I have always lacked due 'patience' in my life - with people, situations and my own performances at times. How can I better control and increase my patience in order to create a more relaxed and understanding 'me'?

Allow me to digress. Life is full of opposites. Based on the Law of Polarity. Hot, cold, night, day, black, white, open, closed. But between all of these opposites is a vast range of other variables or possibilities. Two opposites that exist are 'being' and 'doing'. You might think of being as sitting in the lotus pose meditating and doing as action woman bouncing off walls. If we are too much of one without experiencing the other our life feels out of balance. Life is best experienced by oscillating between the two. So in the case of patience, it might relate more to your belief about what you 'should' be doing or achieving at any particular time. Perhaps your expectations of what you 'should' achieve need to be reviewed and relaxed. 

The feeling of impatience, frustration, anxiousness, or the likes; is just a message. It is telling you that perhaps you need to change your expectations (of what you think you should be achieving) OR change how you are going about dealing with a situation, person or yourself. I would suggest that you loosen up your belief on what you think you should be doing; because there are no 'shoulds' in life. There is just what you decided to buy into.

Practical strategies:

1. reduce your expectations on yourself and others (as opposed to trying to increase patience)

2. be ok with ok

3. relaxing comes from letting go (being), as opposed to controlling (doing)

4. move to Asia - you either learn to chill out or you implode ;-)

5. there are no 'shoulds' - just what you choose to accept

6. and finally, accept things for what they are - not what you want them to be