As a writer, I'd recommend - though YMMV - that you try interlacing an abstract explanation like this one with a specific, concrete technique.

Yeah, that's what I'm doing in the rewrite of Thinking Things Done that I'm working on right now. Chapter 2 will start with the "thoughts into action" technique in my video, and use it as a demonstration of several specific principles about how thinking-for-action differs from ordinary "thinking". (In my previous arrangement, I had several chapters of theory before getting to the technique in chapter 6, but this way I think I'll actually be able to maintain a lot better theory-to-practice ratio throughout.)

I know nothing of NLP, so you needed to explain "submodalities of motivation" or at least link it

What you would do is think about something you're motivated to do, and something you "could" do, but are not motivated to do. (As opposed to being motivated to avoid or NOT do.)

Then, you observe what your autonomous representation of these actions are, and compare the representations. Do you see pictures? Hear sounds? Where are they located, what size, moving vs. still, etc. (WIkipedia's "Submodality" page has a list of typical qualities of these kinds.)

After you've identified the differences between the two, you can try changing your representation of the thing you're not particularly motivated by so that it matches the representation of the thing you are motivated by -- move it to the same place, same size, brightness, etc. etc. -- and observe whether you now feelmotivated to do that thing. You can also experiment with changing the various qualities, and noticing what effect it has on your felt-response to the idea.

This is not a permanent change -- there are other things you have to do to make it stick or to contextualize it appropriately. And you may have to tweak some things to do it at all; it helps to use more than two examples, I've found, even though submodality elicitation always seems to get taught with just two. Many people also have trouble paying attention to their images; I worked with someone yesterday who was much better focusing consciously on their sounds, and then their images changed in response to changing the sound qualities (including direction, volume, and location).

Anyway, while not permanent, it represents a simple demonstration of NLP's practical rendition of an idea that I believe originated with General Semantics: that is, our behavior is determined by our internal representation of concepts. It just so happens that NLP shows the driving representations aren't primarily verbal.

Which makes sense, evolutionarily. After all, we had to be able to decide things and act on those decisions long before we had language.

The hardest part of learning to do any NLP or similar technique is simply learning to "shut up" one's ongoing verbal analysis and argumentation long enough to actually pay attention to what the rest of your brain is doing... which is why a lot of the original NLP creators tend to speak very disparagingly of the conscious mind. (e.g. "Any conscious verbal statement of the client is to be treated as unsubstantiated rumor until and unless it is confirmed by an unconscious non-verbal response.")

But I'm digressing a bit. Submodalities are a basic building block of a wide variety of NLP techniques, and they're only one of NLP's building blocks. There are also plenty of ways to change submodalities without direct manipulation; I personally specialize in using questions that cause people to indirectly change their submodalities, on the basis that we change them indirectly all the time, and for a lot of people, that leads to less conscious interference... presumably because the verbal mind at least gets to ask the questions then. Whereas, direct submodality interventions leave the verbal mind free to critique itself and/or the process, making it impossible to actually pay attention, at least for me most of the times I've tried direct-manipulation techniques. Strangely, though, if I have someone else there to talk me through it, I can usually do them... answering someone else's real-time question seems to commit my attention better.

You're assuming knowledge of things I've never heard of, and would probably be allergic to most standard expositions of (I can't stand standard self-help writing style).

I understand, believe me. My allergy was more to doing things than to reading about them, though. I discarded techniques because I didn't like the theories.

Problem is, everybody discards techniques because they don't like the theories or the writing styles -- which is why there are so many hundreds upon hundreds of books that describe what are basically the same techniques, in slightly different styles. (Of course they're the same -- our brains are the same.)

You don't seem to have a strong instinct for realizing what the other person already knows or doesn't know, but then most people appear to me to lack this instinct, which I suppose indicates that I possess a talent in this area. Unfortunately, that also means I have no idea how to advise people who lack that talent. You'd have to ask someone who started out without talent and developed skill.

Yes. I've realized this year that I suck at this and other teaching-related skills, which is why I've been studying instructional development and why I've also started over on my book; it was halfway finished, but early feedback showed it wasn't reaching my goals for knowledge transfer OR motivating people to act on the knowledge that was transferred.