about Anna Shilina
Hi, I’m Anna,
the performance coach for happy, successful relationships.
I started performance coaching in 2015 after my exit from the security guarding business, where I had signed dozens of deals and managed sites with almost 1,000 employees. Running that business was an incredible initiation into leadership, but my true calling was waiting.
'Love mastery' is the name I’ve given my path.
I’ve yet to meet a human who isn’t on a path of mastering love, whether they know it or not. This is what humans are here to do, in many different forms.
I practice love mastery by bridging worlds… a bridge between:
your world and her world
the core self and the conditioned self
the wounded part and the wise part
physical and spiritual
philosophical and practical
leadership and surrender
the old pattern and the new pattern.
My life has taken me through many worlds. 14 years of travel across countries, industries, and identities. By now you know my story. The move from Kyiv to Cape Town at the age of six. And how the fighting in our immigrant home was the perfect initiation to my path of love mastery.
Here’s what I haven’t told you. My parents are together to this day, and the love between them has gone from strength to strength. It took me decades to understand what the fighting actually was: two people doing their absolute best with the Relating Intelligence they had at the time. Humans love at the level they were taught.
A few years ago, I ran a workshop on finding your why. One of the participants had a lightbulb moment. He audibly gasped. "I now understand why I've been working so hard to make money, at times forsaking my family and my health. It's because we didn't have money when I was growing up."
For him, it was money. For me, it was love.
When I was young, I didn’t have the relationships I wanted.
And now I do.
The bridge from there to here was the hardest work of my life: I had to let go of my achievement identity.
When I was young, I somehow believed achievement would equate to connection.
School excellence awards, year after year. BSc in Property Studies, honors, cum laude.
Eight years in hospitality, including chief stewardess on a 160-foot superyacht.
I served main course and dessert to the wealthiest families in the world, and I listened closely. What were they teaching their children? What books were they reading?
While signing security contracts I was also Toastmasters Club President. I completed train-the-trainer seminars, and hired mentors in coaching and speaking. All that achievement left me feeling desperately lonely.
Alcohol was the anesthesia I used to avoid the one thing I wanted most.
It created the illusion of intimacy, while in reality, I was abandoning myself.
It wasn't until I hit rock bottom, put the booze down after 7 years of being sober-curious, that I got serious about the most important aspect of life: relationships.
I devoted myself to the mastery of love. At my third 10-day silent Vipassana retreat, Relating Intelligence was born.
Every human relates.
To parents, to partners, to children, to friends, to work, to money, to the body, to the divine…
To the parts of themselves they haven't yet learned to love.
My craft is to make the invisible mathematics of love visible. So love stops feeling like a mystery we win or lose, and starts being a living intelligence we can practice for.
If you take one thing away from this book, let it be this:
Relationships are ratios plus capacity.
The only time to do better, or be better, is now. Whenever possible, do the hard thing now.
My dream is a world where Relating Intelligence is as common as IQ and EQ.
Where couples stop turning on each other, and start asking:
"What is love trying to reveal here?" and "What would love do now?"
The distance between knowing and doing is not a character flaw. That distance is what the relationship gym is for. You’re going to get it wrong more than once. You’ll read this book, and still find yourself reacting instead of pausing. That’s not failure. It’s a rep.
Relationship wounds heal inside of relationships.
Some relational patterns can be understood alone. Changing patterns is often faster through real-life practice with other people, because relationships reveal what solitude cannot.
Thank you for being brilliant.
Peace. Power. Play.
Anna Shilina
