Are you your own harshest critic? What if gentleness—not perfection—was the path to purpose?

Welcome to The Collide Podcast Summer Highlight Series!

All summer long, we’re bringing back some of our most impactful episodes — powerful conversations centered around life-changing collisions with Jesus. Whether this is your first time hearing the episode or you’re revisiting an old favorite, each story is filled with hope, healing, and purpose.

This episode originally aired in November 2024 and quickly became a listener favorite. In this episode, life and leadership coach Jillian DeBritz shares her journey from burnout and perfectionism to gentleness and grace. If you’ve ever struggled with shame, self-criticism, or the pressure to do it all, this conversation is for you.

About This Episode

Jillian invites us into a powerful conversation about self-compassion, shame, and the importance of paying attention to our inner world. Drawing from her personal experiences and coaching work, she offers practical ways to challenge self-critical thoughts, embrace gentleness, and reflect God’s heart in how we treat ourselves.

Meet Jillian DeBritz

Jillian is a certified life and leadership coach, writer, speaker, and host of the Permission Slips Podcast. A former educator and self-described recovering perfectionist, Jillian has personally experienced the toll of burnout. Today, she’s passionate about helping women silence shame and embrace a gentler way of living as they step into their God-given purpose. Her message is filled with encouragement, grace, and practical wisdom for women who long to thrive without sacrificing their well-being.

In This Episode, You’ll Learn

• How embracing self-compassion helps silence shame
• Why gentleness with ourselves reflects God’s own heart
• The importance of paying attention to your thoughts, emotions, and needs
• How asking the right questions can guide personal growth
• What Jesus teaches us about treating ourselves with kindness

How This Episode Will Encourage You

This conversation will help you take a deep breath and release the pressure to be perfect. You’ll be reminded that God is not harsh with you—and you don’t have to be, either. Walk away with hope, renewed compassion for yourself, and practical tools for healing and purpose.

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All the Best – Connect with Jesus and find peace through guided reflections on Mary and Martha’s story, helping you overcome distraction, worry, and comparison.

A 20 Day Walk Toward Gratitude – A beautiful guide with 20 daily reflections, practical tools, and journaling space to help you grow a heart of gratitude.

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Connect with Jillian - Website | Permission Slips Podcast

• Gentle Framework Guide: Cultivate Self-Compassion

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Hey there. Welcome to the Collide Podcast. This is Willow, and I am super excited to be with you today.

I'm handing you an interview I just had with Jillian DeBritz. Jillian has been a guest on the podcast many times, and I keep asking her back on because I asked. Absolutely love her. I love who she is.

I love what she does. I love the work she's doing, the work she's committed to doing, and I think it'll bless you.

I don't know if you're like me, if you're really good at self debasing, if you're really good at telling yourself lies, if you're really good at beating yourself up, or maybe you know someone who is. Maybe one of your friends or your spouse, your kids. Listen to this podcast for them.

It is so helpful and such an invitation that Jillian lays out for us. Take a listen. Jillian, I love having you on the podcast. You've been on before. Have you been on once or twice already?

Yeah, this is my third time. Oh, my God. Thanks for having me.

You're like a go to podcast guest on the Collide Podcast. I don't know why I'm singing everything.

I love it. Let's do this the whole time, please.

No.

I always wanted to be in a Broadway musical. I feel like we're living the dream right now.

Okay, well, first of all, I have a terrible voice, number one. Number two, I actually. I don't even want to admit this because listeners might hate me, but I actually don't like musicals.

Oh, Willow. Okay, we're just going to skip this part because I really like you and I want to stay friends. But it's okay. It's okay. We can learn from each other.

Okay, wait, let me clarify, though. I don't like musical movies, but I like musicals. Like, in person, theater musicals. But I can't do a movie where they're singing the entire movie.

Yeah, I just can't do it.

It's not the same on screen. It's just not the same. The magic of being in that audience. Like, there's just something really powerful about that. So I can give you.

I can make space for your lack of movie musical enjoyment. That's fair.

Well, so I don't know why I'm singing, but welcome to the Collide Podcast.

I'm so glad you're here.

Thank you. You've been doing since we last talked and probably even before that, but you've been doing a lot of work around this idea of practicing gentleness.

