About The Profile

The Mental Golf Workshop^TM Profile was developed by Bobby Foster, formerly a teaching professional and golf coach at the University of South Carolina. While at South Carolina, he coached in both Men's and Women's NCAA championships. Bobby has spent the last 15 years building a successful management consulting practice and is a Certified Behavioral Analyst specializing in the DISC Behavioral Style Model. He explains the purpose behind the development of the Mental Golf Workshop^TM.

"My company has had great success using DISC-based work related profiles to help managers, salespeople and others improve their personal effectiveness in all types of working environments. The key to this success is that profile information is based on a person's own responses to a questionnaire and the information produced is personalized. People tend to be more open-minded towards information based on their own input than they are with evaluations based on others' opinions. Most people are interested in self-discovery processes, and profiles are great self-discovery learning tools.

"I built the golf profile system so that golfers and golf instructors could enjoy the same benefits we've experienced with work related profiles. I wanted to build a profile system that would give golfers a framework for understanding the "what's and why's" of their mental golf traits, and our DISC based golf profile does just that. I also wanted to provide improvement ideas tailored to each person's individual golfing personality and ideas they could implement right away.

"Far too often, golfers improve their ball striking and short game abilities by practicing and working with instructors, but these improvements don't carry over to the golf course. Most players realize this problem is "in their heads," but they don't really know where to start in improving their mental games. Our profile puts golfers "inside their own heads" and they gain a clearer understanding of what really goes on in their golfing minds.

"Touring professionals work with sports psychologists and coaches on the mental aspects of their games but most golfers don't have those opportunities. Our profile enables golfers to coach themselves and also equips golf instructors to better understand the minds and learning styles of each student.

"As our team worked to build the profile, we rigorously tested it at every stage of development with golf instructors, touring professionals and club players at all levels. Based on this testing and the positive results our first distributors have experienced, our goal of providing an effective, user-friendly and affordable mental coaching tool has been achieved.

"We are particularly appreciative of Dr. Greg Rose and Dave Phillips Co-Founders of The Titleist Performance Institute and to Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott owners of Coaching for the Future Golf Schools for including the profile in their programs before we were totally ready to market the system. The feedback they've received from golfers at all levels has been invaluable and certainly encouraging. Pia, Lynn and Dave are Golf Magazine Top 100 instructors and Greg is a renown expert in the field of biomechanics and other scientific methods for improving golf performance. Pia has also been Annika Sorenstam's mental coach throughout her amateur and professional careers."

Now that we have covered the purpose behind the profile, here is the outline of the Mental Golf Workshop^TM profile process.

The first step is to log in to www.mentalgolfworkshop.com and put in the access code you'll receive from your distributor. Then you'll spend about ten minutes answering seventeen multiple-choice questions on the online questionnaire. Your answers go through a series of mathematical computations to produce a 21 page customized report detailing your tendencies.

Your personalized profile will detail your mental tendencies in these five key areas of the game.

Preparing For The Round
Mental Tendencies When Playing Shots
Golf Temperament
Course Management And Shot Selection Tendencies
Working Most Effectively With Instructors Based On Your Learning Style

In the first section of your profile, you'll find five pages detailing your mental golf tendencies. To date, our test groups - including touring professionals, golf instructors and club players of all levels - have been delighted with the accuracy of their profiles.

After you review your present mental tendencies, you'll find ten pages of mental golf improvement ideas and many of these improvement ideas will be customized based on your DISC style for each area of the game. We suggest reviewing all of the ideas and then selecting a few at a time to incorporate into your practice session and as you play on the course. The ideas are written with the intentions that you can implement them right away.

We are grateful to various prominent people in the game who shared their experiences and thoughts with us during the development of the Improvement Ideas section of the profile.

Pia Nilsson and Lynn Marriott of Coaching For The Future - two of the most brilliant minds in golf - offered some key improvement ideas. Dr. Bob Rotella and Tom Kite allowed me to sit in lectures and lengthy Q&A sessions they had with the University of South Carolina Golf Team and use ideas from these sessions. These experts have been in the arena either as a player or coach at the highest level and they know what "really" works in the mental game. Without exception, each cited learning how to become fully committed to the shot once you're over the ball as perhaps the single most important mental factor for playing to one's physical potential as a golfer.

Brad Faxon, one of the smartest players in the game, shared some of his key mental tendencies for putting. Jonathan Byrd, 2002 PGA Tour Rookie of the Year, shared techniques on how intensely competitive type golfers like himself can release excessive tension in the middle of a round.

The entire 21-page profile printout is produced in a "workshop" format, with every page having space to make notes and record your progress. This "workshop" format makes it easy to work with the profile by yourself or with your instructor in a mental coaching session.

Developing the profile required two years of research and rigorous testing, and hours upon hours developing the mathematical formulas that drive our proprietary scoring system. Please benefit from all of our research and work by completing the response form and then working with your profile by yourself or with your instructor. We're confident you'll find the process easy to use and the feedback on your mental golf tendencies to be comprehensive and the recommendations you receive to be ones that you can begin implementing right away. As Dr. Greg Rose, Co-Founder of The Titleist Performance Institute advises, "The beauty of this system is that our players get an accurate and comprehensive report without having to spend hours completing laborious questions. You sure get a lot for the time and money you invest in this process."