by Mike Ososki, PMP

As usual, our meeting opened with networking and announcements of lots of high value activities and upcoming events for PMI Atlanta members. You can see all of these on our Calendar of Events. Then came the main event:

Your career is like a chess game, not checkers. It’s complex, requires thoughtful positioning, and can result in a myriad of scenarios. It requires advance planning that attempts to encompass 5-10 years and 5-10 moves ahead at any given moment over a lifetime. Who better than you to decide and guide how to do this as best you can?

Chris Carter kindly shared sage wisdom in our February Chapter meeting at Georgia Tech last month. Perhaps his #1 question for everyone is, “What do you want to do?,” a question we all answer every day in every way. It’s an inescapable paradox: choosing to not make a choice is making a choice.

Mr. Carter is a strong practitioner of servant leadership. Nothing lights him up so much as developing and inspiring others. Throughout his 21 years with Toyota and more recently as a Georgia Tech professor, he’s had ample opportunities to mentor, coach and sponsor his co-worker professionals and now university students. He currently works with nineteen mentees at Toyota. Encouragingly, he emphasized how both he and Georgia Tech want to plug in and do more with PMI Atlanta. Education has been a life-changer for Chris, and he adamantly asserts that he would “do it again and again and again and again.”

Here are the 3 E’s : Experience, Exposure, and Education. Experience is your job titles and work history—the resume basics. Exposure means “the things that people really care about, and will remember you for,” which = marketability or sell-ability of self as a valuable resource to advance business. As you progress through your career, be sure to capture and document your WOW elements, aka achievements and accomplishments. Be sure to also get these in your resume—don’t sell yourself short!

Be decisive with your career design elements. Form the shape and function of what your career should look like. Lock your 3 E’s firmly in your mind, but also be adaptable and flexible for their evolution. One size does not fit all—you never know what doors will open and there will be career steps you never saw coming. 

Chris exhorts us to be brave and bold, take on challenges, and never shy away from learning more. He says to “go after it, take it by the reins, and see what happens.” He especially loves the Q&A part of the events, telling us at the beginning to “prepare your juicy questions now.” At one point, he said to one audience member, “You’re thinking, ‘He’s speaking to my soul,’” and it’s evident that Chris strives to do so in a fun and engaging manner that can propel inspiration in others. 

One of the most super-valuable universal elements of success is getting out there and networking. Do it with SME’s, contractors, supply chain, purchasing, designers—pretty much all of your co-workers that make good stuff happen as a TEAM. Build relationships based on loyalty. Take the time to dig the right-size holes, prepare the nutritious soil, plant the beautiful trees, then water, fertilize and sometimes prune them as they healthfully grow.

Career sponsorship is golden. This comes after and along with being a mentor and coach. It’s general advice first, then more specific coaching, then a sponsor relationship where you are both all-in for the duration. Have 3-5 sponsors for where you want to go. They will validate your WHAT that brings business value, and be the WHO for you that opens doors.

Written by: Elizabeth Adeusi, MHA, PMP

Presentation Overview

On November 14, 2024, the Clinical Research Forum of the PMI Atlanta Chapter hosted the Channel Your Inner Child To Become A Better Clinical Research Professional event as presented by The Q-Kids: John R. Nocero, PhD and Andrea L. Bordonaro, MAT.

Andrea and John emphasized that in the stressful world of clinical research, becoming overwhelmed by your emotions can happen to all of us. Emotions are your brain’s way of telling you something good or bad is happening in your life. To emotionally regulate yourself means you can step back from whatever emotion you are experiencing, identify it, and manage it as needed. As a result, an approach taught in schools worldwide for more than 15 years and bringing it into the clinical research world can result in better relationships with your colleagues. It’s emotional intelligence on steroids — The Zones of Regulation.

John explained the Zones of Regulation further. There are four zones: blue zone, green zone, yellow zone, and red zone. It is important to identify what zone you are in and manage it as needed, even in Clinical Research, as this can make all the difference in efficacy and results.

Takeaways

• Emotions do matter. They are incredibly important.
• The Zones of Regulation give us a concrete strategy to maintain emotions in various situations.
• Learning to recognize and regulate our emotions daily is beneficial in our personal and professional lives.
• When we can easily identify our zone as we navigate our day-to-day, we are able to recognize and utilize effective strategies to move us to a more comfortable, successful, and positive place. In turn, we can then make better decisions, improve our interpersonal relationships, and feel better about the aura we put forth about ourselves, which directly impacts how others view and interact with us.
• Use your next team meeting to introduce the Zones of Regulation to your research staff or as an employee engagement activity. This type of employee engagement—the connection that an employee has with their team, their job, the company culture, and the company itself—can have real impacts on productivity and well-being.

