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First learn to factor quadratic equations. Do practice problems until you can you just look at them and see how they factor. This is like the wax on/wax off and paint up/paint down from karate kid except for math.
Second, learn SOHCAHTOA so well and just do so many trigonometry practice problems that you can see the angles and stuff in your head easily. If you don't know in one second what the secant of eleven pi over three is, then you need to do more trig.
Once you do these high volume fundamental training sets, you are well-qualified to win the local karate tournament for amateur math. Don't start doing anything complicated until you get REALLY good at factoring quadratic equations and doing triangle stuff with trig. Once you master these things, you can do a little calculus to get the gist of it, a little ODE to get the gist of it, a little whatever once you get really good at these two fundamental skills. Once you get these simple skills, there will never be any other area of math where you really need to harp on getting super good at it before you progress to something else. For everything else, getting the gist of it is good enough, but if you do enough calculus that CALC II and CALC III integrals are always immediately obvious to you, then that is good too but is probably not really a practical skill that you will use later for a lay interest in math as a hobby. For the factoring and the trig though, that is the basis of everything (assuming you are already good at plus and minus and times and divided.)
PS: The "invert and multiply" rule for dividing by fractions needs to become innate knowledge in your brain.