I know that you're you're studying about it, you're writing about it, you're coaching people about it. Can you like, can we just define what it is for? People are like, what do you mean practicing gentleness?

Like they're picturing someone like petting a kitty or something. What's practicing gentleness?

It's a great question. Yeah, we do have like these kind of rainbows and butterflies that come to mind when we use words like gentle.

But really it's gentleness for me has become this tool to help women, to help myself cultivate self compassion in order to combat shame. It's really about cultivating that sense of how Jesus sees and treats me. His posture toward me, his tone of voice toward me.

Choosing to practice receiving that from him and offering it to myself so that shame, the enemy's favorite tool, does not have power. So it's really a shame resilience tool. Yeah.

And I can talk about kind of where that came from, but it's for me, it's about paying attention to our lives with curiosity and not judgment. Because judgment and curiosity can't coexist.

So it's building in space to wonder what's happening without judging ourselves or condemning ourselves or beating ourselves up for what we're noticing.

So let's talk about that a little bit. Curiosity versus judgment. What might. If I'm in a moment in my head, what might curiosity sound like versus what self judgment might sound like?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, let me just think of a moment. Okay. Here's one that comes to mind super easily. This morning I had to practice this for myself.

And as I am, you know, starting as a Monday, I am still early in the school year with my kids. We have not adjusted to our schedule and I'm exhausted. I can't, like, my brain just isn't functioning.

I had multiple things that I forgot this morning. I knew we had this conversation coming and I was just, I, I was noticing that sense of I cannot pull myself together, I can't do anything right.

I am, you know, words start to come to mind like such a loser. Stop forgetting things.

You don't have the discipline, you know, like it becomes very self condemning and critical in my mind when I'm noticing my reality through that lens of judgment as opposed to. Then I sat down and I kind of started going through these practices that I'm working on developing.

And I stepped back and I said, okay, really, what, what is my current reality? I wonder? What are the circumstances that are impacting how, what's happening within me? Okay. One, my kids have had One full week of school.

This is new. It takes time to transition. Okay. I haven't been sleeping well.

That's actually a legitimate need that my body has that I haven't been able to meet for lots of different reasons. Okay, what else? And I'm starting to wonder, and I'm noticing the facts without blaming or criticizing myself for those facts. It's just building.

Almost like instead of being in a courtroom where I'm building a case against myself, I'm in a laboratory noticing the data and trying to collect information for an experiment.

So I love that so much because I think a lot of us, our inner voice is very like we're in a courtroom and we're condemning ourselves over and over again. And obviously picking up voices from our past and experiences from our past that were sort of recondeming ourselves constantly.

One of the things that's interesting to me is you talk about asking yourself questions. I think for some people, that might feel like you're crazy at first. Like, what? I'm asking me a question. I do it all the time now, though.

But there was a time that was like, before I did that and after I did that where, like, you could walk out of a social setting, you're in a bad mood, you don't know why, and you could do that your whole life, or you can say, willow, what just happened in that space? What just happened in that space that you walked in excited to go and you left and you are unhappy? What is going on?

What is that that we need to begin to do or be given permission to do that makes us not crazy? It's actually being really self aware, being a friend to ourselves.

What is this thing that we need to hear from you to give ourselves permission to talk to ourselves?

Yes. Well, that's it. I mean, we just heard it from you. It's that permission. I love that.

You know, I love that word, permission, that we have permission to pay attention to our own experience. One of my favorite authors, speakers, people that have most impacted this journey for me is Dr.

Kurt Thompson, who writes a lot about shame and the intersection of interpersonal neurobiology and spiritual formation. And he says we become what we pay attention to.

So there's this idea that the things that we're paying attention to shape us, shape the people that we're becoming. We're always being formed by something, whether we realize it or not.

And so as we're going to the party or going throughout our lives, we're paying attention to something, whether we're aware of it or Not.

And so turning our awareness to what we're actually paying attention to gives us the ability to stop being formed by forces outside of us and choose what we're being formed by invites really creating space. Right? And that's what I talk about.

The work I do as a life and leadership coach with clients is I help women, specifically women and men, create space to pay attention to their own lives. Because we live in this world that is so crazy fast paced, so full of distractions. I mean, how much pinging happens all day long with notifications?

