Shane Watson is on a mission to change how the cricket world thinks – by revealing the secrets to his success.
He was one of the most technically skilled all-rounders of all time, but when he was on the verge of retiring, he discovered an approach to the mental side of playing which revolutionized his game.
Over the next four years, thanks to these new skills, Shane had some of the best performances of his life – including his legendary undefeated 117 off 57 in the 2018 IPL final to win it for CSK.
Since retiring, Shane has been sharing this mental skills approach with some of the sport’s biggest stars as the current head coach for the MLC’s San Francisco Unicorns and the PSL’s Quetta Gladiators.
But now Shane is sharing his performance secrets with the whole world.
He published a book called the Winners’ Mindset [as well as an online course] that details his approach and also helps readers apply his simple frameworks to turbocharge their own performances.
The world’s best cricketers swear by it – including Faf Duplessis, Rachin Ravindra, and Ricky Ponting among many others
And Shane also just released the Winners’ Mindset online course on his website, shanewatson.au – an interactive multimedia experience that enables users to easily learn and use these mental skills to elevate their own games.
Shane joined our business of cricket podcast to talk about his career, mental skills, and a whole lot more.
Transcript
Zee: And we’re here live with Shane Watson, one of the greatest all-rounders to play the game of cricket in history. Shane, thank you so much for joining us.
Shane: Zee, don’t be silly, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Zee: Thank you. You know, you are a coach, you are an entrepreneur, you’re an author, and now you have a new venture in a subject area that I absolutely adore and am passionate about. Why don’t you tell our audience about it?
Shane: Yeah, thanks. You’re very kind. Yeah, I’ve just launched an online course version of the winner’s mindset. The winner’s mindset is the second edition of my “mental skills for cricket” book that I launched.
The genesis of the winner’s mindset, the book or the online course is all around the essential mental skills that all human beings need to know and understand. And what it is all about is understanding how the human mind works, when we get in our own way and sabotage your own performance, because we have the wrong thoughts and allow our thoughts to be the wrong thoughts at times to, and we all know what that feels like when we’ve just know that we haven’t brought our best because with our own thoughts we’ve got in our own way. And on the flip side of that, it’s understanding how to be able to create the right mental environment. So have the right thoughts at the right time to be able to access all the skills that are so deeply ingrained in us.
We’re all performing in all different aspects of our lives, whether that’s in our careers, whether that’s as a partner, whether that’s as a parent, we’re all performing and we all want to know and understand how can we bring the very best version of ourselves every time we need to step in to perform. This course is something that I, this information I was taught from a mental skills guru who’s based in the US, Dr. Jacques Dellaire, he’s based in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Zee: Jaques Dellaire.
Shane: And I was very, I’m very fortunate to have gone through that information at the age of 34, right towards the, the backend of my career. and then being taught how to teach it, how to mentor it. And now it’s, it’s in everything that I do. It’s in my coaching. It’s the first thing in any new, any new player that I work with, any new team environments, the first information that I give to these, it gives to the players and the people around me, because I just know how powerful this information is and just how, which is just, it continues to blow my mind, how the access to this information.
It’s not readily available, which just, again, blows my mind that this information in such a really simple form that I got taught from Dr. Jacques Dellaire is not in a really simple way and super accessible to everyone because whether you’re a student trying to perform as well as you can in exams, you want to bring the best version of you that you can to your performance while also reducing stress and anxiety around performance.
So it’s one of the most essential life skills that we can learn. So I feel very fortunate to have been taught this information and now doing everything I can to get this information out in different formats so that people can learn and implement this information into their daily lives.
I’ve been very fortunate in Australia to be able to partner up with Safety Culture, who’s one of Australia’s most successful tech startups over the last five or 10 years. And what they do is turn information into micro learning courses – engaging micro learning courses. So the winner’s mindset online course is a much more interactive way of learning this mental skills information. Different people learn in different ways. I love reading books, so that’s always been a way for me to be able to learn. I love watching videos as well, whether YouTube, those sorts of things to be able to learn. So different people learn in different ways, but…
This online course is a, is a way there’s, there’s texts, there’s audio, with me, with me talking about my different experiences, how I use the mental skills information in a good way and not so good way throughout various times in my career. but there’s also tests. So you’re tested on the information. So you are having to recall the information. So you’re just not sort of going through the motions to be able to just make it more engaging. So people can really take the information and apply.
So it’s just another way to be able to get this information out in a more engaging way of learning. So, you know, I’m incredibly proud of the product that we’ve been able to put together.
Zee: So I’m really excited about the product. I’m super passionate about this subject area. And over the past couple of decades, I’ve read everything you can think of, like you like consuming books as well as other formats, every book in the pop domain, right? Whether it’s a Blink or whether it’s Thinking Fast and Slow, I mean, all those, but also some of the theory, the neuropsychology, I mean, performance and how the brain informs performance and especially peak performance, competitive performance, it’s just a passion, right? So I’ve read everything.
But let me tell you, for what it’s worth, my perspective, having read all that is so awesome about what you’ve done, right? And how it fits in and how it fills a massive gap that was in the market, right?
