Ask anyone out there what the most important things in their life are, and they’re likely going to tell you it’s their wife/husband and kids. If they’re single, ask them what they want most in life, and they’re likely going to tell you that it’s finding their life partner.

Most people, honestly most people on this planet, including virtually everyone I speak to, admit that they spend their lives yearning for that soulmate connection. That type of deep seated, genuine, nourishing love where you feel safe with your partner, you feel free to be yourself, and free to relax knowing that you’ve found them.

Without that sort of love, we spend our lives yearning. We’re always looking. Every opportunity to meet someone, go anywhere, do anything, has that aching, quietly burning sense of possibility, of hope, of wondering. Where are they? Will I maybe meet them here? There? Today? Tomorrow? At the work conference you’re going to as you scout the room, scanning people to see if anyone catches your eye and could possibly be ‘the one’? At the bar on a Friday night with friends after work? At the gym? On the commute? Always scouting, looking, scanning. Evaluating, judging, considering. Everything that we do, truly, is geared towards finding that person.

This is natural. Of course it is. Humans are wired for connection. We are primal beings, at the end of the day, with the desire for partnership and companionship. That’s our biology. We’re also lucky insofar as we have the capacity to love deeply, to connect with another human’s personality, to intertwine our lives, to build together, to grow together, to nourish each other and achieve greater things together. We have the capacity to know another person on a beautifully deep level, to go into depths of intimacy that we can only dream of when we are single. Relationships are magic. They really are. They are potent forces for alchemic growth and self-actualisation. So, of course we want connection. Of course we want that relationship. 

Yet ask any of these people what they are actively doing to find that life partner, and they will look at you blankly. They might respond with “I’ve done some therapy on my past exes”. Or “I’ve read a book or two”. I even had one guy tell me that he had done a yoga course (not sure how that is going to help you find a partner…). Most will tell you, in some shape or form, that they are waiting. That they ‘trust’ it will work out for them. That they are hopeful. That they believe if they put themselves in the right place at the right time it will all just work out for them.

This, my friends, is catastrophic.

I’ve said this before in my videos, and I’ll say it again. 

Successful people who have successful marriages, relationships, lifelong partnerships that we all admire…didn’t get there by hoping or waiting. They might not say it out loud, they might not reveal the lengths that they went to, but trust me, they didn’t just hang around and wait.

Honestly - can you imagine if you adopted the same strategy in any other area of your life?

If I asked you, hey, what are you doing to secure your next steps professionally this 2024? My hunch is you wouldn’t say, ‘trusting and hoping it will all work out’. Especially not if you hadn’t got good results in the past few years (which, if you’re still single, we can safely say you probably haven’t). 

If you had oodles of credit card debt and were struggling to get yourself a mortgage to buy a home, and I asked you, hey, what are you doing to get up the property ladder? You wouldn’t say, ‘nothing, just waiting’. That would be madness. It really is.

It is extremely naive, and unfortunately a symptom of our pretty toxic pop culture that likes to romanticise both dysfunctional relationships as the norm (soap operas, reality TV and so on), and healthy relationships as something that drop out of the sky to people after they’ve gone through some sort of trauma or journey (Hallmark movies, rom-coms). None of these are realistic (because they are pop culture - which is by nature often a fetishized and extreme version of non-reality to make it interesting and appealing - the banal, mundane, every day doesn’t really sell, right?)

And that is precisely the point.

Finding a life partner that is that wonderful, warming, comforting, nourishing presence in your life, that meaningful connection that transforms your life to another whole dimension, finding them often requires you to step up and accept responsibility, and a bit of that banal strategy and inner work that isn’t exciting or glamorous but does work. It gets results. It's mature. It’s an adult response.

It isn’t sitting back and fantasising about finding ‘the one’ and being happy forever by doing sod all and just swiping on your phone with that same jaded feeling you’ve been festering for years now. Nor is it about coming home to your partner and expecting things to somehow miraculously improve by doing…nothing. 

Life doesn’t work that way. It just doesn’t.

And I really don’t care how many rom-coms you indulge in and narratives of ‘well it worked out for them so it’ll work out for me’ you absorb. 

Trust me on this one.

Any couple that you see that are healthy, happy, and secure together - got there by taking responsibility for their relationship, investing into it, doing the inner work, and probably climbing a few mountains together before they got to their glowing state. Trust me. 

Again they might not talk about it. Unfortunately society makes this sort of stuff taboo, so single or unhappily coupled people walk around with a naive expectation that they just had it happen to them. They didn’t. They worked hard for it. 

You cannot have lofty hopes and expectations of finding the sort of ultimate match you are craving whilst avoiding any responsibility of doing anything to find it. 

It requires openness and a bit of patience, yes. Of course you cannot ‘force’ the outcome.

You cannot sledgehammer your way into a healthy relationship. You cannot coerce love.