And how much temptation is there to scroll and to distract and numb ourselves from our actual lives? So the work of paying attention to our inner worlds is literally work. It's countercultural and requires a lot of intentionality.

But like what you just. That example you just gave of going to a party, like you're stopping that natural.

We talk about our neural pathways like we have these trained responses that are unconscious responses in our minds that will respond in a certain way without even recognizing what's happening.

So for you to stop long enough to get curious about what's happening within you, sort of short circuits or at least creates a gap where you get to choose the response that you have in that moment instead of having the neural pathways that have been trained over your entire life continue to drive your response unconsciously. So no, you're not talking to yourself like a crazy person.

You're talking to yourself like a very healthy person that's intent on building greater well being and self awareness and growth.

Well, it's interesting because it brings up this idea that you have a relationship with yourself. Yeah, we all have a relationship with ourself and we might not be sort of evaluating it, this idea of paying attention.

I want to talk about it a little bit more.

I mean, when I think about women, and obviously I'm a woman and have only ever been one, but I look around at us and I see that we are so good at paying attention to other people. How are my kids doing? Like, do they have their lunches? Have they filled out their college applications?

Do they have a place to sit in the lunch table? I have to go from like home to work to home to serving and all these things that we do to serve everyone in our lives.

And I think we not only are busy, but it's almost like we're so good at taking care of other people that we don't stop a lot in between all those moments and take care of ourselves and ask ourselves how we're doing. So how do you do that how do you coach people to do that? I mean is that literally like do you set an alarm on your phone?

I mean how do you make someone become self aware who has not historically been invited to be self aware?

What a great question. Well, and I think it has to start with desire. Like there has to be a level of desire to know ourselves more.

I wish I could pull the quote out of the back of my mind around without. I can't remember who said it. But without knowledge of self, there can be no knowledge of God.

That idea that as much as we know ourselves, like that limits how much we can know of God and vice versa, as much as we know of God, it allows us to also know ourselves more. That both are necessary for our health and our wholeness and for our spiritual growth.

But we have to have a desire because it's a lot more comfortable to move through our lives unaware. Honestly. There's a lot more comfort and ease and just going with the flow of the cultural current and what's happening around us.

It's easier to move through our days a little bit numb even. But it takes work and effort and energy to develop self awareness. And like you said to pause whether it's.

Yeah, I have had moments, seasons where I've set an alarm on my phone. I actually have it. I don't use it as much. I'm good at ignoring alarms if they are on my phone too often.

But at 1:30 I have a reminder that pops up that says stop and breathe.

And it was my reminder for a long time time for months that I would stop and practice just a few minutes of centering prayer which is just a spiritual practice of kind of quiet contemplation before the Lord. And it would just help me to build in that habit of stillness. And I think there has to be some habit change. Yes.

But before that we don't change anything that we do. We don't change any of our behaviors without that underlying motivation. Our emotions, our desire has to be connected to any change.

And so if someone doesn't want to build self awareness, I can't. I'm not going to be able to do anything for them. But yeah, it's a practice of training our minds.

Yeah, just retraining our neural pathways so that we're learning to notice our internal world. And that comes more easily for some of us than others. I don't know, I'm an enneagram4.

And so like going to the deep places is like my sweet spot where I'm married to a man who does not prefer to go to the deep places. It's very ironic and hilarious how God brought us together, but so hilarious.

Oh, marriage. Yeah.

That practice of self awareness, it's for me, I have found with my clients and in my own life that I have to build in some structure around that.

And over time, as I built in structure, whether through alarms or through coaching or through spiritual direction or through counseling, for me, it's really helpful to have other people doing that work with me.

Over time, it's become more and more natural where my muscles have developed, my self awareness muscles have developed where now I can notice more quickly, oh, I'm kind of in the middle of a shame spiral right now. Like I'm beating myself up. Hold on, hold on. That doesn't feel good.

I'm noticing that let me step back and, and get curious about what's happening where that curiosity wasn't even an option prior to starting to do that practice. That training work of building some of that self awareness that I've been doing for years now. But it does get easier.

Yeah. When you talk about a shame spiral, can you give an example of what that looks like?

Yeah, it's any. Well, shame just to begin, is universal. Brene Brown taught us this.

