Jeff Hunter:

Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter and you were listening to Coaching in the Clear, the podcast

committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we

believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best

way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your

coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their

potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the Clear is a

production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders

achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a

weekly newsletter called the Sensemaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues

affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content to

enable you to unleash your potential, learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. Today I'm

speaking with Eric Kinariwala. Eric is the founder and CEO of Capsule, the pharmacy of the

future. Over the last five years, he and his team have built Capsule into a multi-city, multi

pharmacy platform across the United States. Eric and I met soon after he started Capsule and

I've enjoyed watching him learn, struggle, and grow as a successful entrepreneur and a

self-aware leader. We'll talk about talent, being a craftsman, helping others to do the same,

contextualizing intuition and much, much more. Eric, thanks very much for joining and welcome

to the conversation.

Eric Kinariwala:

Thanks for having me excited to have the conversation.

Jeff Hunter:

Yeah, well, let's give this a shot. So Eric, you have envisioned designed and built an incredible

company. You've worked with me, you've partnered with Talentism. So, you know, you're

familiar with our approach and our thinking. And of course I've seen you do a lot of your own

coaching over time as a successful executive and investor. And that leads me to ask you, how

do you think about the value and importance of coaching?

Eric Kinariwala:

It's been really interesting. I'd never had a coach before you and I started working together a

handful of years ago now. And I think there was sort of initially I had some trepidation around

coaching as almost a sense of like, you know, I don't need a coach. I can kind of figure it out.

And I think the phrase, the idea of like; Hey, even tiger woods has a coach that kind of always

resonated with me which is like, no matter who you are and where you are in your own kind of

journey. I think everyone needs somebody to bring out the best in them. Then that can mean a

lot of different things. But for me, it's really been, I think what's been valuable, has been a

couple of things. I think one has been to create a safe space to really have somebody be able to

work through with you some of the unique challenges that really only, you know, in my case that

only the CEO has to deal with and to have somebody who can provide and share a framework

that I think that not only has helped me, like, think about the specific sort of situation that I'm in,

but what are the kind of guiding principles that let me then apply that framework to the same or

similar situations are gonna happen over time. I think the other thing that's been really helpful is

sort of a process of self discovery around, you know, my own mental models, my own

assumptions that are bacon decisions. I make that I might not even know their assumptions

because they're so deep rooted. So this idea of a mirror and somebody who can both

understand who you are, but bring that mirror back and help you kind of work through what the

impact of your words, your decisions, your actions are on those around you all with sort of, I

think the consistent goal of unleashing the greatness within, you know, that exists in each of us.

And so I think for me, it's been two things. One has been sort of a set of tools and a framework

to approach problems over time. And the second has been a mirror to be able to uncover blind

spots or to better understand myself, to be able to be more effective with others over time.

Jeff Hunter:

That makes a lot of sense and so thank you for saying that and thank you for saying that

because of course that's what we're trying to do. So it's good to know that it's working in some

way. The thing you said about self discovery is something I wanted to pick up on a little bit. So

as you know, cause you and I have talked about this frequently, the way I think about it as the,

you are the only tool that you have to bring to the table when you're a leader or a manager like

fundamentally, you've got this mind and the mind has models and capabilities and impressions

and all these things in it. And the most valuable thing you can do is to get to know that tool

better and become a real craftsmen with that tool, as opposed to trying to acquire new tools,

because fundamentally, if the underlying thing that you're working with, the, you know, the brain

you've got is something that's a mystery to you. All the other tools are going to be secondary to

that primary problem of you don't know how to use that thing. So that self discovery is a critical

part of what we're trying to do. And of course, as you and I have talked about many times, what

makes that especially difficult is you yourself, can't really interrogate your own mind to figure out

what's going on underneath. There's this really thin channel between your consciousness and

your unconsciousness, the consciousness of what you're going through and how you think and

what you believe, etcetera. And then this whole huge mass of intuition and instinct and memory

and emotion and all those things that are really not accessible. So you have to go into battle in

essence, you have to like get to work and you've got to do things and then try to take the data or

the evidence that you produce and bring it back to the table and say, okay, how am I going to

make sense of this. How am I going to make sense of what this says about me? Because

frankly that surprised me or I thought I was better at that or whatever it was. I think the role of

coach, at least a clarity coach is crucial to try to help you make sense of that. So one of my

questions would be just for you personally, what's been one of the things that, because you and

I have worked together so long, what have been the things that you started out and thought, you

know, I'm pretty good at this thing. I think I'm good at it. And then over time through the process,

through the work and through just being a successful executive, you've come to maybe a bit

more humility or a perspective of like, wow, I've learned that's much harder than I thought, or I'm

not as good at it as I thought.

Eric Kinariwala:

A lot of things. Hey, you know, one of the things I spent a lot of time doing is building an

amazing team to tackle the mission that we have, which is large and ambitious. And so I spent a

lot of my time recruiting and interviewing, and I think there's, I think getting more, in some ways

getting more sophisticated abo...