If you really want to improve and transform yourself, the first step is to become aware of the weaknesses which may be holding you back and preventing your evolution.

Although you are friendly and outgoing and commit yourself to friendships and partnerships, you often find it difficult to balance your own needs, desires, and goals with the objective reality of others and their individual desires and needs. To understand and overcome this problem, you should accept the idea that every relationship follows more or less the same general scheme: a base of intimacy and an accomplishment or purpose apart from the relationship itself. If you succeed in defining, through discussion and communication, what sort of intimate relationship you and your partners want to maintain and what accomplishment or purpose they hope to achieve, many conflicts will be avoided.

Because of your tendency to be self-focused at times, you may encounter conflict in relationships. Your certainty that you are bound to succeed, combined with impulsiveness, make you want to take charge of everything. This aggressiveness and lack of cooperation could arouse resentment in others. You would do well to meditate on the concepts of authority and individualism.

Ang Lee might set unrealistic goals for himself and struggle with organization. These tendencies are particularly evident when it comes to his emotional relationships. In the beginning, he will idealize the potential partner, putting them on a pedestal, but then he will try to dodge his commitment and desperately plot to extricate himself. In other life pursuits, he tends to rush into activities, of which he might only have a crude, confused concept. Life could step in to urge him to slow down and induce him to organize himself with more patience and forethought.

To trust yourself better and gain self-assurance, the first thing you must do is learn to say no. Once you are capable of saying no to others, you can say yes to life. You must develop your awareness of all the things you love and feel positive about, as well as all the changes you hope to make in order to enjoy life more. This is the foundation that will support you, the inexhaustible source and center of the transformation of your personality. Infantile anxieties which arose in childhood when you were helpless may be obstacles to your evolution. Sometimes they actually prevent you from daring to confront challenges you would be altogether capable of assuming now! One of the reasons you yield to these childhood fears so readily is that they procure a feeling so familiar to you that, although it is negative, it is a reassuring part of your identity. However, the more often you reinforce this complex by yielding to that feeling, the more unaware you become of your true emotional state. The irrational childhood fears have also reinforced your pessimistic tendencies. It is difficult for you to believe in the sunny side of life because of the pernicious little voice inside you that claims you don’t really deserve all this goodness. This side of you could undermine your vitality and force you to compensate or flee from reality. In doing so, you limit your power to bring about a positive change in yourself or your life. It’s a vicious cycle, and to free yourself, the first step is to free yourself from the fears which prevent you from taking full advantage of life. You can succeed if you arrange a relaxed, positive environment for yourself, establish sincere relations with one or two special people, and, if possible, finds a setting – perhaps a yoga class – in which you can practice relaxation exercises.