Hinesh Chauhan traces how his background as a child of immigrants, engineering and economics education, military service as a combat engineer, and work on anxiety through cognitive behavioral therapy shaped his consulting approach. He emphasizes discipline, frontline problem-solving under tight deadlines with limited resources, and expertise across money, risk, people, and governance.
Background, both in the military. You're, you know, just sort of upbringing the way that you have, you know, shown up in the world. How does that inform the way that you advise businesses and you do consulting?
Oh, that's a huge question. Huge, huge question. And there's, there's a lot of aspects to it, but I grew up in a. Both my parents were immigrants. There was financial scarcity. There's a high level of discipline. So much so the army was a joke for me in terms of the meanest, strictest sergeant major versus my dad. My dad was more fearful, and my dad, the reason they were secure was because of his hard work to get educated. So there's a huge. There's a lot of pressure for academics. And I joke about it in every Indian family. There's a pressure to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer. And that gave me that discipline to work hard and to pursue academics. And through academics, I realized, and through the books I read, I wanted a broader understanding of how the world works. So engineering didn't cut it for me. Economics gave me that wider understanding. So from that and from other different traumas that, that I acquired, I started pursuing cognitive behavioral therapy to deal with a high level of anxiety in my 20s, which just started teaching me about people in a whole bigger way at that time. I was able to apply it to my troops in the army. Later, as I did my master's in management, applied that and had my, my little laboratory for all these things. And as I applied what I learned and what I understood, how big that people element was in terms of under my understanding myself, understanding others, understanding psychology, management, leadership, bringing that all together with those technical aspects and problem solving. The. The biggest part of all this was as a combat engineer and later an army engineer officer. We are the problem solvers on the front lines. There is no, oh, give me, give me until tomorrow, when, when you've got that firm deadline for the mission, everybody's relying on you. You need to get it done there. You need to solve it. You need to. And you do that by big borrowing, stealing a lot of gun tape, a lot of all these different things that you, you get together to create a solution. So again, it was, we need this, we don't have it. You have to develop the relationships. You need to have that conversation with somebody that has something that they need and that you need more and be able to, to, to influence them in a positive way, to be able to, to meet the greater goal. So, and there's so much more. The writing, briefing, cabinet ministers, how to communicate properly, concisely in the power of language. And all these different things which I could go on for hours and hours of what those different impacts and influences were, the different roles I've done, and I've been blessed to have such a fascinating career where I've learned all these things in depth to a point of mastery and, and that's brought me to understand money, risk, people, process, governance, stakeholder, stakeholder management.
