Five Minutes That Matter: The Power of Brevity

Ayesha R. Nicholls:

I still remember waiting nervously in my seat at the DisruptHR conference in Kingston, Jamaica on October 8, before I hit the stage to deliver my talk. The rules were clear: each speaker had only five minutes, 20 slides which auto-advanced every 15 seconds. No notes. No phones. No do-overs. No long-winded explanations. Just five minutes to make an impact.

I wasn’t in my usual territory either. This was an HR conference, not a communications one. I was in another country, with an audience I didn’t know, speaking about communications in a room full of people steeped in talent management, recruitment, and workplace culture. It was a stretch. It was uncomfortable. And that was exactly the point.

Because those five minutes weren’t just about a presentation. They were about resilience in communication.

The Pressure of Five Minutes

When you only have five minutes, there’s no hiding. Every word matters. Every pause matters. Every story has to work harder. In communications, we live in those “five-minute” moments all the time:

• The urgent media statement during a crisis
• The elevator pitch to a potential partner
• The brief window of attention from a busy CEO
• The single chance to shape a narrative before it takes on a life of its own.

As I said in my talk, “What is Five Minutes? The Secret Storytelling Weapon You’re Ignoring,” five minutes doesn’t feel like much, but it is everything. 

That’s why the discipline of brevity is more than a technical skill—it’s a resilience practice. It forces you to strip away the noise, get to the core of the message, and trust that clarity will carry you through.

Resilience in Communication

We often think of resilience as the ability to bounce back from setbacks. In communication, resilience looks a little different. It’s about adaptability—the ability to show up with clarity even when the context shifts.

For me, resilience on that stage meant stepping into an HR conference as a Communications professional and asking, “What do we share?” “Where do our disciplines overlap?” It meant resisting the urge to over-explain and instead trusting that five minutes was enough.

Resilience also meant preparing differently—practicing the talk until it felt like muscle memory, then letting go of control once the slides began to auto-advance. It meant staying steady when the pace quickened, knowing the only way through was forward.

Organizations face this same pressure every day. A social media backlash leaves them with just five minutes to respond before the narrative escalates. A journalist’s call gives them five minutes to craft a position. A leader’s five minutes at the microphone can define the tone of an entire strategy.

Resilience isn’t abstract—it’s practiced in these micro-moments.

What Five Minutes Really Means

Looking back, those five minutes on stage taught me three lessons:

1. Clarity beats complexity: If you can’t say it in five minutes, you may not fully understand it yourself. Stripping your message to its essence is an act of discipline.
2. Every audience matters: I wasn’t speaking to a Comms crowd, but the challenge was to connect across disciplines. The best communication is always about finding the shared human thread.
3. Resilience is built in the small moments: We imagine resilience as grand acts of recovery. But it’s also in the micro choices –  to step onto an unfamiliar stage, to speak with conviction in a tight timeframe, to keep showing up when the context shifts.

From My Small Corner of the World

I’m from Barbados, a small island in the Caribbean, where sometimes it feels like the big conversations in Comms and leadership happen elsewhere. But DisruptHR reminded me that small voices matter, that standing on a stage in Kingston, Jamaica with five minutes to share an idea could ripple beyond the room.

Five minutes on that stage taught me more about resilience in communication than five months behind a desk. It reminded me that clarity, courage, and connection aren’t built in comfort zones—they’re built in the moments when the pressure is highest and the time is shortest.

We all have our five-minute windows: the critical conversation, the boardroom pitch, the crisis call, the unexpected chance to lead. The question is—how will you use them? Because five minutes can change a room. And if you let it, five minutes can change you too.

_________

About the Author

Ayesha R. Nicholls is a Barbados-based communications strategist and Director of Communications at GovTech Barbados Ltd. She contributes to regional and global efforts around digital transformation, trust, and purpose-led leadership. Ayesha is part of the Strategic Global Columnist Network and a contributing author to the IABC Guide for Practical Business Communication: A Global Standard Primer. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

Written by: Editor