From cricketer Shane Watson’s new book: To succeed, one has to conquer the ‘beast’ of expectation

The demon of expectation is a beast. Growing up in cricket, the demon of expectation for me was that to be a great batter you needed to score hundreds. All of the best batters scored hundreds. All through my teenage years, it was drummed into me. All of my expectations were around needing to score hundreds, and that flowed on into my Test career. When you have that outcome in your mind, as you get closer to the milestone, you start to pay more attention to it and stop focusing on the A factors, the process of execution that got you there.

And this was a pattern that started for me as a kid, all the way through my teenage years and then into my international career as well. The following example shows the same patterns of thinking that most often entered my mind ever since I can remember.

It was during a Test match in the 2010-11 Ashes series in Perth. I was batting really well, and I was on 95. It was a beautiful wicket to bat on and the ball was coming on so nicely as it normally does at the WACA. At this very moment in time, I started...

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