What keeps you motivated to work hard on achieving your dreams?

I have been working more and more to become a heart centered person. When we are heart centered, our actions and our desires enter into a trend where they become more and more aligned. And when they are increasingly more aligned, we feel less incongruity, less conflict with our actions and our promises/plans.

When our actions are not matching our desires of what we should be doing and achieving, we feel stressed. A tension is being created in our minds, between our perception of what is happening, and our perception of our desire of what should be happening.

When I feel this tension, based upon my present understanding, I become aware that something is off, that I am off center when I am focusing on this ‘something’. It is my priority to practice keeping my self centered, so I remember this and again bring myself to my center. (over time it has become easier to remember for me owing to practice)

By centering I mean that I return my attention on my Breath or Spiritual Heart, and stay as Awareness.

This is a meditativeness practice I have been learning from an enlightened person and his teachings.

Bringing our attention to our breaths or the Spiritual Heart center (we gradually become sensitive to energy through meditation practice and we can find the Spiritual Heart Center by focusing on the center of our chests with the intention to know ourselves) will align us with our hearts in the moment. Our desires and actions as a trend become more aligned (ups and downs can happen while learning, but the trend will be there). We will also be experiencing ourselves more and more as the Awareness.

I recommend you to study the article below to get a thorough understanding of this (including the explanation of the terms I used such as Awareness, Spiritual Heart). It is indeed a deeper way of living life, but it is not a mystical mountain-top way of living, cut off from the world. In a sense it is bringing one from a fantasy mountain-top to reality, the real experience of oneself. As we get more and more aligned with reality, we have less desires that are based on illusion, so we get frustrated or stressed less. There will be many changes in this path, but one needs to go through an awakening this way or that way to be free of such conflict within one’s mind.

New to Higher Self Teachings? Start here.

For a step by step, practicality more first, theory more later approach, read this answer I have previously created and apply the 7 steps there, instead of going into the article above directly:

What should I do to reduce my shyness?