How do I exercise patience?

Nearly a year ago, I met a guy at my job who I hit it off with really quickly. It began as a friends with benefits kind of thing, but it got pretty complicated pretty quickly. There were things I know I did wrong in the relationship - I can be clingy, or too emotional, or just too intense of a person. I tend to fall for a person really hard, really fast. He wasn't perfect either, he is emotionally distant, he doesn't trust easily, et cetera. We had arguments and even stopped being friends at one point. In the middle of this, my father passed away. After that, we've slowly been repairing our relationship, and in fact in many ways it's stronger than ever. We talk and hang out all the time. We still have sex, but we both strive to make sure we also spend tons of time talking and hanging out. It's almost like all the fighting and hardship taught us both about each other in a trial-by-fire kind of way. We understand each other better now. He is not great at talking about his feelings - this is something he has admitted to me and that we've tried to work through. A lot of our fights in the past were based on him not being clear about what he was feeling. So this is out in the open, and it's one of the things he knows he needs to work on, just like I have things that I am also working on. He has shown me signs that his feelings are progressing too, though not explicitly through words. He holds me close now, which he never did before. He's tender, he's more talkative than ever. I don't think it is just wishful thinking on my part - there are very clear differences between how he was with me before and how he is with me now. He has many friends that are women, and with all the stuff we've been through, it would be easy enough for him to drop me completely and move on.(Or for me to do the same, for that matter) But he hasn't, and every time something happens between us he wants to fix it. Why would he do that when he could just let it go, find someone else to do this with? It seems to me like he has feelings for me that he needs time to fully process and develop. The problem, I think, is mostly with me. I like what I have with him, and I want to give him the time he so obviously needs. But I feel so impatient for him to catch up to me. I hate the waiting. I'm not a very patient person in general. I feel so impatient that I want to spill everything to him. I fear this would terrify him, and it would ruin all the forward progress he's made. He clearly NEEDS the time, and is better left to come to things on his own, without me pressuring him. When I'm patient with him, there is an obvious difference. I want to wait, but I don't know how to be patient. So I guess my question is: How do I be patient?