Shane: Please. Yes. Yeah.
Zee: One, it gives just the right amount of theory, right? For someone to understand what’s going on, right? So you’re not overwhelming people, that’s one. Two, it is so focused and effective at creating practical frameworks that people can use to learn and to apply to what they’re doing, I mean, it’s really concrete. It is a step-by-step guide.
To help people identify themselves, what they should be doing and do it, right? That’s two.
But three, the real kicker is the credibility that comes from the fact that it comes from Shane Watson saying, this is what I learned at this stage in my career and look what I did. And if you’re asking about the 2018 IPL final, like this is how I did it.
Right? Just trust me, this works, right?
That kind of credibility is not, know, a lot of those, you know, a of the books on performance weren’t written by people, right? Who’ve gone 117 off 57 in a final, right? And so you combine those three things and there was nothing in the market like that.
You know, something that could actually resonate and be accessible to the masses.
I’ll stop my gushing, but that’s what your book accomplishes.
Shane: Well, Zee, I need to take you everywhere I go because what you’ve said there, I needed to steal that down in my sales copy to put those things together. Cause look, that’s, that’s why I’ve got this information out there again, to be able to relay the information because I know how powerful that information was the step by step, step practicality of how to apply the information. That’s why I was able to apply it so quickly by understanding it. And that’s why I’ve been able to get it out to as many people as possible is one of my life journeys. I know that’s one of my life journeys now. So you’ve put that so brilliantly. Thanks, Zee.
Zee: Well, you know, the only thing I compare it to in terms of kind of an analog out there in the market in a different domain, not about mental skills. Tom Brady’s book. Right? The TB12 method. I don’t know if you’ve read it or seen it. I’ve lived in New York for 24 years, but I’ve been a New England Patriots fan almost all my life. Right?
Shane: Yeah, yeah I have, yeah. It’s bloody awesome.
Zee: Long before Brady came on and I was always an older guy while he was there. I appreciated his longevity and you know, he has this book and people keep asking, hey, how does he do it? How is he 44 and playing football? And my answer to that is people, he has a book. It’s all in the book. Why don’t you just read it and learn from it? And I was having a conversation in past few months, again, with cricket heads like myself about
You know, the greatest, you know, white ball knocks. Obviously they’re talking about Maxi, they’re talking about, okay, 2018, right, they’re like, he was later in his career. How did he do it? Same thing. People, he has a book, now he has a course, right? It’s there. Just read it. It tells you everything, right? There’s, and so just something to point to for the world and say, like, want it, you can do.
Zee: Obviously you can’t do that, you need the technical skills first as well. But you can elevate your performance relative to your technical skills using that.
Shane: Yep. Absolutely. yes, the TB 12 book, I demolished it when it first came out. And then my training, my training that I did change significantly because of reading that book, because it makes so much sense. So yeah, I appreciate that analogy there because yeah, in the end, that is an educational step-by-step sort of process with TB12. And that’s what the winner’s mindset is absolutely all about as well to know how to apply the information. It’s just the practicality of how to apply it, not just the theory that makes it so hard to be able to decipher and then how to be able to actually apply it to my daily performance in getting the very best out of what I’ve got.
Zee: And again, it comes from the guy who was playing in his 40s and he’s telling you how, right? Just like this comes from the guy who in his late 30s was on the franchise circuit, like blowing everyone away and he’s telling you how.
So let me ask you a question about that. Why do you think, if we’re talking about other sports, right? In many sports, the discipline of sports psychology is much more established, right? You know, they’re professional tennis players.
Zee: Who’ve had sports psychologists on their teams for years? Obviously you came to Jacques Delaire through Will Power, who’s a race car driver, Jacques, a lot of race car drivers do, a lot of, there’s sports psychology and performance psychology in a lot of sports. Why do you think cricket as a sport was and is so late to the game here?
Shane: That’s a very good question. That’s a question I continue to ask and have asked for quite a while is why I wasn’t able to get access to this in my early twenties. And look, there has been a lot of sports psychologists around cricket, whether that’s in Australia, whether that’s on the circuit in different parts of the world. But there’s…
Yeah, I think it’s more so that it’s the older school sort of mentality around like the coaches, for example, who are, there’s a lot of great coaches out there for sure. But the coaches, a lot of the times I just do this, okay, technically. And that’s mainly what cricket’s primarily actually talked about and worked on in training. And it’s all around the technique side of the game, whether it’s the debrief at training or debrief after getting out.
In a game it’s more so around that because that’s really what the coaches are equipped and understand well enough. A lot of the time, the coaches don’t fully understand what the right sort of sports psychologist would be to be able to compliment their skills. There are some, but what I’ve heard, I haven’t worked with.
Too many in general who’ve really, really helped me, but I’ve heard there’s a few good ones out in the circuit, but it’s few and far between. More so have the immediate impact to be able to just give the players the right information at the right time to just see their performance elevate. That’s one, but two, reduce stress and anxiety and worry around performance as well, good and bad performances, because that’s one of the critical things that you get out of this information is how to deal with failure a lot better and a lot easier, but also the expectations around performance. It’s understanding how to be able to not build things up bigger than what they are, which is normally when you start to fear failure, when you do get in your own way.