Next Event

Join us at the next PMI Atlanta Chapter Clinical Research Forum in March 2025.

Register at www.pmiatlanta.org/events/event-calendar

Event Picture

by Mike Ososki, PMP 

Energize your potential! And Maria Horstmann may be just the person to help you do it, via her metabolic health-focus coaching practice. From pre-diabetes with an eating disorder and sugar addiction, Maria reinvented herself to become a high energy healthy ball of fire that is a walking testament to the results of implementing her advice.

Working harder and longer just ain’t gonna cut it no more. In fact, doing so without a decent health foundation will increase your risk of multiple body trouble issues. Like a good PM, ya gotta manage yer risk, right? This is not new news. Well, Maria comes at it from her special angle.

Optimize your body’s energy production at the cellular level, through better metabolism—the chemical processes in cells that make energy, promote growth, and keep you healthy. Another way to say it is that your performance is only as strong as the energy your cells can produce. You really want to avoid “Metabolic Chaos®.” 

The science behind all this is quite complex, but you don’t need to deeply understand it. What you do need to do is monitor and adjust your health numbers. Triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, fasting glucose, hemoglobin A1C, blood pressure, and waist circumference are the most important indicators. (To know the real deal, you can’t be on any meds for any of these markers.) This data-driven functional lab testing approach will help identify stressors that inhibit, disrupt, and prevent optimal body function.

Symptoms like fatigue, stress, and poor focus are often rooted in metabolic dysfunction. Poor sleep habits, processed foods, added sugars, and lack of movement sabotage your energy and hold you back. To be highly productive, well-focused, and resilient require consistent energy from the cellular level.

What can you do? You can better control your daily input choices of sleep, food, and movement. Small steps got you to where you are, and you can take small steps to make better choices with these oh-so important everyday elements of basic life. Try to think and do like this ... 

So let’s prioritize the basics again: sleep and recovery, mastering blood sugar, and aligning time with your values, like these ...

Remember that teeny-tiny baby steps are powerful over time. And as you experience even the smallest improvements, let them motivate you to keep on keeping on with your easy-does-it new and improved lifestyle and habits program. Over time, it can lead you to accomplish sustainable energy and peak performance—something every good project manager must value!

Visit Maria’s site https://befabbeyou.com/ to learn more about The Horstmann Method.

The next Chapter Meeting "Designing a Career of a Lifetime" will be held at Georgia Tech Global Learning Center on February 25, 2025. Register Here.

Written by: Dr. Catherine Binuya 

Presentation Overview

Omer Bozok, PE, founder of Pheonix iO, has ten years of experience in geotechnical and civil engineering. His contributions to the field include working in electrical utilities, oil and gas, waste management, and mining. He is the lead author of “NextGen: Engineering: Excelling, Practice, Empowering People.

Drawing from the wisdom of Sun Tzu’s writing in the seminal classic literary text, The Art of War, Omer Bozok presents a framework for a strategic approach to implementing AI for industry success. By connecting principle to practice, Bozok, proposes strategy and a playbook for leveraging AI that speaks to safety, security, and responsible innovation.

To be victorious, one must strategically plan first, know the organization, understanding readiness and constraints, have clear goals, and sagely pivot plans in response to circumstances.

Takeaways

• Strategy: Laying Plans, The Five Factors that determine outcome
  • Moral and Ethics
    • Based on loyalty, shared purpose and value, and motivation
  • Heaven ~ External tactics
    • Recognizing cycles and market forces
  • Earth ~ Logistics
    • Based on data, technical infrastructure, budget, and AI team
  • Commander
    • Wisdom drawn from sincerity, courage, and strictness
    • Requires strategic vision, governance, and empowerment
  • Method and Discipline ~ Professionalism
    • Outline goals, procedures, metrics, continuous improvement, governance, and oversight

Each of the five factors has several key pillars.

• Playbook
  • Involves five steps: strategic planning and goal setting, assessing, identifying and prioritizing gaps, setting timelines and milestones, and implementation
  • Rank (1-5) for the average score of the pillars for each of the five key areas: Ethics, Market Forces, Logistics, Leadership, and Professionalism to assess an organization’s readiness and constraints
  • Prioritize importance and feasibility of strategic plan scenarios to determine plan for victory/success
    • 1-3 scale: Minimum, Moderate, Critical

Next Event

Register at www.pmiatlanta.org/events/event-calendar

Event Pictures