Hello dear reader,
Every Applied Product Thinking for Therapists cohort, I invite a clinical leader to speak with current and past members.
My selection criteria is rather daring. The speaker needs to be someone who will not only inspire the therapists of the cohort, but also inspire Prottoy, me—the two non-clinical members of TiNT—and all the non-clinical folks reading this newsletter.
I’ve long held the belief that you can make sense of this evolving world only by being interdisciplinary. Gone are the days of sailing an entire career knowing singularly of your own trade.
A leadership quality I find genuinely inspiring is the ability to speak fluently to your own field and to people well outside it. Dr. Jini K Gopinath is one such voice, and lucky for me, he agreed to meet with APTT Cohort #3 and our alumni.
Dr. Gopinath has been a clinical psychologist for over 20 years. In that time he has run a private clinic, taught full time at Christ University, led clinical operations at the startup YourDost, worked in corporate wellness at Optum International, coached IPL teams including Mumbai Indians, and written five books. Right now he's holding three roles at once: Chief Psychology Officer at Shyro Health, founder of his own practice Mind Matters, and faculty.
When I asked him how he decided what was worth building across all of this, he candidly admitted: none of it was planned.
On starting without a plan
You've written five books, developed a hypnosis practice, Vedic mathematics work, things that don't sit under one employer or one brand. How do you decide what's worth taking forward and what's just interesting for a week?
Honestly, in the beginning it was pure trial and error. I didn't know what would work, so I didn't spend much time thinking about the consequences, I just tried things. The books actually came out of that same instinct. I was already running hypnosis courses and needed manuals that would give the training some credibility. Those manuals became a textbook, the textbook did well, and that gave me enough momentum to keep going, one title at a time, in whatever direction I happened to be teaching that year.
On breadth being the outcome of depth
You've held multiple roles at once for most of your career, three right now. How do you think about breadth versus depth, and what do you let go of to keep that balance?
I would say that breadth is really just the outcome of depth. If you're strong in one domain, you can leverage that strength across multiple domains, that's the whole logic.
I was was never too focused on doing things in parallel. Rather, I was seeking to take the expertise from one place and applying it somewhere new. I never set out to hold three roles at once. I built depth in clinical psychology first, and everything since then, teaching, corporate wellness, sport, entrepreneurship, has just been that same depth showing up in a different room.
On finding your place in product teams
Therapists who join the Applied Product Thinking cohorts are often trying to figure out where they actually fit in a product team. What's the biggest gap you've seen between psychologists and the tech or product side?
The hardest part is finding a product person who can actually talk psychology. Whenever I've worked with product leaders who came from a psychology background, the products were noticeably better.
There's a cultural angle to this too. Indian clients are wary of a product with no human connection behind it, so scaling here is genuinely harder than in the west, you always need a human touch point. It really comes down to two problems: first that we don't have enough product leaders coming from psychology, and second that standalone products struggle in India because there's no human connect.
If this is sounding more and more useful, perhaps you want to consider being a part of the next Applied Product Thinking for Therapists Cohort, where you get front row seats when leaders like Dr. Gopinath speak? It's a 10 seat classroom and everyone tells me they're having fun and feeling confident, and I'm living my dream doing this work so God yes I'm having fun too!! But that's besides the point, join the waitlist? |
On failing in public and letting go
Not everything you tried must have worked out. What happened when something failed, what happened to the error part of 'trial and error'?
Plenty of things failed outright, yes! Some in the very beginning too.
One example that comes to mind is this: I started a child mental health program in Bangalore a few years ago. Down the line, I eventually realised I couldn't sustain it myself. My circumstances and priorities had shifted and I wasn't the best person fit for it anymore.
At this point, the most obvious choice is to quit. But a better path presented itself for me.
Instead of letting this venture die out, I handed the model to a former student of mine from Christ University. He's running it now as a company called Insight, and it's a 10 to 20 crore business today. I started it, I couldn't carry it further, so I gave it to someone who could.
I suppose to answer your question, errors in the 'trial and errors' only need a chance to be something in themselves, isn't' it?
On choosing startups over stability
You've moved between institutions, your own clinic, and startups your whole career. There's a constant shift, a constant moving. Why keep choosing the instability of early stage companies?
One good thing about joining a startup is that you can experiment, where you don't need to really worry about the consequences, because startups are always about experimenting. So people expect you to experiment and people are okay if you fail. That was the advantage of joining a startup.
This is the part I want this cohort to sit with. Clinical training teaches you to be careful, because in a therapy room, carefulness is the job. But building a product, a course, a company, or even a side practice runs on a completely different clock. Iteration isn't recklessness there, it's the expected mode of operating. And that's very freeing to clinicians like us!
On taking the first step
In closing, if a therapist from this cohort said 'I don't know where to start, what to do first, how to build this kind of mix career,' what would you want them to understand?
I want to tell you this.
Be open to new domains. Explore, experiment, and let yourself notice what actually connects with you, then jump in. Don't wait for a five year plan to justify starting mid-career like this. You need enough curiosity to follow a thread, and enough humility to let it go when it's no longer yours to carry.
Dr. Jini K Gopinath is Chief Psychology Officer at Shyro Health and founder of Mind Matters. He has previously held clinical leadership roles at YourDost and Optum International, and worked as a psychology consultant for Mumbai Indians and Kings XI Punjab in the IPL.
You can watch my full interview with him on TiNT’s youtube channel.
Take care and see you soon,
Harshali
Founder & Educator, TiNT
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