Dr. Jen Clifden
Educator | Researcher | Burnout Preventionist
The light you cast is your greatest gift and most significant professional asset.
Make it INEXTINGUISHABLE.
Your mental health
is contagious.
It is true. Your Presence -- your energy, care, and compassion -- is not only your most invaluable personal asset; it is the single most significant variable of your professional impact.
You have been called to human-service work because YOU are the intervention that influences positive change in others and infuses space with compassion and care that invites others to root into their strengths and rise up into their potential.
Your mental health is your core resource; it is where you source your greatest gifts of service.
Our inner, invisible states of mental health have outer, visible impacts of positive influence.
"There's no doubt in my mind that we've had healthier educators working with our students, which really impacts the overall student experience and helps those employees. District Curriculum Director
Serving Those Who Serve Others
Being called to human-service professions is not supposed to harm us. Our callings are supposed to bring us into greater harmony with our gifts so we can best be of service.
Hello! My name is Jen, and I am an educator, mother, and burnout survivor turned burnout preventionist and mental health researcher, educator, and advocate. I serve individuals called to human-service professions to
PROTECT
Mental Health
PROMOTE
Well-Being
PREVENT
Burnout
from dimming their light, diminishing their impact, and driving them away from their life's work.
Mental Health & Social Emotional Well-Being
through Stress Education
The Light You Cast™
is preventative care PD that protects and nurtures individual mental health and collective well-being at the same time.
What if the stress you experienced was the necessary catalyst to strengthening your mental health and fueling the impact of your Presence? It not only can be; it is the essential ingredient.
Investing in mental health, social emotional well-being, and stress metabolization professional development is how we prevent burnout and intentionally serve and care for those who serve others. It is also a direct investment in ensuring positive, authentic relationships that create healthy climates of safety and support necessary for others to thrive and grow. We can only mirror and model mental health and well-being if we embody it first.
The Light You Cast™ professional development keynotes, in-person/on-site trainings, on-demand courses, and community support circles are interdisciplinary, science-backed, and based on a salutogenic (focusing on the origins of health), healing-centered approach that braids together
Stress Metabolization
Interventions
Mind/Body
Practices
Trauma-Responsive
Approaches
Social Emotional Learning
Competencies
to enhance and expand one's tool-kit of signature strategies and trauma-responsive REST, RESTORATION, and REVITALIZATION practices proven to metabolize stress in ways that strengthen the core competencies of mental health (physical, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual), balance energy levels, manage anxiety and distress, and rejuvenate compassion, care, and connection necessary for relational health and mirroring and modeling mental health to those one serves.
REST and relax body and return the nervous system to a set-point of safety to regenerate inner energy reserves efficiently and effectively
RESTORE cognitive clarity, asset-based perspective-taking, and emotional resilience in the midst of stress and uncertainty
REVITALIZE safe connections, restore/repair relationships, and enact healthy boundaries so one can give of one's self without losing one's self in the process
Where to Start
Mental health and social emotional well-being in the workplace starts with creating and holding space for healing and health happen.
Burnout, compassion fatigue, and secondary traumatic stress are protective, not defective, responses to stress that is chronic, prolonged, and severe. Burnout is not an indicator that these internal capacities are lacking or that we are not resilient enough. Unrelenting demands, too much to chronically do, and unrealistic expectations coupled with reduced agency, support, and time suppress the expression of these innate health capacities. Mental, emotional, physical, and psychological health are innate conditions within each of us all the time. Burnout is a sophisticated bio-psycho-social smoke signal that shows us where there is an imbalance and loss of energy in our mental health system.
Feeling healthy and in the flow of things is our natural state, and thus, always achievable. Stress is a necessary catalyst for developing mental health, emotional balance, and resonant relationships. Knowing how to manage, metabolize, and mitigate stress is the key to building self-efficacy, emotional resilience, and healthy boundaries -- 3 key elements to preventing burnout from beginning. Space, time, education, and support are essential preventative and protective factors that provide the necessary context for one's innate mental health and well-being to come back into balance and be expressed.
You create the space, pick the time, and we will provide the education and support.
Self-Paced, Sustained Support
[ON-DEMAND, Online]
Introductory
Support
[IN-PERSON, On-Site]
Deeper, Sustained Support
[IN-PERSON, On-Site or ONLINE]
The entire (8) module (4.5 hour)
The Light You Cast™ ON-DEMAND curriculum fully online and self-paced can be licensed for just you, a cohort or team, or your entire organization/staff either on its own or to deepen and extend any in-person offerings.
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 holistic health.
Provide sustained, on-going, in-person mental health support and experiences that create systemic change through The Light You Cast™ IN-PERSON Comprehensive Curriculum, TLYC | Communities of Practice Support Groups as well as targeted, multi-session trainings for specific groups, roles, cohorts, and leaders at your site.
The Light You CastTM | ON-DEMAND
Heal, restore, and reinforce your mental health at your own pace while earning 4.5 Continuing Education Clock Hours of Professional Development.
6,000 +
human-service professionals
served
26,000 +
views of modules
18,000 +
hours of engagement
Designed specifically for busy human-service professionals to be a slow and low-dose of accessible and integrateable 35 minute modules that can be engaged at any time, from any device, as many times as needed.
The Light You Cast™ ON-DEMAND is our entire, comprehensive curriculum of (8)
35-minute interactive and interdisciplinary video-based modules designed for easy and on-going access to immediate trauma-responsive stress reducing movement practices that heal, rejuvenate, and "re-fine" a fatigued nervous system, guided mental health exercises ground overwhelm and relieve anxiety, and concrete preventative care strategies that create healthy boundaries that protect against compassion fatigue and promote work-life integration that make your light INEXTINGUISHABLE!
"In the Spring of 2022, I almost left the profession. This training helped launch me into a healthier school year of setting firm boundaries that created more balance for me. It allowed me to fight for positive perspectives and an inner peace throughout my day-to-day."
School Counselor
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 and moods 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. I had never felt a caregiving force like I felt caring for my children, so before I even knew what hit me, I was mothering from stage three burnout and coping with postpartum depression (PPD) while attempting to care for three infants. *See the 2024 Surgeon General's Advisory on Parents' Mental Health and Well-Being.
The unrelenting and chronic demands on me 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
