Founder

Meet Dr. Mala

Founder/CEO, The Synergy Center

Dr. Malasri Chaudhery-Malgeri — known professionally as Dr. Mala — is a psychologist, educator, executive and behavioral-health leader, Certified Professional Coach, and the Founder/CEO of The Synergy Center.

Why I built Beyond Functioning

I have spent my career around highly capable people — in clinics, classrooms, organizations, and leadership rooms. Again and again I watched the same thing happen: people who were praised for coping, who carried everything and dropped nothing, were quietly losing contact with how they actually felt. Restoration, presence, meaning, pleasure — the internal side of a life — went unattended precisely because the external side kept performing.

Beyond Functioning grew from that observation. The idea is not that something is wrong with you. It is that there can be a real distance between how well you function and how well you are — and that noticing that distance early, honestly, is what creates the space to recalibrate before functioning becomes the only measure of how you are doing.

Background, at a glance

Teaching at the university level since 2004
Trauma-informed care, PTSD, and traumatic brain injury
Military psychology
Marriage and family systems
Program development and organizational psychology
Behavior change, resilience, and human performance
Outcomes and quality in behavioral health
Certified Professional Coach

The idea behind the Synergy Gap

The Synergy Gap is a descriptive framework, not a diagnosis. It names the distance between two things that are usually measured very differently: external functioning — what you carry, deliver, and hold together — and internal wellbeing — what actually comes back to you in presence, restoration, pleasure, and meaning.

A wide gap is not weakness and not a clinical finding. It is information: what capability costs when that cost goes unaccounted for. The framework is informed by psychology, wellbeing, behavior change, trauma-informed care, and resilience — and by years of watching what happens to people when only their output is ever measured.

The Synergy Center

Beyond Functioning is developed within the broader work of The Synergy Center, which is focused on helping people move beyond merely functioning toward a greater alignment between their capability and their wellbeing. This app is the self-guided, reflective expression of that work — education and self-reflection, not treatment.

Begin

See where your own gap sits

Fourteen questions, about four minutes, and an honest read of the distance between how you are doing and how you are doing.

Take the Synergy Check-In See membership options

This is a self-reflection tool, not therapy, diagnosis, or a medical device. Read the privacy and safety notes.