Frequently Asked Questions

Athlete Assessments' FAQs

Below you’ll find answers to the most frequently asked questions about Athlete Assessments. If after reading through the FAQ’s you still have a question that we haven’t covered, please Contact Us. We are here to help you.

About Athlete Assessments

At Athlete Assessments, we are the experts in the people side of sport. While we are best known for our behavioral profiling and sports team consulting using the AthleteDISC, CoachDISC and Sports ManagerDISC, we do more than just assessments. Learn more about the services and programs we provide here.

Athlete Assessments works with some of the world’s best sport psychologists, performance consultants and universities, and with some of the top Olympic, Paralympic, National, Professional, State and US College teams. Click here to read case studies and comments from our different clients.

The core of our work is based on the use of DISC Profiles specifically for sport. Athlete Assessments DISC profiles are used around the world by different sports professionals in different ways. You can learn more about the services we deliver here.

The company was founded in 2007 by Bo Hanson and Liz Masen, and has grown considerably since the initial development of the AthleteDISC Profile. The reason our name is Athlete Assessments is because the first assessment we provided was the AthleteDISC Profile.

Learn more about our history here.

You are very observant! Athlete Assessments owns and uses both of these sites. www.athleteassessments.com (this one) is the site we use to provide detailed information about our services and www.athleteassessments1.com is the site where all of the technology that delivers the assessments is located.

If you haven’t done your assessment yet and want more information, stay on our www.athleteassessments.com site as there is much more information for you here. Also, if you are referring others to our services, please always use www.athleteassessments.com. If you have completed one of our assessments, you will have received an email with your private link back to your personal user log in. Please feel free to Contact Us to assist you further.

About DISC Profiling in Sport

Yes, DISC Profiling has been used for decades in business and Athlete Assessments was the first (and currently only) company providing DISC Profiles which are specifically for sport. Our AthleteDISC, CoachDISC, and Sports ManagerDISC Profiles are based on the same foundation as DISC Profiling that is used in business and other industries, and have been developed to specifically meet the needs of people who are involved in sport. You might find it useful to read more about DISC Profiling in sport.

We usually recommend that individuals are over the age of 16 years old. This is primarily driven by their understanding of the English language and ensuring that they understand the questions in the assessment. The assessment is comprehensive, yet simple but it does require a fair understanding of English. Younger athletes may be able to use the assessment but they will need an understanding of the English language the same as the average 16 year old. Please feel free to Contact Us to assist you further. You might find it valuable to read the individual webpages about the AthleteDISC Profile for athletes, the CoachDISC Profile for coaches and the Sports ManagerDISC Profile for team managers, administrators and other sports professionals.

Athlete Assessments provides three different DISC Profiles – the AthleteDISC Profile for athletes, the CoachDISC Profile for coaches and the Sports ManagerDISC Profile for team managers, administrators and other sports professionals. All three are based on the foundation of DISC Profile but are different as they are tailored for the different roles.

Most ‘regular’ DISC Profiles are designed for a business context and many of our clients who have previously used these have found that they need to do their own interpretation of the results to be able to relate it to how they work and coaching within the sporting environment. The CoachDISC profile is designed purely for the sports coach. It is unique, only available from Athlete Assessments, and gives a coach all of the benefits of DISC in a sporting language every coach can relate to. To find out more information specifically for coaches, please go to our Coaches page. Or you might also like to read more about our Methodology and the Importance of Profiling.

A paper version gives a person a basic understanding of what their profile may be. It is not an accurate measure nor does it produce a full report with descriptive and prescriptive strategies on how to improve your results by adapting your behavior when required. Athlete Assessments’ online versions of DISC have a more detailed survey and algorithms are applied to your answers and both your adapted profiles and natural profile behaviors are generated.

