I never try to “lie” my way through by saying this is the last one. My negative self will forever after destroy my positive self talk with, “remember you lied the last time.” More than once I have said to myself “I have to learn to trust myself.”
While I have used positive self talk along the lines of “You can do it.”, “You are doing it.”, “You will do it.”, I find it easier to use either instructional self talk or focus.
By focus I mean either, focused one-pointed concentration on part of the cycling process - the pedaling, the breathing, etc., or counting.
I took up counting to get up long mountain climbs.
I count sets of hundreds: 1, 2…100, 1, 2…200, etc. If I forget where I am in a hundred, I go back to the beginning of the set. If I forget which set of hundreds I am on, I go back to the very beginning of the count.
The idea is to keep the brain busy so it does not complain about what I am doing.