

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jen Clifden.
Hi Jen, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My story starts in 2nd grade. I was mesmerized by my teacher. She was kind, loving, and funny. I loved going up to her desk to ask her a question because when I did, she would get out her red felt tip pen and write in beautiful cursive on my paper. I was obsessed with her outfits and shoes. I wanted to wear a dress to school every day so I could be just like her. I felt seen and loved in her presence. I was only 7 years old, but that is when I first felt the calling to be a teacher.
25 years later, I have been an elementary and middle school teacher, a college-level teacher educator, and a program administrator for a teacher preparatory program at the University of Minnesota. I have also created a company on the founding mission of educator mental health, emotional resilience, and spiritual well-being. I think people called to the profession of teaching are unique souls with superpowers of compassion and empathy. My calling has evolved from creating safe spaces of learning for kids to creating conditions of care for our educators and educational caregivers so that their calling to teach is a source of passion and rejuvenation for them.
For me, school was a safe sanctuary away from the unpredictability of my home. School was the primary place where I felt safe and seen. It was in the presence of my healthy, happy, and passionate teachers that I was able to get to know myself. After spending 10 years in the field as a public school teacher, I decided to return to graduate school to get my doctorate. I had originally intended to focus on becoming a reading professor for educators, until my life took a radically different turn.
My first year of graduate school, I found out I was pregnant. This was shocking because I was told that I was unable to have children. Given the fact I could not have my own kids, I decided to dedicate my life to teaching and teaching teachers by becoming a professor. Finding out I was pregnant with my first child was shocking, but the that is not what changed my life. 9 months later I found out I was pregnant again– this time with twins!
When I had three babies at home, a one year old and twin new borns, I left graduate school. There was no way I could focus on school since no one is the house, including myself was sleeping and someone was always crying (including myself!).
I remember the first “back to school” season that I was not in a classroom as a teacher or a student. It felt like the Universe of was off-kilter. And it was not long before I was mothering from stage three burnout. Most days I felt depleted and lost, and those feelings made me feel guilty and ashamed. I had three beautiful children, and I was struggling desperately. I had experienced burnout and compassion fatigue as a teacher, but I had never experienced the dark depths of burnout and compassion fatigue like I did when I was a mom to three infants.
It was a morning where I hadn’t slept all night. It was 7am, and I was already completely exhausted. One of twins started to cry, and I went into her room to get her from her crib to hold her close to comfort her. I will never forget how depleted I felt even though I was somehow mustering the energy to provide comfort to my child. But when I went to bring my 8-week-old daughter to my chest to console her, she cried harder the closer she got to my body. I will never forget that moment. It was moment of pure connection between me and my daughter where my body read her little body reading my body. Her instincts were to pull away and to cry harder to protect herself. It was in that moment that I realized I could not hide my burnout from my children. They were attuned to my energy. My presence had an impact. And in this instance, the impact hurt my heart because it felt like even despite my best efforts to be the most attentive mom possible, I could not do that if I was depleted mentally, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
From that moment on, my practice of self-attention became intentional and deliberate. If I couldn’t muster the energy to get well for myself, I would do it for my daughters. I started exploring meditation and mindfulness practices. I also explored yoga and dedicated myself to becoming a yoga teacher as an act of committing to my self-attention ritual. As I intentionally engaged these self-attention practices, I craved sharing my findings with other moms. I co-created an online mothering community for moms, Mindful Moms Network, with my college friend so that we could support each other and other moms on caring for ourselves as mothers while we cared for our kids.
As my three daughters became school-aged, I returned to graduate school to finish my doctorate. I wanted to discover what elements contributed to the healing cycle of mental health, emotional resilience, and spiritual well-being for individuals in professions where their presence was critical to their calling. I intimately knew burnout as a mother. I intimately knew burnout as a teacher. What I now wanted to know was how does one heal from the mental, emotional, and spiritual impacts of caregiver burnout in the midst of care giving.
Before I went back to graduate school, I began researching the positive impact of my presence on my daughters when I was deliberate about practicing daily strategies that helped to buoy my mind, calm my nervous system, and reconnect me with my spirit. I discovered that simple daily mindfulness practices and mindful movement, like yoga, engaged with consistency and intention had a profound impact on my relationships with my daughters and my relationship with myself. I shared these practices on Mindful Moms Network, and I was astounded by the positive impact these practices were having on mothers who also practiced them. They shared stories of renewed hope and energy. That is when I wondered if the practices could be translatable to educators.
That is when my company was born. As a teacher educator and curriculum designer, I created an 8-week training for educators that was designed to engage teachers in evidence and experience-based practices for mental and emotional health and yoga/mindful movement practices that calmed the nervous system and stoked energy. I then returned to my formal doctoral work once again, this time, to gather groups of teachers together to study the impact of the teacher restoration training I created. That was 6 years ago, and over 3,000 educators, paraprofessionals, and administrators have engaged Present Teacher trainings.