It's an emotion that is both universal, everyone experiences it and it's paralyzing. So it just locks us up when we're experiencing shame.

And it's that deep seated fear belief that something about us is broken or flawed and makes us inherently unworthy of love and belonging.

And so when we have some sort of trigger that makes us feel shame, there's a part of our nervous system that reacts in like a fight or flight, like, oh no, oh no, I'm going to be rejected. Which emotional pain tracks the same in our body as physical pain. So it does almost feel like a life or death situation at times.

And so when shame is triggered, when I look in the mirror and have these old neural pathways that are activated of body shame that I see the shape of my body, I see the normal changes that happen as I'm aging and I have this shame response that makes me think, oh my gosh, you're so disgusting. People are gonna like judge you. No one's gonna want to be your friend because they're. Which is ridiculous, right?

Like, because I say these things out loud, I'm like, that's like so far from the truth. But in that moment, like my body is having this physiological reaction where it's like I can feel it.

Like I have this heaviness in my chest and in my head and it's like, oh, like your heart kind of drops. And so what that feels like is there's something wrong with me.

And it's that self talk of, I'm such a loser, I'm so disgusting, I'm xy, I can't do anything right. It's the voice that makes us feel like we are broken, we're unlovable. Like, if people knew this about me, they would run the other way screaming.

And the most painful part is that it feels in the moment. Shame feels like the truest thing, which is why we actually can't pull ourselves out of it alone.

So that's part of this practice of gentleness that I have really been working with women about, is that we need other people to help us one, learn how to be gentle with ourselves. Because most of us don't know, like, we haven't received gentleness most of our lives.

Even if we had gentle people in our lives, that's not the normal narrative that we're used to hearing spoken over us is gentleness. So we need other people. We need people that we can be real and vulnerable and raw with.

And we need to be intentional and pay attention to that shame when it pops up, to be brave enough to reach out and ask for the support that we need both from the Lord and from others. And I think he uses both.

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You know, you talk about and you give this example of body shame and just you can get in a headspace where you're just going off about how disgusting you are and you said shame feels like the truest thing. And I thought, yes, it does feel like the truest thing. And then we act on it.

Yeah.

So what starts to happen is someone who's feeling the way you were in that moment that goes, no one wants to be my friend I'm disgusting. All these things. Then you don't go to the party, then you don't do certain things. And so now shame is starting to boss us around.

And I think you're absolutely right that you can work yourself to a place where you can help yourself get unstuck from the shame spiral. But it does help to have other people invite you out.

Mentioned a couple times you talked about self compassion, this idea of seeing yourself the way Jesus sees you, the way Jesus hears you.

I'm curious in all of this work that you're doing on practicing gentleness, how much of it has to draw upon, knowing what Jesus is like, how Jesus would react, how Jesus sees you, how Jesus loves you, how Jesus wouldn't condemn you or shame you. Like how much of this work of practicing gentleness draws from Jesus?

Yeah, I mean, it's the foundation. It's the foundation. And the truth is that I couldn't practice gentleness toward myself until I really began to believe how gentle he is with me.

And I didn't realize that I. What my beliefs were about, how God looked at me until I started to wrestle with this inner resistance I felt toward gentleness.

And the truth is there's a book called Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortland, and he makes the argument that the only time Jesus describes his heart, we hear a lot of things that Jesus says about himself. You know, these I am statements. I am the way, the truth and light, I'm the vine.

But the only way that he describes himself and his heart is when he says, I am gentle and humble of heart. And so the truth of his character is that how he wants to show up in every interaction with us is with gentleness. He's never condemning or accusing.

We know that that's the voice of the enemy, right?

But I started to, with the help of my spiritual director, actually imagine Jesus with me in the room when I was having moments of shame or even, even outside of those moments, as I was reflecting on areas where I was really struggling and it took so much work to activate my sanctified imagination.

But to imagine Jesus sitting next to me and not with like, a furrowed brow or like shaking his head in disappointment like that, if I was honest, that's really what I was picturing that he was thinking that he was kind of arms crossed, you know, kind of on the other side of the room or even, like even further off, but as I started to imagine him looking at me with compassion in his eyes and affection and tenderness and even like tears kind of glistening when he heard me share about my pain. Like that started to shift something.

