Tuesday, April 7, 2026 | 6:30PM to 8:00PM

This Event will be delivered via Zoom Meeting

Note: Registrants will be sent a confirmation email, and a reminder email with the Zoom link prior to the meeting!

Agenda:
6:30 - 6:45 pm – Get Connected, Introductions & Announcements
6:45 - 7:40 pm – Guest Speaker – Annmarie Curley
7:40 - 7:55 pm – Q&A
7:55 - 8:00 pm – Final remarks and close out

The PM for this event is: Rick Caudill - [email protected]

Registration closes: Monday, April 6, 2026 at Midnight

Designed to Adapt, Wired to Resist: The Neuroscience of Change for Project Leaders
with Annmarie Curley

Your brain is simultaneously designed to resist change and built for remarkable adaptation. Understanding this paradox is the missing piece in most transformation initiatives — and the reason even well-planned projects stall.

In this interactive session, originally presented to 5-star reviews at the 2025 PMI Global Summit in Phoenix, Annmarie Curley takes you inside the neuroscience of change resistance. Through a live exercise, you’ll experience your own brain’s threat response in action and discover why what we call “resistance” is your brain doing exactly what it evolved to do.

You’ll learn a practical 60-second neuroscience-backed technique to shift yourself and your teams from survival mode to creative engagement — and a framework for designing project environments where people naturally move toward change instead of away from it. Grounded in research from HeartMath Institute, neuroscience, and 25+ years of leading complex transformations, this session will change how you think about every project you lead.

Learning Objectives

At the conclusion of this session, attendees will be able to:

1. Recognize the three types of change resistance — obvious, sneaky, and biological — and understand why the brain treats organizational change as a physical threat.
2. Apply a 60-second neuroscience-backed reset technique to shift themselves and their teams from threat response to creative engagement in real time.
3. Design project environments that cultivate natural adaptation by creating biological safety — replacing force-driven change management with conditions where people want to move forward.

PDU Info: You will need to record and self-report your PDU's for this activity. Following the guidelines of the new CCR program and the PMI Talent Triangle®, the PDU's for this course can be applied as follows: 1.0 PDU - Business Acumen

Presenter: Annmarie Curley
With 25+ years of executive leadership — including as a senior executive at a Fortune 500 investment bank — Annmarie Curley is known for guiding organizations through complex transformations where failure is not an option. In 2010, she founded Newgrange IT Consulting to help organizations execute their strategy, transform how they work, and build the teams needed to sustain it — blending project management discipline, organizational change expertise, and neuroscience-based leadership training to bridge the gap between vision and results.

Annmarie partners with C-suite leaders to design and deliver tailored action plans, training, and coaching that build resilience, unlock human potential, and accelerate adoption. She specializes in high-visibility, mission-critical implementations across financial services, healthcare, higher education, and government — with a proven record of rescuing troubled initiatives and turning them into outcomes that transform the way organizations operate. By combining disciplined execution with a deep understanding of human behavior, she helps teams thrive in complexity and deliver lasting value.

Central to Annmarie's approach is equipping leaders and teams with neuroscience-based tools to harness human biology, strengthen resilience, and cultivate high-performing, future-ready organizations. She delivers integrated leadership training, coaching, and implementation support that reduce project risk, accelerate transformation, and foster cultures of innovation, collaboration, and sustained performance.