So yeah, it is very interesting why cricket is quite late to the game with the mental side of things. As you said, racing car drivers, they’ve been doing this for a long time. Other sports, tennis players and that, they’ve always had people in their corner. But I think just for whatever reason, the people who’ve come into the game over the last sort of 20 or 30 years around sports psychology, with my experience that it’s just too theory based.
It’s harder to decipher. Can I actually use that information to apply into every training session I do every moment that I’m in a game and I need to have the right thoughts at the right time to be able to execute my skill over and over again and to make fewer mistakes. So that’s where, again, every time I work with players in teams, even though a lot of them have been working with different sports psychologists.
So many times, like one or two little things like, gosh, yeah, I’ve never really heard that way of talking about this skill. And now I know how to actually apply it.
Zee: Yeah, amazing. So, now, just like I just want to talk for a second about, it’s almost like a beautiful irony, right? That cricket was so late to the game with mental skills, and so were you. Right. And it was late in your career. Right. And I mean, you were already right by the time you met. Well, and you met Jaques.
Shane: Yeah.
Zee: Consensus, one of the best white ball, at least, all-rounders of all time, if not all-rounders of all time. Best pace all-rounders, which is, you see a lot more spin all-rounders. Pace all-rounders, you’ve been the top ranked all-rounder at ODI internationally, in T20 internationally. You’re still one of, I think, seven cricketers to have international 10,000 runs and 250 wickets, right? And this came, at the end, pretty much towards the end of your international career at least, right? And because I think March 2016 after the World Cup is when you just called it on your international career and you met Jaques [the summer before]. And the first chapter of your book or the introduction is called I Wish I knew then what I knew now.
Shane: Yeah.
Zee: And it goes both ways, right? It’s like, it’s so amazing that you got this knowledge from, you know, how it came to you is it’s like serendipitous and you had four glorious years, but at the same time, it’s like, wow, you had, you know, 14 years where you really could have used this, right? And, and if you were kind of like Superman already, like what would you have been had you had this?
Shane: I get asked this a bit actually. And look, the one thing that I do know is, look, I don’t know if my performances could have been any better in a way that you can’t control results, even though you wish you could, you try and bring the best skills that you can to every, every performance. So I’m not sure if the results would have been better. Look, I think they, I’m confident they would have been, but look, I’ve had a lot of very good results throughout those previous 14 years. But the one thing that I absolutely know would have been very different is the stress and anxiety and worry that I carried around since I was a kid. And especially as a professional cricketer from the time I started playing as a 19 year old, but then in and around international cricket from the age of 20, the stress and worry that I had around performance, I just turned myself inside out. And I would…
I would suffocate my performances often because of the fear of not performing. And then if I didn’t perform, which would happen, then me beating myself up and really worrying about selection, worrying about how things would change. And I wasted a ridiculous amount, like tens of thousands of hours over those 14 years, worrying about things that were totally out of my control.
So I know that I would have been able to navigate the different challenges that being a professional cricketer presents in a much calmer, more directed, more directed way. Again, the results I believe like test cricket, for example, from a batting perspective, I know if I was able to apply, or I believe if I was able to apply these mental skills throughout my test career, I would have definitely been able to bat for longer periods of time. And that should constitute runs as well, but I would have, I made mistakes, mental mistakes so consistently because I was mentally fatigued because I was so desperate to stay in and concentrate all the time that I was switched on all the time, which meant that I’d make technical errors because I was mentally fatigued.
But then like it is, you got your walk off, you watch footage, I’d watch footage. You have a coach sitting over my shoulder going, okay, this technically you were slightly off on here. This is the reason why you got out. And then we’d go back to the nets and work on that technical thing. It was never okay. Were you mentally a bit fatigued? What were you doing in the lead up to you getting out? What were your thoughts? What were you like in the, like the day or two before? Were you mentally just over-processing it and you go into the game and you’ve mentally already actually played the game before it’s even started. So those are the things that certainly would have, would have been different for sure. But again, like
Well, I can’t take it back, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Right. Because I’ve been able to sort of go, I was able to have it. It wasn’t too late where I was able to then apply these skills for T20 cricket for Australia for about three or four months. But then in T20 cricket around the world against the best players, the best players in the world. So I was able to have that chance to do it for four years, not just apply these skills and talk about them retrospectively. I would have used it in this world. You would have used it in that way. No, I was troubleshooting at every moment that I was out in the middle for those next four years while I was playing. So that’s why anytime a question comes up around this information, I can answer it because I’ve been through it, good and bad, while applying these skills in the cauldron against the best players in the world.
Zee: Yeah, and that’s why I called it a beautiful irony. I almost think that like this is the way it was meant to be because had you not struggled, right, that much with this and still had results and then done what you did after you got it, then maybe you wouldn’t have had the same mission you do right now, right, which is to bring this knowledge to everyone. And you wouldn’t have been as credible a preacher, right, of this. So I think it worked out the way it was meant to be.
Shane: Yep. I agree.
Name of Author: Zee Zaidi
