Dr. Jen Clifden
Educator | Researcher | Relationship Scientist
Your PRESENCE is what empowers
Make it 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 middle school teacher turned teacher educator, curriculum developer, relationship researcher, burnout preventionist, and mental health advocate.
I serve individuals called to education, youth work, leadership, and public health through RELATIONAL HEALTH education, trainings, and support to
PROMOTE
Mental Health
PROTECT
Social Emotional Well-Being
PREVENT
Burnout
The Physics of Empowering Relationships
The Light You Cast™
Mental health, adult SEL, and relational well-being professional development for those called to empower others.
You Are the Intervention
Your Presence—your energy, authenticity, and emotional state—radiates like a field that others can feel. Just as energy transfers on contact, your Presence is contagious and shapes the space around you. When your energy is aligned and steady, others experience resonance: they feel seen, supported, and empowered. This is the physics of empowerment.
Relationships are the foundation of mental, emotional, and relational health, and they are the conduit to empowerment. Yet in relationship-first professions like education, youth work, and public health, constant stress, emotional labor, and compassion fatigue in the workplace make burnout -- personal disempowerment -- a serious health risk.
Burnout isn’t just about workload—
it’s about disconnection and disempowerment.
The Light You Cast™ curriculum — offered through dynamic on-demand trainings, transformative on-site professional development, energizing keynotes, and restorative community practice circles — harnesses the science of relationships, the physics of energy conservation, and somatic mind-body healing practices that stoke mental health, emotional well-being, and relational resilience -- core sources of inner power that expand a caregivers capacity to uplift and empower others.
Our brain-based, trauma-responsive practices align with the 5 Essentials for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being and center on two universal human needs—safety and security—so caregivers stay grounded, connected, and empowered in sustaining resonant relationships.
Create Relational Empowerment Opportunities
At the heart of our work is what matters most: human connection.
Healthy environments make human connection possible. When workplaces are psychologically safe, supportive, and secure, individual mental health and relational well-being can flourish—strengthening community, individual, and organizational health.
The Light You Cast™ integrates individual (intrapersonal), interpersonal (relational), and organizational health support to build trust, prevent burnout, and create sustainable cultures of care—environments where caregivers and those they serve thrive through meaningful, lasting connection.
Organizational - Leadership
Health
Individual - Intrapersonal
Health
Interpersonal - Relational
Health
Where to Start
INDIVIDUAL SUPPORT
Foundational Support
For Everyone
INTERPERSONAL SUPPORT
Focused Support For
PLCs and Target Groups
ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT
Focused Interventions for Leaders and Organizational Well-Being
Provide proactive support, inspiration, and encouragement that reinforces intrapersonal resilience and interpersonal connection through our universal The Light You Cast™ ON-DEMAND training designed for ongoing, individual support and our event specific keynotes or professional development opportunities.
Provide ongoing, in-person support that drives lasting, systemic change through guided community support groups and targeted multi-session trainings tailored for specific roles, teams, and cohorts where all The Light You Cast™ curriculum materials are tailored to the specific needs of the group.
Provide targeted organizational wellness consultation and personalized coaching for leaders to cultivate positive, resilient workplace cultures grounded in care, connection, and collaboration—powered by our signature The Light We Cast™ practices.
The Light You Cast™ | ON-DEMAND
Transform the Way You Care for Yourself and Others
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 an integrative 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 and middle school reading teacher, I thought being tired, over-worked, and exhausted meant I was doing teaching "right." Given my deep and genuine capacity to care, I unknowingly operated under a false assumption that if I did more and did it faster, I would be more effective. I fell into the hyper-productivity and perfectionism trap.
My self-abandonment started from a sacrificial place. Since I loved being a teacher, I assumed to be good at it meant I had to give 150% of myself in all the ways and all the time. 25 years ago, we didn't have the awareness we do now about the ways chronic stress corrodes one's capacity to connect with students and how it harms our connection with our very selves.
Burnout is not only related to the workplace. It was motherhood that forced me to confront burnout in ways I wasn’t prepared for. Having three babies in the span of 17 months created a context for burnout and postpartum depression to set in quickly. The chronic stress and overwhelming emotional demands of mothering a 1 year old and infant twins quickly overloaded my nervous system, clouded my thinking, and made it nearly impossible to care for myself or my girls.
My capacity to connect, respond, and nurture was severely impaired, creating a vicious cycle of disconnection, guilt, and exhaustion. I realized that, like in teaching, if I gave all of myself without any attention put toward nurturing the very sources of energy that allowed me to give, the well would eventually run dry. When the well ran dry, my caregiving capacity reflected this.
I felt alone, ashamed, and guilty that I could not meet the needs of those I cared for -- including my own self. I did not know how to balance my attention and energy among those in my care and meeting my basic mental, physical, and emotional health needs at the same time.
One morning, exhausted and sleep-deprived, I had a stark realization. I thought --“No one is coming to save you.” That moment was terrifying—and also liberating. It marked the beginning of my path to understanding, healing, and preventing burnout, and to developing a sustainable (and replicable) path of relational health practices where I was able to meet the needs of those in my care while renewing and revitalizing my mental health well-springs. Through my doctoral research on relationship-based burnout prevention, I learned scientifically just how the energy that one uses to care for others is intimately connected to how one nurtures and nourishes one's inner energy reserves, even using care-giving stressors as a profound personal power source.
