Logos Institute Fellow Holly Helstrom Leads Workshop at Barnard College’s Athena Center for Leadership Studies

On Thursday March 7, Logos Institute fellow Holly Helstrom led an engaging hour and a half workshop with Barnard College students on effective time management skills and how to make smart decisions when juggling competing priorities.

The workshop was part of the college’s Athena Center for Leadership Studies’ leadership lab series. The Athena Center offers special programs dedicated to students’ development and advancement as leaders. The leadership labs are one of the programs offered by the Athena Center, and are interactive workshops led by experts on a variety of topics ranging from how to plan for post-college life to how to deliver a compelling presentation. The workshops are grounded in practicality, with the main goal of providing students with applicable life skills and tools.

Holly began the workshop detailing with the students her shared experience of being an ambitious student at an academically rigorous university (she is a graduate of NYU), among equally ambitious peers, located in a competitive and bustling city. Her senior year she successfully juggled a full course load, two part time jobs, and an unpaid internship, while maintaining an admirable GPA. She shared with the students the tips she used to keep herself organized and feeling her best to complete all of her tasks to a high standard, including keeping a desk calendar and investing time each week for self-care.

She led the students through an exercise where they defined for themselves what their top three priorities are over the next six months by asking themselves “What three tasks, if not completed, would have a negative impact on my overall wellbeing and the quality of my life?” Considering the consequences of one’s choices in the inverse has a powerful clarifying effect and touches on a psychological truth: humans are often more motivated by avoiding bad outcomes than pursuing paths that lead to good ones. She then walked the students through how to turn those priorities into actionable decision criteria that can be used when weighing the consequences of a given set of options.

Holly frequently shares her work at Logos Institute in classrooms. In addition to guest lecturing at the Athena Center for Leadership Studies, she has also guest lectured at New York University, Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, and at Elon University’s Love School of Business.