, I know this has been tried before, and I know it might not be everyone’s first choice, but given our data from last quarter and given that I’ve already spoken to our external stakeholders, actually hold on, I have that chart right here…..”

Do you see the problem? You’ve been talking for almost a minute and haven’t even said the thing you want to say. Instead, try this:

“Here is my recommendation. Now, here is the data that supports it.”

Then, when giving the data or supporting details, more is absolutely less. What is the minimum information the audience needs to act upon it? Extraneous details detract from your point. If you know you tend to ramble, write out, in bullet point form, everything the audience needs to know before the meeting. Then see if any of the bullet points can be combined into a large thought.

Make Your Ideas and Repeatable

It’s unlikely that every single person who is needed to implement your idea is in the meeting. Your comments might need to be repeated to leadership for approval, delegated to a team to implement, or communicated to a vendor for a solution. Make it easy for the people in the room to repeat your comments. Imagine you’re watching someone in the room repeat what you said to someone else. What do you want them to say?

Ideas are repeatable when they are concise and clear. Stay away from jargon or lengthy explanations. “We should do X because it will achieve Y.” That is the kind of repeatable sentence you’re looking to pass along.

Speak Confidently and Listen Thoughtfully

The words you say are important, but how you say those words can be the difference between coming across as a confident leader and an unsure employee. This is especially true for new managers. Take a pause before speaking, leave space between your sentences, speak clearly and loudly, and when you’re not speaking, listen to what’s being said around you.

The time to practice your words in your head is before the meeting, not during it. During the meeting you should be listening to what others are saying. What are their concerns? How does this impact the ideas you’re about to present? Confident communicators are able to concisely show how their ideas fit into the other concerns and narratives being discussed.

For specific, individualized feedback as to why you’re not being heard in meetings and how get to better, contact Emily@EmilySchwartzSpeaks.com Most people see dramatic results and insights after our first 1-hour meeting.