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 mean living in survival mode.
When our work aligns with our gifts, it becomes a source of healing both for ourselves and for those we serve. As we shift out of survival mode and into grounded, authentic thriving, our Presence models the very well-being, resilience, and possibility we want our youth and communities to experience.
Hello! My name is Jen, and I am a public school teacher turned teacher educator, relationship researcher, burnout preventionist, and mental health advocate.
I serve individuals called the relationship-centered professions of education, youth work, leadership, and public health to
PROMOTE
Mental Health
PREVENT
Burnout
PROTECT
Relational Well-Being
The Physics of Healing Relationships
YOU Are the Intervention
Your Presence—your energy, authenticity, and emotional state—acts as an external nervous system for those you lead, teach, and support. Others feel your steadiness, your coherence, and your alignment before they ever hear your words. When your nervous system is regulated, grounded, and attuned, you create a field of safety where people feel seen, supported, and inspired to rise.
This is the physics of healing relationships: the light you cast through embodying a regulated Presence calms, uplifts, and empowers others to thrive.
In relationship-centered professions like education, leadership, youth work, and public health, connection is our most important tool for impact. Yet when we operate from survival mode under constant stress, emotional labor, and compassion fatigue, our own well-being suffers, and our ability to care effectively and sustain meaningful relationships is compromised.
Burnout isn’t just about workload;
it’s about disconnection and disempowerment.
The Light You Cast™ curriculum—offered through on-demand trainings, transformative on-site professional development, energizing keynotes, and restorative community practice circles—draws on the science of thriving to rebuild connection, reinforce personal power, and foster resilient healing; core capacities that help retain and sustain caregivers in their callings.
By integrating relationship science, energy regulation, and somatic mind-body practices, The Light You Cast™ strengthens the core capacities of mental health, emotional intelligence, and relational attunement that help caregivers move from surviving to thriving while expanding their ability to uplift and empower those in their care.
Our research-based, trauma-responsive practices, aligned with the U.S. Surgeon General’s 5 Essentials for Workplace Mental Health and Well-Being, focus on the universal human needs of SAFETY and SECURITY to help those who inspire others stay grounded, connected, and thriving.
Create Relational Empowerment Opportunities
At the heart of our work is what matters most in all relationship-centered work:
human connection.
Healthy environments make human connection possible. When workplaces are psychologically safe, individual mental health, relational well-being, and organizational health can flourish.
The Light You Cast™ strengthens personal, relational, and organizational well-being to build trust, prevent burnout, and create sustainable cultures of care and safety that support those who empower others and everyone within their circle of influence.
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 Health
Provide proactive support, inspiration, and encouragement that reinforces intrapersonal resilience and interpersonal connection through our universal The Light You Cast™ ON-DEMAND training, , one-on-one burnout prevention coaching with Jen, and one-time, 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, personalized coaching for leaders, and strategic leadership team professional development 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
The Story Behind the Science
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 meet 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, how the energy that one uses to care for others is intimately connected to how one continually nurtures and nourishes their own inner energy reserves. I also learned that care-based energy is the most potent, transformational, and powerful force of healing that exists in relationships, and that if I routinely turned a little of it back onto myself, my capacity to care for others grew exponentially....
