Dr. Jen Clifden
Educator | Researcher | Relationship Physicist
Strong PRESENCE = Endless Impact
Make your light INEXTINGUISHABLE.
Serving Those Who Serve Others
Being called to serve others shouldn’t come at the cost of our own well-being.
Our work is meant to align with our gifts—nourishing us as we help others, not harming us in the process.
Hello! My name is Jen, and I am a professional educator, relationship researcher, burnout preventionist, and mental health advocate.
I serve individuals called to human-service professions to
PROMOTE
Relational Health
PROTECT
Well-Being
PREVENT
Burnout
through healing relationships
The Science of Relationships
Relational Health & Mental Well-Being in the workplace
The Light You Cast™
Preventative care professional development that strengthens individual mental well-being while nurturing relational health.
Your Presence—your energy, authenticity, and emotional state—is your greatest personal asset and the key to your professional impact.
You are the intervention. Through your Presence, others feel seen, supported, and empowered to grow. That’s why your holistic well-being isn’t optional.
Relational health and mental well-being don’t happen by accident—especially in human-service professions where stress, emotional labor, and compassion fatigue are constant risks. Burnout isn’t just about workload—it’s about disconnection. Chronic environmental, role, and relational stress overloads the nervous system and weakens our ability to connect with others and our very selves.
The Light You Cast™ curriculum — including keynotes, online trainings, in-person courses, and support circles — is based on the science of relationships and offers brain-based, trauma-responsive, mind and body practices that are proven to strengthen mental, emotional, and relational health. It helps prevent overwhelm and exhaustion, heal and treat the root causes of chronic stress, create protective relational boundaries, and metabolize everyday stress into energy that deepens relational resilience that fuels meaningful connection and sustains your calling.
Foundational Elements
Trauma-Responsive
Approaches
Social Emotional Learning
Competencies
Mind - Body
Practices
Stress Metabolization
Interventions
Signature Practices
REST
Engage the BODY and
"re-fine" the Nervous System
RESTORATION
Clear the MIND and
expand perspective
REVITALIZATION
Energize RELATIONSHIPS with conscious curiosity and compassion
Creating Relational Opportunities
Where to Start
Relationships are more than valuable—they are biologically fundamental to learning, healing, and growth and development.
By prioritizing relational health awareness and education through on-site support groups, sustained professional development, on-going access to immediate mental health resources for staff coupled with organizational, systems-level, health and care consultation, we protect caregivers from burnout and foster environments where they—and those they serve—can flourish through meaningful, lasting connections.
Self-Paced, Sustained Support
[ON-DEMAND, Online]
Introductory
Support
[IN-PERSON, On-Site]
Deeper, Sustained Support
[IN-PERSON, On-Site or ONLINE]
The Light You Cast™ ON-DEMAND is designed specifically for busy human-service professionals. Its eight 35-minute modules provide a slow, low-dose approach that fits easily into any schedule, can be accessed anytime from any device, and repeated as needed.
Invigorate and inspire your staff with a keynote, 60 minute, 2 hour, half-day, or full day professional learning experience, and be sure to check out our signature TLYC | Mindful Movement experiences you can bring to your organization or staff to support their body-mind-heart health.
Provide ongoing, in-person mental health support that drives lasting, systemic change through The Light You Cast™ Comprehensive Curriculum, TLYC Communities of Practice support groups, and targeted multi-session trainings tailored for specific roles, teams, cohorts, and leaders at your site.
The Light You CastTM | ON-DEMAND
Heal, restore, and reinforce relational resilience at your own pace while earning 4.5 Continuing Education Clock Hours of professional development in mental health, relationship science, and social and emotional (SEL) competencies.
6,000 +
human-service professionals
served
26,000 +
views of modules
19,000 +
hours of engagement
The Light You Cast™ ON-DEMAND is a comprehensive curriculum featuring eight 35-minute interactive, interdisciplinary video modules. Designed for easy, ongoing, and immediate access, it offers trauma-responsive stress-reducing movement practices to heal and rejuvenate the nervous system, guided mental health exercises to ease overwhelm and anxiety, and practical strategies to build healthy boundaries that help protect relational health.
"This training saved my teaching career."
Elementary Educator
For me, healing from and preventing burnout and compassion fatigue is both professional and deeply personal.
As a former elementary reading interventionist and middle school reading teacher, I assumed that feeling burnt out, professionally, meant I was a good teacher. I had little to no awareness about the phenomenon of burnout, so I just assumed that I was the only one who was incapable of coping. Worse yet, I blamed myself and my high-sensitivity to stress and other people's emotions as the reason for my inability to cope. For a long time, I thought I was wired wrong and that was the reason I felt overwhelmed, anxious, and burnt out as a teacher even though I loved what I did.
Then reality forced me to face the depths of burnout to an extent I was definitely not prepared for. I became a mother to three infants in the span of 17 months.
Burnout and compassion fatigue set in hard and fast as a mom. Within 2 short months, I was mothering from stage three burnout and coping with postpartum depression (PPD).*See the 2024 Surgeon General's Advisory on Parents' Mental Health and Well-Being.
The unrelenting and chronic demands as a mother disabled my capacity to care for my three girls and myself. The chronic stress was frying my nervous system and clouding my capacity to think or see clearly.
The most severe impact the chronic stress had was that it negatively impaired my ability to create healthy attachment bonds with my babies, and I fell into a self-neglect spiral that atrophied my relationship to myself. The more disconnected I felt from my very self, the less I could feel, sense, and respond to the needs of my kids. And the more I disconnect from myself, the more stress and anxiety grew exponentially. It was a vicious cycle that overtook my capacity to cope with calm, compassion, and clarity.
Every day, I felt less and less like myself. The less I felt like myself, the more I felt guilt, shame, anxiety, and fear. Burnout was a sophisticated signal that let me know that my heart and soul were sore. I was no longer able to love or care about the things that mattered to me most. Compassion fatigue was a very real force that co-existed with feeling completely burnt out.
Then one sunny morning at 7am (with no sleep the night before because twin babies don't always sleep at exactly the same time), I broke. All I had the energy to think was -- "No one is coming to save you."
That one thought was the most terrifying and freeing thought that ever crossed my mind.
the Burnout Prevention Collaborative
The Light We Cast is potent.
Burnout is not the primary problem; it is the symptom of a system that has become unrooted and disconnected from honoring core human values that are necessary for health and well-being in the workplace:
Reverence | Trust | Respect | Agency | Recognition
The Burnout Prevention Collaborative is designed to create space and provide support, training, and educational opportunities for leaders within the education, public health, and healthcare systems to nurture and care for their own mental health and well-being while providing them with resources to support the mental health of those within their care.
We must collectively respond the burnout crisis in systematic ways that promote communal wellbeing, interdependence, and healing-centered care for our human-service professionals.
Coming in the fall of 2025
