There’s a new epidemic in town: Loneliness. And while making friends is intimidating at any age, it feels especially daunting as adults. As we hit our 30s, our groups of friends are getting smaller and smaller (fun fact: We replace half our friend group every seven years as adults!). Life gets busy, people move away, and milestones come at different times. Even though this seems to be universal, it can still feel like something is wrong with us.

As we go through our 20s and 30s, we all start adulting in different ways and at different rates, and maintaining our ride-or-die connections can start to feel complicated. Navigating these different life stages means that our friendships sometimes end up at the bottom of the list, or we start growing in different directions and losing common ground. But every friendship goes through different seasons, and change doesn’t need to be a bad thing!

We humans are social creatures, we thrive on community and connection. But in these times of social media comparison and cancel culture, it can feel like we’ve lost sight of something vital — compassion. With mean girls dominating the news cycle, we thought this would be the perfect time to get deep and teach ourselves a lesson on the importance of compassion, how to give it to others and most importantly, how to give it to ourselves.

At its core, compassion is about putting aside judgment and making an effort to understand the struggles within ourselves and others. It helps us create meaningful connections, build healthy relationships, and develop emotional intelligence, which coincidentally all make for a well-adjusted adult! We’re all a lot more similar than we are different so let’s get positive (but not in a toxic way we promise).

We can find support for nearly every aspect of our lives these days, from our careers to our mental health. But when it comes to friendships, there's virtually nothing out there to help us maintain and strengthen our relationships with some of the most important people in our lives.

As two besties and business partners, Gillian & Cailyn know all too well the impact that having strong friendships can have on your life. So we called in friendship coach and expert Danielle Bayard Jackson to help us level up our friendships and show up as supportive BFFs.