The trainings and professional development experiences that I bring to educators and human-service professionals invite them to practice and play with the process for cultivating presence, or one’s soul-texture, through stress. We critically examine the stressors that are innate to the work of our calling while we gain insight on how those stressors can be metabolized in a way that leads to increased self-awareness and awareness of how we are being in relationship to those in our care. Since I am a certified yoga teacher and mindfulness educator in addition to being a burnout prevention researcher, we pay attention to how the body holds stress and how we can befriend our nervous systems when we are triggered. Once we learn how to calm our nervous systems and reconnect with our bodies, we practice exploring the origins of our joy and emotional health.
As my work with educators and educational caregivers started to spread, I began to receive invitations to work with other human-service professionals like nurses, physicians, and social workers. As it turns out, burnout is a dis-ease that impacts so many humans called to healing and helping professions. While we stand on decades worth of research on how burnout harms and hurts humans, families, institutions, and organizations, I am called to explore and expand the research on what is beyond the threshold of burnout. What are the origins of well-being? What is the cycle of well-being? Since we cannot control our lives and professions in such a way to totally eliminate stress, how can we leverage stress to heal our past pain, expand our awareness of ourselves and those in our care, and imagine a new way of being in relationship to ourselves and others that seeks justice, kindness, and compassion.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Not at all. In fact, I credit my greatest growth, insight, and vision that lead to the work I bring to the world to the very struggles along the road that brought me to my knees and overwhelmed me.
The most difficult struggle has been managing the innate daily stressors of being a single mom, an administrator for a teacher preparation program, a teacher educator, a business owner, and a creative. I have to practice what I preach about caregiver mental health, emotional resilience, and spiritual well-being. No one wants to listen to a speaker talk about stress management and mental health who shows up frantic, disconnected, and overwhelmed! People can feel my energy, too. So one of the biggest struggles is the daily work of noticing my needs, recognizing and honoring my natural limits of attention and energy, and giving myself the same quality of attention I give my family and my work.
One of my biggest challenges was being a new mom to three infants. As I came out of the fog of the first three years of that experience, I studied my healing. I studied how I reclaimed my mental health. I studied how I reclaimed my emotional stability and joy. I studied how I reclaimed my physical energy. I studied how I re-connected with my spirit. I called this time my “soul-battical.” While I was away from formal doctoral work for over 7 years to raise my children (and myself), I was learning profound lessons about self-restoration and reclamation. What I discovered was that my presence was impacted by the quality of attention I gave myself.
I discovered that I needed my attention as much as my children needed my attention. But caring for myself while in a state of compassion fatigue was near impossible. That is until I re-framed my purpose for paying attention to my needs and wants. While it was almost impossible to get well for myself, knowing that my kids were picking up on my energy, I made a commitment to them to pay attention to myself. As a researcher, I studied what happened when I did just one small thing for myself that positively impacted my mental, emotional, or soul health. It was out of the love I had for my children that I truly learned how to love and behold myself with compassion. I then discovered that there is an uncanny symmetry between how I was toward myself and how I was toward others. When I was compassionate with myself, I was more compassionate with others.
The continual struggle I face daily is slowing down the chronic rush of my day to concentrate my attention on my needs. I practice everyday. I was so very good at rushing, and my mind told me that to be productive, I had to do more. Once I started to question that line of thinking and really push back on it, I was then able to re-story how I spent my time and energy in my day. My time and my energy were my greatest gifts. And while I truly enjoyed sharing my time and energy with others, my life shifted when I added myself to the list of who received my time and energy. I realized– whoa. If I give myself a little of my time and my energy, I have more to give those I love and care for. I didn’t realize how interconnected caregiving for myself and my capacity to care give to others were so closely related.
Another struggle I face daily is deeply listening and responding to my call to be of service in the world. From a young age, I knew my calling was to be a teacher. However, that calling to be a “teacher” has expanded well beyond the 4 walls of the traditional K-12 school classroom. As I left the public-school setting to become a college-level teacher educator, there were growing pains. Teaching adult learners is different than teaching youth. Becoming a teacher-educator took time to grown in to. I then had another identity growth-spurt when I completed my Ph.D. and felt called to create a company where I could teach thousands of different students (i.e., teachers, nurses, physicians, and business leaders). The context for my teacher identity expanded yet again, and it required me to assume a new identity as an entrepreneur and woman-owned business owner.