And to be honest, it was really hard for me to imagine Jesus's face at first as I started kind of practicing, like slowing down, bringing him my shame and imagining him with me. I felt like I was kind of grasping for thin air. Like I couldn't hold onto this picture of him as compassionate and gentle.

And so I started to borrow other people's gentleness that I had received.

Like an embodied experience of a friend sitting with me with compassion in her eyes, or my counselor listening to me share my story with such understanding and tenderness.

Or my husband in those moments where I am just, you know, overcome or overwhelmed or whatever, the thing is reaching out his arm and just wrapping it around me and pulling me in close to his chest. Like I would start to imagine those things and then imagine Jesus doing those things for me.

And it started to shift my beliefs about how Jesus sees me. And then adding in also practices of listening prayer and really learning to discern his voice.

Yeah, I would say Jesus is the foundation of gentleness. And I have clients who don't know the Lord that are, you know, we're working on this as well.

And they can borrow some of those same practices with people that love them. But you and I both know that it lacks, it lacks the power to transform us the way Jesus can and does when we abide.

Yeah, well, I certainly know, I mean, in my own life, combating shame and having had years of it with no belief in God, so it was undealt with shame and what has helped me over the years.

And you know, we talk about colliding with Jesus around here, but literally looking at Jesus colliding with someone who feels ashamed or who feels wounded, who feels vulnerable, who feels like a screw up, whatever it may be in the New Testament. And I would read and I would look at his life and I would see him showing up to them.

You know, you think about the woman caught in the act of adultery. Here she is, she's drugging like trash. She just was caught in the act. There's all these men who want to condemn her and make her feel ashamed.

And the way Jesus responds to her is so stunning. It's so beautiful. And I would imagine myself when I would read these scriptures, I would imagine him colliding with me.

And I would wonder, like, what would he say to me with the things that I feel ashamed about? The same Jesus who runs into the woman caught in the act of adultery runs into me.

And so I highly believe that even as you're talking about practicing gentleness and self compassion, like, I'm with you on the idea of like, if you can begin to look at the life of Jesus and comprehend how he would treat you in your circumstance, and you can see how he would, because you see him run into so many different people and how he interacts with them is so gentle, it is so beautiful, it's so patient and gracious. And then you can begin to do that for yourself and do that for other people.

So it feels like there's a huge element of sort of like the spiritual discipline of going to God's word and really, really learning who Jesus is and what Jesus is really. Like, not who Jesus is according to Christians who are being dumb, but like who, who Jesus is, which we all.

At times, right, like, we can all put ourselves in that category.

But there is, there is something really important about like embodying our faith and allowing what we know about Jesus to move from our minds where we can really intellectualize Scripture. We can intellectualize what we know of God and allowing it to trickle down into our hearts.

And that comes from embodied experiences with real people in real life, because we can't really know. Kurt Thompson again says that if we don't, When I say to you, God loves you and you don't feel it in your chest, it's not real to you yet.

Like, we've got to allow his love to trickle down in an embodied way. And we do that with our relationships with the people in front of us.

Like, that's, that's how we practice embodying his love and living it out where it's not just this idea of like, oh, I'm reading the Bible and I see this nice idea of Jesus being kind to this person. Oh, he must be kind to me. That's, that's great intellectual knowledge. But shame wants to keep every part of us separate from one another.

Shame wants to, that's, that's what shame does. It disintegrates. Disintegrates the different parts of ourselves.

It wants to keep our spiritual life over here and our physical health over here and our emotional mental health over here. And it wants to keep our relationships over here. And it wants to keep us separate from the people in our lives.

It, you know, comes between us because shame, part of the neurobiological impact of shame is it makes us want to hide. It makes us want to isolate and hide.

And at the same time it separates different parts, the different domains of our, our mind, actually, it separates. And so if we are able to invite Jesus and invite people into the spaces where we feel shame.

It melts the shame away and allows the different parts of us to become integrated, reintegrated, reconnected and whole.

And so there's this idea of practicing like we have to practice in our real relationships, allowing the love of Jesus to penetrate not just as an idea, but as something we practice and receive in our bodies in a real and vulnerable way for it to have that transforming effect that all of us want.

