Anna Shilina

Love mastery is the name of my craft.

I'm yet to meet a human who isn't on the path of mastering love.

I make the invisible mathematics of love visible. So love stops feeling like a mystery we either win or lose.

And starts being understood as a living intelligence we can listen to.

I practice love mastery by bridging worlds.

By translating the unsaid and the invisible.

A bridge between…

Your world and her world.

The hurt self and the whole self.

The wounded part and the wise part.

Physical and spiritual.

Philosophical and practical.

Love and distorted love.

Leadership and surrender.

The old pattern and the new pattern.

My life has taken me through many worlds.

Across countries, industries, identities, heartbreaks, reinventions and initiations.

I was six years old when my mom, dad, sister, and I immigrated from Kyiv to Cape Town.

We moved a lot. Money was often tight. 

My parents loved us deeply, but there was a lot of shouting in the house. 

I can still hear the shouting in my head from time to time.

My parents are together to this day.

The love between them has gone from strength to strength.

And inspires me daily.

But the love modeled to me as a child was mostly survival, endurance, and hard work.

These are important. 

But I craved connection and feeling understood.

What we perceive is missing in childhood, becomes what’s important to us (our values) as adults.  

I felt that relationships were missing. 

It makes perfect sense that I would eventually devote my life to Relating Intelligence.

A few years ago, I ran a workshop on finding your why.

One of the participants had a lightbulb moment. He audibly gasped, and said,

“I now understand why I've been working so hard to make money. It’s because we didn't have money when I was young.”

⁂

I was an awkward kid.

The ugly duckling.

I struggled to make friends and belong. 

I was confused why kids didn’t want to hang out with me on the playground during lunch breaks or on the weekends.

I was the teacher’s pet.

I received excellence awards year in and year out at school.

I studied (Bsc.) Property Studies and graduated honours cum laude.

I worked in hospitality for eight years, including a few years on the yachts. 

I listened closely to the conversations the wealthiest families in the world were having around dinner tables while I served main course and dessert.

What were they teaching their children?

What books were they reading? 

I was President of a Toastmasters Club. I completed Train the Trainer seminars.

I hired mentors in the coaching and speaking world.

Achievement was the main pattern of my younger life.

I tried businesses in wine export and events.

Then I started a security company, the Cape Town branch.

I signed contract after contract. I hired guards. I learned how to lead people under pressure.

By the time I exited and sold my shares, we had a couple of dozen sites and about a thousand employees.

Because I had been a seminar junkie for years, I knew many of the speakers and coaches.

They encouraged me to become a coach. 

I started coaching what I knew.

Sales, business, mindset.

Once I quit drinking, lost weight and felt much better in my body, I started coaching clients on improving their habits.

After researching and studying relationships, my coaching evolved into Relating Intelligence.

⁂

Alcohol was part of my story for a long time.

It influenced my relationships for more than two decades.

It was the anaesthesia I used to avoid the one thing I wanted most.

Alcohol made the illusion of intimacy possible.

I called it partying while betraying and abandoning myself.

I was sober-curious for 7 years before reaching my rock bottom that said goodbye to the booze.

At twenty-eight, I fell in love for the first time.

I remember that altered state as if it were yesterday.

Before that, I didn’t believe in love.

Today, that sounds silly.

I had seen it in fairytales. But I hadn’t seen it in real life.

Suddenly, love existed.

Thirteen months later, my heart broke.

At the time, it felt like devastation.

Now, I understand heartbreak differently.

What we call heartbreak is an ego break. 

The end of a story. Far from being broken, the heart opens.

Love keeps breaking the heart open 

until the heart stays open.

⁂

I spent years figuring out my relationships.

My relationship with alcohol.

My relationship with men and the male gaze.

I was on a journey of dozens of plant medicine ceremonies,

meditation retreats, therapy, breathwork, personal development seminars…

Every healing modality I could get my hands on.

My self-awareness increased.

So did my loneliness.

That was the part that made no sense to me.

How could I be one of the most self-aware people I knew

and still keep repeating the same painful patterns?

I didn’t need more awareness.

I didn't need more information.

I needed intelligence.

I needed Relating Intelligence.

What’s the difference between information and intelligence?

Implementation. Integration.

I needed these skills. That’s how I designed the Relating Intelligence O.N.E. formula.

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 have not yet learned how to love.

My craft is to make the invisible mathematics of love visible.

So love stops feeling like a mystery we either win or lose,

and starts being understood as a living intelligence we listen to.

My dream is a world where Relating Intelligence is as common as IQ and EQ,

Where couples stop turning on themselves and each other,

and start turning towards each other, examining their patterns and asking better questions:

Not, “What’s wrong with me?” or

“What’s wrong with you?”

Rather, “What is love trying to reveal here?” and “What would love do now?”

Thank you for being brilliant.

And honest enough to be here.

Love is math. Relating is a learnable skill.