A. While you may feel vocationally challenged because of these missed opportunities, thankfully, your chart shows promise in the career department. To shift this unfortunate pattern, decide on your direction and stay focused on your goals. Your natal Mercury in Gemini in the 11th (communications and connections at work) square 10th-house ruler Mars in Pisces in the 8th (personal motivation and goals) reveals that you may undermine yourself or spread yourself too thin. Neither failing a work advancement test (due to classes you're taking to further your career) nor improperly filling out a job application reflect bad luck, but simply bad planning. What beliefs do you need to change to stop sabotaging your own success?

Next, cultivate an on-the-job network. Your Mars—Mercury square may also indicate that you feel threatened by your colleagues, and therefore competitive with them, and Uranus in Leo rising square Neptune can be the mark of a maverick. Though you may pride yourself on being independent, this may explain why you're not in the loop about upcoming job openings.

But the greatest hindrance to your successful advancement may be your own self-doubt. Natal Neptune—IC is notorious for undermining trust in oneself. It's as though, at the very foundation of your being, you simply don't believe you've got what it takes, and that deep-seated but often unconscious belief invites failure.

Neptune—IC can become your strongest ally, as you transform self-doubt into powerful faith in your own capabilities. You can accomplish this via self-help books, therapy or coaching, building a personal support network, meditation, spiritual practice, or religion — whatever Neptune-related activity works best for you. Prepare now for December, when your progressed Moon crosses the natal IC, offering the potential for a deep and profound transformation.

Based on the 30-year progressed lunation cycle.¹ Learn more about the Progressed Lunation Cycle from The Lunation Cycle: A Key to Understanding of Personality by Dane Rudhyar, Aurora Press, 1967 and in the article, An Overview of Dane Rudhyar's Approach to Cycles (TMA, 2/98), by Nicki Michaels. November is an opportune time to creatively refocus your goals (waxing sextile), so begin to research your career direction now. Your capacity to step into a new, more successful professional phase is heightened by the current trine of your progressed Sun to the natal Midheaven.² The progressed Sun trines the Natal Midheaven within a 2° orb from October 8, 2003 to December 8, 2007 and is exact on November 8, 2005.  Meanwhile, transiting Uranus will conjoin natal Mars while squaring natal Mercury,³ Transiting Uranus squares natal Mercury from March 12, 2005 to January 3, 2007 and conjoins natal Mars from March 27, 2005 to January 22, 2007. Aspects begin when the transiting planet enters a 2° orb and end when the transiting planet leaves that orb for the final time. thus enabling you to finally end the negative pattern you describe, if you begin to take advantage of current planetary opportunities and get ready to succeed. Go for it!