Each time I feel my identity expanding, the growing pains show up as self-doubt and imposter syndrome. However, I have learned, and this is what I teach people, that fear-based thinking is important and needs to be attended to like a small child who is seeking attention. When I befriend my fears and listen to what they are telling me, I am able to create a deliberate counter-narrative based on self-confidence and hope that gives me the passionate energy I need to blaze a new train in my life and transcend my self-imposed limitations. My company’s trainings all revolve around the basic premise that teaching, caregiving, nursing, and (insert your calling here) is a spiritual practice—that the innate stressors, the struggles, of your role met with strategic practices and healthy perspective can actually brining you more in alignment with yourself. When we feel aligned, we feel on purpose, energized, patient, and joyful. Burnout is the opposite of alignment. Burnout is the slow dis-integration or mis-alignment of the self that goes unnoticed over time. We lose ourselves when we are burnt out. The challenge is engaging the stressors as invitations to get closer to myself and learn more about how I want to be in that stressor as opposed to allowing the stressor to break me and make me act in ways that feel inauthentic to who I am.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Well, I am like everyone else in the struggles that we face as being caregivers in this world: surviving our upbringings, especially if there was trauma; using the growth-spurt experiences of life that we all face as opportunities to get know what we like and what we don’t like; making big and little mistakes along the way, and in their aftermath, trying to make some meaning from them so to know how to move forward in life with integrity; struggling to find connection during those times in life when one feels lost, uncertain, and disconnected, etc.
What I believe makes my experience with the struggles of life unique in such a way that others open up to engage what I am called to offer through my teachings is that I have learned how to metabolize the darkest of darkness—I have learned how to leverage the pain, struggle, and trauma in my life in such a way that I use the darkness to usher in the light. That means, I’ve discovered a process for processing the inevitable daily stressors in such a way that one can use the energy embedded in the struggles to produce insight and self-awareness. I’ve discovered a simple process and practice that equips caregivers with what they need to lean into stress and struggle as an invitation to feel stronger and more like themselves. Stress and burnout has a way of breaking our spirits down so that we forget who we are, what motivates us, and what matters to us. I have created a process that allows one to move through stress in such a way that they experience the opposite of burnout– they learn how to burn brighter.
In addition to having letters behind my name (my Ph.D.) that denote that I have “defended” my teaching and research to experts in my field of study at a competitive research institution, everything I teach is a result of my very real lived experience of surviving struggle and extracting meaning from it in such a way that the struggle actually brings me closer to myself. I find that caregivers trust the message I have to share because they intuitively know that I lived it in addition to researching it. The message I share is the reminder that there is a place inside all of us where no pain, trauma, or hurt has ever touched. And that we can re-connect with this source of wellness when we need to. It never goes away or leaves us. But the reality of the fast-paced world we live in means that we can easily stay caught in the flow of doing and producing to the detriment of slowing down the speed of our lives to allow our own spirit to take care of us.
I am known for creating the space and providing the experiences that invite people re-engage themselves and re-connect with their innate resilience and inner guidance system. Once they re-connect with that inner authority, I then show them how to intentionally leverage the experiences they encounter in their lives, especially the stressful ones, to express more of who they are—express that inner authority to “author” the experiences of their lives in such a way that they feel more alive, present, and in control of who how they behave and act.
This work is critical care for caregivers. Caregivers are so good about directing their time and energy outside of themselves so to reduce the pain and suffering of those around them. Except this superpower can become a detriment if the caregiver neglects to turn their caring gaze and attention onto their own pain and suffering. I am a caregiver who directs my time and energy to caregivers to invite them to turn their time and energy TOWARD themselves to allow themselves to be cared for by their spirit—their very selves. Caregivers are healers. Yet we often forget that our attention can also heal ourselves. I am known for showing caregivers how to do that inner work so that they continually feel renewed and restored, even in the midst of stress, so they can turn their energy outward to the do the necessary healing work they are called to do.
What do you like and dislike about the city?
I love the people. The work that I have been engaging with our community healers, our caregivers, has afforded me a chance to meet such incredibly passionate and compassionate humans. Forming relationships with them and sharing our stressors and our joys is one of my favorite things about our communities in the Twin Cities. I have lived in other cities than Minneapolis before and there really is something special about the energy of our local caregivers.
I also love, love, love the variety of places I can go to experience things that make me happy and ground me in the simple pleasures of life. Innovative food, creative cocktails, incredible coffee, nature preserves/walking paths, community gatherings, and inspiring yoga studios are found all throughout the Twin Cities. Knowing that I live in a location where I can experience the novelty-hit that travel gives me by just going 20 minutes outside my home is wonderful. I love how the diversity of our city allows me to not only get to know and be curious about all the unique ways individuals in our communities experience their life, I learn a lot about myself when I engage with all the different places I visit and experience. I am grateful for that learning.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.presentteacher.com
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/JenClifden