With the detailed and personalized content of the reports, it gives the user an unsurpassed view of their behaviors within their chosen sporting environment, and how they are likely to revert to instinctive patterns under stress and pressure. Only online versions create this level of detailed feedback. Athlete Assessments also has three different types of DISC Profiles: the AthleteDISC for athletes and players, the CoachDISC for sports coaches, and the Sports ManagerDISC for team managers, sports administrators and other sports professionals.

We currently have the assessments survey and reports available in in English and Hungarian. We also do have the CoachDISC Profile in Japanese in both survey and report.

We also offer the option to complete the survey in different languages but the reports are generated in English. The languages currently available to complete the survey in are: English, Japanese, Hungarian, Spanish (Mexico), French (France), German (Germany) and Russian. (i.e. the survey questions are completed in German but the report is generated in English). Within our English survey, we do have the function that if you don’t understand a word that if you hover your mouse of it, you’re provided with a few other words that mean the same.

If you have any further questions regarding the languages of our assessments, please feel welcome to Contact Us.

Great question. Technically a DISC Profile is a behavioral assessment, rather than a ‘personality’ assessment but many people refer to the two in the same way. DISC Profiling focuses on behavior which is how someone prefers to act and what they do, rather than personality traits. It is important to note that behavior is flexible, yet generally personality is not. As an example, we never ask an athlete to change their personality, but coaches constantly ask athletes to adjust their technique or what they do. Or you might also like to read more about our Methodology and the Importance of Profiling.

Emotional Intelligence (“EI”) is a competency based model describing how we interact with others, build relationships, motive ourselves and the degree to which we understand the impact of our emotions on our performances day to day and in competition. EI is a great tool for increasing your self-awareness and you can read more about it in our article, Emotional Intelligence in Sport. As it relates to DISC, it is different as DISC is describing how you behave from an external perspective. EI looks deeper into your emotional states and the impact this has on your behaviors. We believe EI to be a wonderful tool used in conjunction with DISC to help you understand when to adapt your behavior to create better outcomes given the situations and people you have to interact with. Emotionally Intelligent people are the most adaptable, they can however, be any type of DISC Profile style.

Myers Briggs represents a profiling tool based on the theory of Personality – those inherent traits shaped by our values, beliefs and underlying motivations. DISC is developed from Behavior Theory suggesting that our behavior is a function of personality and the environment we find ourselves operating in. Therefore, our behavior can change depending on the environment. Either way, DISC measures the actual observable behavioral patterns which one prefers to do in a given environment. DISC also measures how we adapt ourselves in different environments compared to our natural behavioral preferences. Personality does not change, but behavior can if one chooses to do something different and learn new skills or ways to act. Particularly in sport, we believe it is much more important and effective to focus on behavior which is adaptable, compared to personality which is fixed. To read more about this, go to our Methodology page or read more about the Importance of Profiling.

Many of our Sports Manager360 clients have previously or simultaneously completed their Sports ManagerDISC Profile and you may be wondering how these relate to each other.

Fundamentally, they are both useful tools for further developing self-awareness and supporting the individual’s professional development. Both start with the individual completing a survey as to how they see themselves in their professional role and both have the ability to include others – we call them ‘observers’.

The Sports Manager360 focuses on eight manager effectiveness abilities and does encourage those working with and around them to be actively involved by providing feedback about their performance. The Sports ManagerDISC Profile is a behavioral assessment, which identifies the individual’s preferred work behaviors, their personal preferences and style. Using the information within the Sports ManagerDISC Profile report, you can be more effective with your communication, build stronger relationships with staff, senior management, peers, coaches, athletes and others, and have a deeper understanding of your motivation, strengths and areas for development. With the Sports ManagerDISC, ‘observers’ are an optional inclusion whereas with the Sports Manager360 they are a critical part of the process.

Purchasing a DISC Profile

Yes, you can. You can read more about the CoachDISC Profile and purchase one now from our website. All you need to do is go to the bottom of the CoachDISC Profile webpage. You are welcome to Contact Us if you need any assistance.

