Cognitive Backpack Essay
By: Mitchell Fox
I have various skills from the cognitive backpack. Some are strengths and some are weaknesses. I will be discussing my strengths throughout this essay and I will also share a few various stories to help prove my strengths. The three skills I will be discussing my strengths about will be: Analyzing expectations, assessing opportunities and thinking long-term and previewing potential outcomes. The stories I share will precisely provide support to my strength.
The first strength that I am going to asses is my ability to analyze expectations. I play a lot of competitive golf and I have to keep my expectations for myself very high. If I lowered my expectations my results would get worse. When you lower the bar of expectations you will never reach your true potential. I also have to keep my expectations realistic though. So when I go into a tournament I will have a score that I want to shoot that day. I can only control how I play and if I achieved my own expectations. If I achieve my expectations then the leader board will fall into place. This story might help explain what was just said. I am going into the Burlington High School Championship and the weather was just brutal. It was raining, super windy and extremely cold. I wanted to win that day as I had won it a couple years prior to that year. So I expected to play well, I have been practicing for weeks just to perform in this one event. With those brutal conditions I am certainly not going to expect to shoot a 66 and I also did not expect to have to soot something that low. My expectations had to be realistic but they also had to be high to win. I have achieved many golf accomplishments and I wouldn’t have been able to do that if my mind set was not in the right place. Part of my mind set being in the right place is having the right expectations. My expectations have to be realistic to be able to think properly. As golf is 90% a mental game, you can practice all you want and that is only 10% of the game. The definition of expectation is: belief about (or mental picture of) the future. I did not mentally visualize myself holding the trophy and shooting a 63 in the tournament before my round. That would be getting ahead of yourself and I do not do that because that is how you get in trouble on the golf course. I expected to play well and play the way I know I can. All I can do is play my best that day. If my best that day doesn’t get me holding the trophy and shooting a 63 then I need to work on my game a little bit and keep working at my mental state. The fact is that if I get ahead of myself I will not perform my best because I am thinking too much about the prize not about the playing part of the game. That is why for all those reasons and more I am very good at analyzing my expectations. I believe that aspect from the cognitive backpack could possibly be on of my best aspects and will help me through life.
