“You Can’t Lead Others Until You Lead Yourself”—Evan Mestman on Fueling Leadership Through Health

Cut The Tie Podcast with Evan Mestman

What if the very drive that made you successful is the same thing destroying your health? In this powerful episode of Cut The Tie, host Thomas Helfrich sits down with Evan Mestman, founder of ProAttitudes and a health transformation and leadership coach for high-performing executives.

After 20 years in corporate America—including a career that survived 9/11—Evan walked away from burnout to rebuild not just his body, but his purpose. Today, he helps business leaders who’ve “climbed the ladder but left their health on the bottom rung” reclaim their energy, reframe their mindset, and reawaken their leadership.

This conversation dives into the mental, emotional, and physical ties that hold many executives back—and how taming your inner critic might just save your life.

About Evan Mestman

Evan Mestman is the founder of ProAttitudes, a health transformation and leadership coaching company that helps executives lead with clarity, energy, and confidence. A certified nutritionist and diabetes educator, Evan’s career spans startups, leadership roles in medical device sales, and 20 years in corporate America. Today, he combines neuroscience, mindfulness, and behavioral science to help clients rewire their habits, strengthen their “attitude muscle,” and shift from burnout to balance.

In this episode, Thomas and Evan discuss:

• Climbing the ladder while losing your health
  Why high-performing executives often leave their well-being behind—and how to climb back up before it’s too late.
• Taming the inner critic
  Evan explains how to quiet the self-defeating voice in your head and strengthen your “inner coach.”
• Reframing success
  Why true success lies in the intersection of what you do, how you do it, and why you do it.
• Fueling leadership through health
  The habits, mindset, and tools that help leaders rediscover joy, energy, and purpose in both work and life.

Key Takeaways

• You can’t lead others if you can’t lead yourself
  Great leadership starts with physical and emotional health.
• Health is a leadership skill
  How you fuel yourself determines how you show up for your team and family.
• Tame the inner critic, train the inner coach
  Self-awareness is the foundation for lasting transformation.
• Habits reveal your mindset
  Change your thoughts and your behaviors will follow.
• Private victories create public victories
  The small, consistent wins in health and mindset make the biggest business impact.

Connect with Evan Mestman

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-mestman/
🌐 Website: https://www.proattitudes.com
📧 Email: evan@proattitudes.com

Connect with Thomas Helfrich

🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/thelfrich
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cutthetie
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomashelfich
🌐 Website: https://www.cutthetie.com
📧 Email: t@instantlyrelevant.com
🚀 https://www.instantlyrelevant.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Welcome to Cut the Tie Podcast. Hi, I am your host, Thomas Helprick, and I'm on a mission to help entrepreneurs cut the tie to whatever's holding them back from success. And they better define that success on their own terms, otherwise, you're chasing someone else's dream. So welcome to the show, Evan Mestman.

unknown: 0:15

How are you doing?

SPEAKER_00: 0:16

Hey, I'm grateful for you inviting me on. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01: 0:20

It it is uh it's gonna be my pleasure by the end of this. I'm telling you right now. Right now, it's your pleasure. It's like Chick-fil-A style. My pleasure. My daughter works there. That's how I owners and know that. All right, take a moment, Evan. Introduce yourself, where you're from, what you do.

SPEAKER_00: 0:33

Hey, everybody, I'm Evan Messman. I am a health transformation and leadership coach. What I do is I work with business leaders who've climbed that ladder to success, but they left their health on the bottom rung because they thought they had to. And what I do is I take them back up to the top rung before they fall off the ladder altogether. And I do it three different ways. I help them lose weight with their minds, not their mouth. I help them be intentional with their health. And most importantly, I help them tame their inner critic. I keep mine up here on the shelf just to show people. I've got him down to six, eight and a half inches. He used to be six feet tall. And I keep up on my shelf also, Yoda. He's up here. You can't really see him. I'm gonna point. There he is, because I want to help develop everybody's inner coach. Do you start like me?

