He was the highest paid cricketer in Australia until the death of a friend let the demons loose in his head – and almost ended his career. He’s now teamed up with SafetyCulture to teach people how he got his mojo back.
Cricketer Shane Watson always saw his fearlessness as one of his great strengths. “I never took a backward step against fast bowlers, whether they were bowling 160km/h or 130km/h, it didn’t matter.”
It stood the all-rounder in good stead. He’d overcome an injury-plagued early career to be, by 2014, the highest paid player in Australia, raking in an estimated $4.5 million a year.
But after his friend, fellow opening batsman Phillip Hughes, was killed by a bouncer in November 2014, everything changed, Watson says via a Zoom call. As the ball would leave the bowler’s hand, he’d think a bouncer was coming for him and he’d move his feet accordingly. But when it actually went at his pads, he’d be in the wrong position.
He got out leg before wicket so often it became a meme.
“The main thing that had changed was me not understanding to control my thoughts, me not being equipped with the right mental skills to understand how I could redirect my mind to not let the wrong things come in.”
“Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse.”
Former test cricketer World War II pilot Keith Miller
Watson went from the peak of his career to being dropped from the test and one-day teams, and his head was on the block for the T20 team. At 34 years of age, retirement loomed.
But he attended rugby league’s Dally M awards and was sat next to IndyCar driver Will Power. Watson was saying how cool it would be to be race car driver, but suddenly found Power going deeper. Power had been involved in the Las Vegas speedway crash that killed his friend, Indy driver Dan Wheldon.
“He really opened up around the fear that he had about getting in the car,” recalls Watson. “By Will opening up and being very vulnerable around where he was at, it was the first time that I felt I could open up and talk about the challenges that I was going through.”
Power, though, had found a way through. He put the cricketer in touch with his “mental skills guru”, Dr Jacques Dallaire.
Within a week, Watson was flying to Charlotte, North Carolina, to do Dallaire’s two-day program, thinking that even though he was probably going to retire now, at least he might pick up some insights he could apply to a future coaching career.
But on the plane home, he had an epiphany. “I knew I could turn things around. It was going to take a lot of work, but I had the mental skills, insights and information I needed. I went on to have three and a half to four years of the best performances of my career.
Key Insight
“For the first time I understood that we normally base our confidence around results. But results in life go up and down. And those are the things that we aren’t actually in control of. What we need to build our confidence around is what our preparation is like and what we bring to every performance and what the best version of us looks like.
“The other thing was by understanding this information, I fully understood how to eliminate stress, anxiety and worry around performance.
“The wrong thing was coming to my mind as the ball was bowled. I didn’t know how much control we have over our thoughts. I was allowing space for the wrong thought to come in, but understanding how the human brain works, puts you in control of your thoughts if you want to be.”
While Watson never forced his way back into the Australian test and one-day sides, far from retiring, his form flourished in the shortest form of the game. Over the following four years he made AUD$5.5 million from his Indian Premier League salary alone, along with an ever-growing list of endorsements and merchandise side hustles in the long twilight of his career.
“I said to Jacques, I want to get this information out to the world. Because, once you hear it, you go, ‘Oh my God, that’s so simple, but it’s just not readily available.’”
Ever since, he’s been looking for different ways to get the information out there. It started with in-person workshops, but they were expensive. He wrote a book, The Winner’s Mindset: Bringing the Best Version of You to Every Game and to Life. It sold well especially in India where he remains a crowd favourite.
“I always knew that I wanted to do an online-course version. I wanted to have more of an interactive experience because different people learn in different ways.”
Former AFL footballer and Athletic Ventures founder Matt De Boer put him in touch with the people at SafetyCulture. In 2020, SafetyCulture had bought online training startup, EdApp, in a deal valuing EdApp at $40 million. Their team got to work creating a course based on Watson’s ideas.
“Once I saw the first chapter that the team built, I was like, ‘Oh my God! This can be so much better than I thought it was going to be.’ Because this is obviously what they do … pulling out the most important parts to make it a micro-learning course.”
There’s a version available through Watson’s website for $110 which comes with a “mental performance diagnosis tool”.
SafetyCulture customers will soon also be able to take a short course, High-Performance Leadership with Shane Watson, via the SafetyCulture app, which has joined the company’s library of more than a thousand short courses.
Watson says the lessons apply equally to other facets of life. Whether you are standing up doing a presentation or you are in a negotiation, it’s understanding what are the right thoughts for you when you are at your very best. For example, if you’re in a negotiation and you start to allow your mind to wander or start to worry about what’s being said, instead of being right in the moment and reacting to your external environment around you, then that’s where it can play a huge part.
“It’s critically important to understand from moment to moment throughout your day: what are the right thoughts that you need when your performance is critical?”
Another famous Australian all-rounder, Keith Miller, famously scoffed at the notion that test cricket was stressful. “Pressure is a Messerschmidt up your arse,” the former World War II Mosquito pilot told interviewer Michael Parkinson.
“That’s the thing,” Watson says. “It is critically important to put all situations into perspective. When it all strips back … if you build it up to be bigger than what it is, that’s when you allow your mind to get overcome and succumb to performance pressure, performance anxiety.
“Whereas – and I’ll use a cricket example – if it’s a practice match when there’s not much pressure, it’s the same skill. It’s about a bowler coming into bowl. You’re reacting to the ball coming down. Even if it’s in a World Cup final, in the end, it’s you building it up to be bigger than what it is because if you strip it back, it is just a skill and a skill execution. It’s understanding what are the things I need to do to execute my skill, because that’s all it is.
Watson doesn’t know if such skills would have helped his earlier career performances, but wishes he’d known them as a teenager. “It would have reduced the stress and anxiety in my life significantly. It would have meant that my ability to bounce back from underperforming would have been very, very different – much less stress and worry which used to overwhelm me at certain times.”
