The decision keeps arriving with your name on it
Your North Node sits in the 1st house, so ordinary days keep handing you the moment where somebody has to choose and nobody else will. Consulting first is the old reflex. What this asks for is a preference stated before you have checked whether it is popular.
Small things carry the practice: ordering first, picking the film, saying where you want to go. The size of the decision is irrelevant; the direction of it is the whole point.
Growth is on the other side of going first
Everything that has genuinely moved your life forward began with an unilateral move — applying without permission, starting before consensus, saying what you wanted while it was still unpopular. The pattern is unusually consistent.
Trust the record rather than the feeling. The feeling reports danger every time; the record says this is the direction that pays.
The pull back toward the other chair
With the South Node in your 7th house, partnership is where you already know what to do — so the moment self-direction gets uncomfortable, you find yourself asking someone, deferring to them, or building the plan around their needs. It feels like consideration and functions as an exit.
Notice the poll before you take it. One decision a week made without consulting anybody is the whole practice, and it works at any scale.
Clumsy is the correct feeling
Acting on your own behalf will feel selfish, awkward and slightly rude for a long time. That is not a signal that you are doing it wrong; it is what unfamiliar competence feels like from inside.
Keep a note of what actually happened afterwards. The gap between the dread and the outcome is the evidence that eventually changes the reflex.
What happens when you stop asking
Some people close to you will find your new directness harder to be around, because the arrangement had you accommodating. Others will be visibly relieved that somebody finally said what they wanted.
Take the second group seriously. Which reaction you get is the most reliable information you will ever collect about who your relationships were actually serving.
A self assembled from stated wants
The assignment here is not confidence but definition: knowing what you want, saying it, and letting the answer stand. Identity gets built out of accumulated stated preferences rather than out of a decision to feel more certain.
Say one want out loud each day, however small, and do not soften it afterwards. The practice looks trivial and it is the entire course.
Being someone rather than being agreeable
Your social skill is real and it has been used mostly to fit alongside other people rather than to take up any space of your own. Being easy to be with has never been the difficulty.
Disagree once, warmly and without walking it back. The friendships that survive it are the ones that were real, and you will find out considerably faster than you expect.