As an aside, you can also purchase the AthleteDISC Profile and Sports ManagerDISC Profile on our website too.

Just email or call us, we will arrange an alternative, mutually suitable payment method – please email accounts@athleteassessments.com and explain what you want and which country you are in. Our motto is to do everything we can to help our clients! Refer to Order Online for more information. Please feel free to Contact Us to assist you further.

We recognize the cost of some programs can be out of reach for many, so we’ve taken the critical elements of our work and tailored a more affordable options such as the DISC Card Game. There is also an enormous library of articles and videos available free on our site in the resources section.

Completing your DISC Profile

We will have a special arrangement with your professor or lecturer for your class. Please contact them or you are welcome to Contact Us and we can provide all of the information you need. Just confirm your university and your class name and we will get right back to you.

When you start the survey, you will be asked to enter your name and email address. This sets up a personal account (End User Account) with us. Once you’ve completed the survey, you can access your personal report from this log in and also access additional resources and capabilities associated with your profile. In addition, once you’ve completed your survey, you will be emailed a copy of your report so you have it in your inbox for easy reference.

Athlete Assessments has three different types of DISC Profiles: the AthleteDISC for athletes and players, the CoachDISC for sports coaches and the Sports ManagerDISC for team managers, sports administrators and other sports professionals. Please Contact Us as we are here to assist and provide exceptional service.

Definitely, yes. We have some great packages that include both completing the DISC Profile as well as having at least two consultations. The first consultation is to debrief the report with you in full and the second is a follow up consultation a few weeks later to ensure you are getting exceptional value from the experience and putting things into action. Check out the Get Ahead packages in the Internet Specials section or Contact Us to talk to you about needs and how we can assist you.

If you have initiated the Assessment yourself, only you have access. If someone else has organized for you to take the Assessment, it is likely they will have access to the results of your assessment. We have very strict privacy rules within Athlete Assessments and your results have the highest security level to access them. If you contact us, we can access your results to review, but only after you’ve given us permission to do this. For more information go to Info for Coaches or Info for Athletes or feel free to Contact Us

This is completely up to you. When you start one of the Athlete Assessments’ DISC Profiles, you complete the questionnaire about yourself. From there, you do have complete control to choose the option to invite others (“Observers”) to complete a questionnaire about you as they see you. (By the way, there is no additional charge, it is all included in our service). Having others (“Observers”) complete a questionnaire about the individual provides valuable 360 degree feedback. In our experience, you gain enormously valuable feedback from this review. When several Observers profile you, their feedback is anonymous and therefore honest, sometimes more so than in a face to face scenario.

If you choose to have Observers complete your profile, always remember to ‘regenerate’ your report so the feedback from the observers after they have completed their questionnaires is updated on your soft copy report that sits online on your own homepage. Also, please note that personal comments are only included in your report if more than three observers complete the questionnaire – we do this to provide them with privacy. Learn more about the additional capabilities of our assessments here. Please feel free to Contact Us to assist you further.

No. The only thing observers see is the questionnaire they complete about you. They have no other access than this. Please feel free to Contact Us to assist you further or you can learn more about the additional capabilities of our assessments here

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Bo Hanson

Senior Consultant & Director

Bo Hanson’s career within the sport and the business sector spans over 25 years, delivering leadership, management, and coach development. In addition to his own athletic career comprising of four Olympic appearances and including three Olympic medals, Bo has worked for many years with coaches and athletes from over 40 different sports across the globe. Bo was also the winner of the Australian Institute of Training and Development (AITD) 2023 Award for L&D Professional of the Year, for his dedication to L&D and transformational work across various industries.

After a successful career in sport including four Olympics and three Olympic Medals, Bo co-founded and developed Athlete Assessments in 2007. Bo now focuses on working with clients to achieve their own success on and off ‘the field’, and has attained an unmatched track-record in doing exactly this.

Headshot Bo
BoRowing-Atlanta Olympics

Now, watch us interrupt him for a round of quick fire questions.