But you absolutely can, and must, transform yourself into becoming the type of person who easily and effortlessly attracts the RIGHT love for them. 

This requires strategy and inner work.

Because the risk is, if you do NOT do this inner work, and you stay as you are, that single person or unhappily coupled person who is waiting and hoping for things to work out for you, you may very well bump into the ‘right’ person or even have them right now…but your blinkers are going to be on. Your psychological blockers are going to be there. Your inner saboteur is still going to be running the show. And so you can find them, and totally miss them being there, or find them and sabotage things horribly - because you haven’t done any of the inner work.

Nothing I am saying here is rocket science.

It’s pretty basic. 

Think about it:

You want to build a successful business and make millions. Great. 

You probably accept that you need a strategy to do this and some inner work to know what the heck to do when you get that business and millions. Your current state just isn’t good enough. Do you know what to do to run a multi million dollar business? Potentially not. Do you have a solid strategy on how to grow, nurture, and keep it? Do you know where to safely invest your millions and protect them? 

If not - then you won’t find it bizarre of me to suggest you need a strategy and a bit of inner work, a bit of learning and growth in order to transform into the type of person who prints money.

Right?

So the same goes for your relationships.

Okay, so if dreaming and praying and hoping and waiting for things to work out isn’t the best way to achieve a healthy secure relationship, then what is?

In my 15+ years of study, personal experience, academic, professional and coaching work, I have landed on 12 fundamentally necessary stages that we all have to go through if we want to find that lifelong connection. With ourselves, and with others. 

It’s a journey of personal growth, inner connection, deepening your own intimacy with yourself so that you can become extremely clear on what it is that you want and need in a relationship, and how the heck to find it, win it, and keep it. All of this has to start with you because if you don’t know what you need in a relationship, how the heck can you go about finding it? 

These 12 stages I’ve broken down into 3 core phases:

• Liberation

This is the phase where you have to liberate yourself from your past baggage, your old emotions, your old patterns and ways of thinking, being and behaving - the very stuff that is inadvertently holding you back from finding love. If you’re reading this and feeling prickly, thinking, ‘I don’t have anything to liberate myself from’ and you’re not in a soulmate nourishing relationship, then you probably have even more stuff to shift than the rest of us. I say that with love. We all have stuff we have to shift. Even those who are happily married. Shifting it doesn’t have to be hard, but it does require intention and a bit of time (a month or two is enough). You *have* to go through the liberation phase to shift your blockers and illuminate your blind spots so that you can move forward with clarity and confidence, knowing that nothing is going to sneak up on you and sabotage you.

• Behavioural Science

The second phase, once you’ve cleared everything out and are more of a blank slate, is about getting radically clear on who you are and what you need in a relationship to be truly happy. Not what you want - what you want is often what society, family, peer pressure or whatever it is has coerced your mind into thinking you want. But what you need. There’s a huge difference here and unfortunately, when we engage from what we want rather than what we need, we can end up in sticky situations further down the line when we stop hiding our true selves (because we get comfortable) and realise, heck, I’m not happy with this person - because they were never the right person for me in the first place. This is how divorces happen left right and centre. People marry out of ego and what they want, not what they need. Trust me on this one. So, getting that deep clarity from the get go is going to save you a lot of stress in the long run. There are proven ways to use the behavioural science of attraction to help you get that crystal clear clarity, and we do this in phase 2. Plus, you’ll want to learn the science of healthy relationships so you have a roadmap of how to unfold things and what to look for (what are genuine red flags, not pop culture ones), what to aspire to, and how to evolve and grow together.  

• Integrity

Lastly, you want to have extreme integrity in all that you do. Once you’ve cleared the past, got clear on who you are and what you need and want in relationship, you need to realign your life to be in greater integrity. This looks like shifting a few things, making 1 degree turns, communicating your boundaries, needs, and expectations to people, and learning to show up in a way that allows you to be authentically you rather than having to hide yourself. Because trust me, most of us are hiding to some extent - shape shifting, people pleasing, being timid - and you don’t have to be when you have confidence in who you are. When you are confident in who you are, and you can communicate that with confidence and passion, then you will, inevitably, attract the right people into your life - and the right relationship. You just will. It’s scientifically hard not to. The healthy secure relationship will become a byproduct of your healthy and secure life. Everything else in your life will be healthy and secure because YOU will be healthy and secure.

So, my friends - let me ask you: what do you choose?

Are you going to be like Bob down the road and sit in your home waiting for things to figure themselves out and work out for you? For your prince charming or queen to break through your front door and somehow rescue you? Or are you going to take responsibility for this beautiful, precious life that you have been given, and go out there and get it? 

I know what I chose, and I know what my clients have chosen. 

What about you?

I really, really, really want you to win at life. Sometimes a bit of strategy and accountability is all you need. I promise you.

If this resonates with you - you can start by taking a love life audit here.

Big hugs and lots of love,

Katarina