Jillian, can you give an example or two of some work you've done with people or in your own life or friends, or I don't know where you've actually watched this become a reality where Jesus's love moved from someone's head to someone's heart and it actually was like a shame be gone moment.

Yeah, I mean, I'm thinking about how much I've experienced that for myself.

I mean, I'm thinking about, like, several groups of women that I've been a part of, where we have space where we're willing and able to intentionally share the real raw stuff. And there's something about naming and speaking out loud the things that we're carrying. Whether it's.

Yeah, I'm thinking of different things that clients and women in my life have struggled with. Like that sense of I'm reacting to my kids in anger, like my. My kid is misbehaving and I'm exploding at them and that's not the mom I want to be.

And then naming that out loud in the safety of friends who love them. This may have been me recently saying to my friends, hey, I do not like the mom that I am. I do not like how I'm showing up for my kids.

This is not how I pictured it. This is not what I imagined I would be like. And I feel power lists to respond a different way.

And as I say those words out loud, with more tears than are coming out right now as I'm telling you the story, but as I say those words out loud and I see their eyes looking at me with compassion and understanding, and they're not condemning me. They're not like, oh, you said what to your 13 year old? You thought, what about what you wanted to do to her?

You walked away instead of giving her a hug like you did. What? Like, that's what I expect. Right? Because that's how I'm treating myself.

And for them to look at me instead and say, jillian, your response makes so much sense. That's not who you want to be. That's not who you really are, but it makes so much sense. That must.

That must have been really painful for you to have them see me, to see my heart and sit with me and hold space for that pain and that shame. And then for them to stay and not run away or reject me, but to love me and draw me in with compassion.

Like, I could literally feel the shame melting away. There's like, a release, you know, it's like your shoulders kind of drop, and you just have this, like, release in your chest. That's one example.

I'm thinking of so many examples in marriage. Friends sharing recently about expectations that they have for themselves in marriage and how they want to be easy.

They want to set their husband up to have all of these things that. That they want or need.

And they're feeling, like, their own lack of needs being met for them to get the things that they want and need because they're trying to set their husband up, and they're feeling ashamed that they have all these needs, and they're starting to feel resentful, and they're starting to feel like, oh, I never get time for myself. I'm sending my husband to do all these things and for us to say, listen, you're allowed to have needs. You're allowed to want time for yourself.

You're allowed to use your voice to ask for support. Your feelings of resentment are not who you are, and they make so much sense.

Like, that phrase to me, I think has done more for melting shame than almost any other. When I hear a friend listen with, you can just see it in their face, right?

Like, we have these mirror neurons that communicate what the other person is feeling as they listen to us. We feel their compassion. And for someone to say to Jillian, that makes so much sense.

It just normalizes and dispels that belief that there's something wrong with me, and that's why I'm experiencing whatever it is I'm experiencing.

I love both those examples, Jillian. And I know there's people listening who want this.

They want this experience you're talking about where they can be gentle to themselves or experience it from someone else, and they can see shame go packing.

I'm curious as we kind of come to a close on our time together today, and I won't sing my last question, but can you share some simple daily practices or affirmations that our listeners can kind of start with right away to begin cultivating gentleness in their own lives?

I actually am putting this together as, like, a worksheet to kind of give people Some tools to make it a little bit more accessible. And so I've been using the acronym GENTLE as a way to remember some ways that we can practice gentleness. And this isn't a formula.

It's not like you have to do all these things all the time. But sometimes even just having. Having one phrase that I can call to mind will help.

So when I think about gentle, being gentle with myself, I think g first get curious. It's the idea of practicing curiosity and not judgment and just noticing what's the truth about my current reality?

That making space to pay attention to our own inner experience while withholding judgment.

And then e would be to engage vulnerability, to be honest with myself and to be honest with others about what's happening under the surface that no one else can see. Maybe where am I stuck? Or what is it that I'm afraid of?

And really allowing myself to be fully known and loved again by myself and by others through sharing what's happening with people in my life who I know love me. And that takes a lot of courage. So get curious, engage vulnerability. And then n is this idea of noticing and naming what is happening inside of us.

There's such power in putting words to our internal experience, especially our emotional experience. Emotion researchers talk about how important it is for us to be as specific as possible when we're sharing or naming our emotions.

