Succeeding at and enjoying triathlon takes four things: the imagination to picture your desires.  The motivation to pursue them.  The discipline to stick to it. And recovery, to make the most of your training efforts.
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 Practical Techniques for Imagination 
 Focus on mental training does not have to be overly time consuming.  In fact, one of the best 30 seconds you can spend to enhance the quality and effectiveness of your workouts is to rehearse them.  Athletes who take a half-minute before their workouts to state their workout goal report vastly improved results.

It’s easy.  Just say to yourself (or aloud) the purpose of the workout.  If it’s a tempo ride, say, “The purpose of this workout is to ride at race pace for a portion of the ride.”  If it’s a recovery run, “The purpose of this run is to do some active recovery to get me ready for tomorrow.”

That takes about 3 seconds.

In the rest of the half minute, rehearse the workout the way you want it to happen.  In your mind’s eye, make a short video of the workout from beginning to end and see yourself achieving the goal of the workout. 

Of all the things you can do to improve your performance, rehearsing your workouts and races in your mind is perhaps the single most time-effective technique available. More and more athletes rehearse this way automatically before every workout to tangible benefits.  Their workouts are sharp and focused and less wandering.  Their 30-second mental rehearsal vastly improves the quality of their performance.  Yours can, too.

From The Four Pillars of Triathlon: Vital Mental Conditioning for Endurance Athletes, p. 25.

Practical Techniques for Motivation 
 First, help yourself by doing what you can to succeed.  Stack the deck in your favor.  There are a few practical things you can try before using mental strategies or patterns.  Here are some proven techniques.

1.       Do your least favorite thing first.
That way, you got it done and during the entire rest of the day you can boost off the momentum of that accomplishment

2.       Find a compatible training partner.
If you make an appointment to meet a compatible training partner for a ride that includes a half-dozen hard hill repeats, you are more likely to actually get that workout done. 

3.       Make it easy to get out the door.
Be completely prepared ahead of time for your workout.  You wake up and the coffee is already brewing because you set a timer.  Your workout clothes are already laid out and your workout is written up on a piece of paper that is sitting next to the water bottle you already prepped the night before. No excuses, so off you go.

Even with all of these practical techniques you may still find yourself unmotivated.  What now?  In this case it’s time to use your submodalities to change your perception of the task ahead.  The pattern on page 36 makes motivation so easy it is like eating chocolate.  That’s why they call it the Godiva Chocolate Pattern.       

From The Four Pillars of Triathlon: Vital Mental Conditioning for Endurance Athletes, p. 36.

Practical Techniques for Discipline 
 Sometimes an unhelpful internal voice will pop up and try to convince you to stray off the path toward achieving your goals. You want to have the discipline to stick to the path.  One way to do this is through a pattern called the Helium Balloon Pattern.

Think of a time when you experienced an unhelpful voice in your head.  Now do this:
                                                                                                                             
1. Access the unhelpful voice. 
Imagine or recall a difficult situation from your past when an internal voice was holding you back (e.g. going on and on about how you can’t swim well).   

2. Alter the voice.  
Now, before that voice says anything else, have it take a giant, massive inhalation from a balloon of helium.  Then let the voice tell you whatever it wants again in its ridiculously high voice.  Notice how your evaluation of the voice has changed and you can hardly take it seriously anymore.

3. Rehearse.  
Identify a time in the near future when this unhelpful voice might crop up. Make a video in your mind’s eye, having this voice come up, breathe the helium, then say its message again.



 

From The Four Pillars of Triathlon: Vital Mental Conditioning for Endurance Athletes, p. 49.

Practical Techniques for Recovery 
 Nobody gains fitness while they are training, only in the recovery period afterward.  No recovery—no gains in fitness.  And while much of recovery is physical, there is always a mental side, too.  The best form of recovery is sleep, which is sometimes difficult.  Here is one of the three techniques in the Four Pillars of Triathlon to help you sleep better.

Pattern: Replay to Sleep  

1. Attend to your needs. Take care of whatever caused you to wake up.  As an example, maybe you woke because you were hungry, so have a bite to eat. 

2. Return to bed. 
After you lie back down to go back to sleep, think of the very last thing you did before you lay yourself down.  

3. Follow the video. 
Then make an image of the thing you did right before that.  “I walked back into my bedroom.” What was before that?  “I was in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal.”  See this happening backwards.  You are un-chewing and spitting the whole cereal back on to the spoon….Keep going in as much detail as possible all the way back to the point you were asleep before waking up—if you get that far before you fall asleep.

 

From The Four Pillars of Triathlon: Vital Mental Conditioning for Endurance Athletes, p. 72.