Like, the more granular we can be in our language, the more helpful it is to allow emotions to be metabolized in our body. It kind of allows everything to move through us more quickly. So. So if we can name our emotion, like, what are some emotions that we're experiencing?

And I always think of, like, our heart, mind, body, and soul. Okay, my heart, my emotions. How can I name some emotions I'm experiencing? My mind, maybe. What's the story I'm believing here?

Like, what am I telling myself? My body? What am I even noticing in my body? Sometimes even paying attention to our own bodies is the work we need to do.

Like, maybe I have tension in my shoulders that's sending me a message or some tightness in my belly. Or maybe I just need to take a nap because I'm exhausted, and that's affecting everything else. And spirit, where is Jesus? Where's God?

In the midst of what I'm experiencing right now? So that's the idea of noticing and naming, looking at all of those aspects of ourselves. And then t would be to tend with care to.

To offer ourselves the most compassionate, generous response possible, as if we were caring for a friend. So if there were a friend in a similar circumstance with a similar emotion, similar thoughts, what would we say?

And to extend ourselves the most generous possible encouragement or permission. And a lot of times this is hardest for women because we feel like we're slacking or giving ourselves an out or making excuses.

But the truth is that we can't out compassion. God, as compassionate as we can be toward ourselves, it's just a drop in the bucket, not even that of how much compassion he wants to offer us. So.

So that's t to tend with care and then L is to listen to love and to really open ourselves to the loving words of the One whose posture toward us is always gentle and kind. And to ask. That's the practice for me of getting still and saying, God, is there anything you want me to know?

And really trusting his heart toward me. That if there are words that come to my mind as I'm asking him, he wants to speak to me.

And this takes a lot of practice, right, to learn to discern his voice. I know there's other podcasts and resources that you've created and other people have offered here for people that want to learn to hear his voice.

But if he is speaking to me with compassion, if, if I'm hearing words that are life giving and loving and in alignment with his character, I can trust that his spirit is speaking to me, even through the things that sound like my own thoughts. So listening to love would be L and then E is to expect to practice.

Like we have to recognize that this is a process that we will be practicing our entire lives, that we are constantly being made more and more into people of love, as John Mark Comer has said recently that we're becoming more and more loving toward ourselves and toward others, and it's going to take practice.

So specifically looking for one small, realistic step that we can take to practice gentleness toward ourselves in a way that recognizes transformation takes time. But right now, what's something kind I can do for myself? So that's the gentle framework that I'm happy to offer to people too.

I love that. How can people get that I love?

Yeah, I'll put it on my website so they can find it@jilliandebritz.com I'll also link it on Instagram. So it's just Jillian DeBritz if they want to sign up to get the Gentle way framework.

Awesome.

Jillian, I always love having you on the podcast and love that you are not just talking about this, but you're actually doing this work in your own life and one on one with women. And I, I just absolutely think it's beautiful. So thank you for inviting us into it.

Thank you. Thanks for having me, Willow. It's always such a joy to be with you.

You too. Take care, Jillian.

Okay.

Friend, I hope that you feel encouraged to begin to pay attention to yourself, encouraged to have more compassion and confidence, encouraged to go to Jesus and have him deal with your shame and encouraged to be more gentle to yourself. I really hope you go and grab that freebie that Jillian has made for you. And I also want to remind you of a few of our resources.

If you don't know, we have a jillion resources for you on our website at wecollide.net so make sure to check them out. But a few that come to my mind are I've written four Bible study books.

I've written more, but there's four main Bible study books that you can check out and those are so helpful as you run into Jesus and you see how compassionate and how loving and how gentle he is on people in the New Testament, it truly forms in you a self compassion and a self gentleness. So check those out.

We also have an anxiety guide that we basically collaborated with several counselors, mental health therapists, and we created, we curated this guide that helps you to manage some of the anxiety that you're feeling. So check that out. There's also a freebie called the Insight Journal and that is is just a tool to help you become more aware.

So if you've gone through a season and you're moving towards a new season, that's a great journal that asks you some really good questions to pay attention to how you're doing and what you want to take with you into this new season. So make sure to check those out and most of all, keep colliding. Love you. Catch you next week.