SPEAKER_01: 1:25

Do you start your sessions like with like fat you are?

SPEAKER_00: 1:30

You know, it's so funny that people are either on or off a diet, they're always so difficult with themselves. The one thing that they beat themselves up all the time is I cheated, I'm on, I'm off. I'm like, we need a better relationship with food, we need a better relationship with ourselves, we need a better relationship with everything in our lives. And the one person you need a better relationship with is the voice in your head, and that's really what I focus on.

SPEAKER_01: 1:57

Yeah, it's uh I just thought it cited that the best thing for weight loss is amphetamines. Yeah, no, it doesn't, or or zempic, right?

SPEAKER_00: 2:06

You might as well go all the way to take the injectables, take the GLP ones.

SPEAKER_01: 2:10

And I my boobs, I don't care where it goes in, just go in.

SPEAKER_00: 2:16

And it's not just about weight loss. You know, I'm a nutritionist, diabetes educator. To me, I believe that we should be fueling leadership. Private victories lead to public victories. If you want to take better care of your company, start fueling your leadership with taking better care of yourself.

SPEAKER_01: 2:32

Yeah. I mean, yeah, you'll you'll think better and everything else. Uh we'll get into some of your journey a little bit, but uh there's a lot of nutritionists and people, you know, why why should or why do uh individuals or companies pick you?

SPEAKER_00: 2:44

Hmm, it's a great question. Well, you know, I've I'm very well schooled, but I'm my first client. My first, I was heavy heavy as a kid. So I've experienced the bullying and and making a muscle, nothing happens, and having that wonderful belly around the middle. And I went through an ordinary change, uh, some just some simple habits that I changed over a summer and went through transformation. I've been reverse engineering it ever since. But the main reason why companies are hiring me and also business leaders is because of the thousand leaders that I've already helped. And I believed that I was in corporate America because one of my startups that I work with, um, I was in a startup that was a wellness company delivered via the internet, and I had 20 consultants that I was managing, and it was going great until we went public on 9-11, 2001, in Cantor Fitzgerald. And I went from hero to zero. And I had to put my tail between my legs because I had 500,000 founder shares worth zero, and had to take care of my family. And I pivoted into corporate America by selling insulin pumps because I'm a diabetes educator, and then that went south because the FDA said you can't import insulin pumps anymore from Desatronic, but it was a company was Roche had purchased them, and then I had to pivot into another company, which was KCI, which then was purchased by 3M eventually. That I learned really what it's like to go from being in sales to being in leadership. I started running my own team. I went to, I was on the go-to-market strategy for new products. I really learned a lot. And then I was recruited by another company called ComboTech for leadership. And I actually developed their uh national clinical sales team, which they didn't have one. I opened my mouth and said, You need one. They said, Well, go ahead, build one. So I had a great opportunity and a run there. So I had 20 years in corporate America in sales management leadership, and I learned how it sucks the joy out of everything that you do. And they don't do it intentionally, but that's something that I want to do is to help people bring back in their culprit culture something that emanates from everybody is joy instead of fear. Why does everybody um worried in companies right now with the lack of engagement? It's because everybody's afraid. So part of what I do is in leadership, if you're taking better care of yourself, you can learn how to tame that inner critic that's beating the fear.

SPEAKER_01: 5:18

You're uh you're uh you're hitting the right points for sure. Did you find uh because that's what people need? Do you find that typically though, the the problem? And this is more of an entrepreneurial question because it's like sometimes the problem they want the symptom solved, and you're like, I'm gonna deliver that for you. And he and I know how to do that. And then you get you're like, now let's go actually solve what you get you easy. And they sometimes go like, What are you which craft are you talking about? Did they do you have that do they have that existential moment like I'm not talking about me?

SPEAKER_00: 5:49

I think what happens is people will come to me because of the voice they hear in my marketing, which is their voice. And what'll end up happening is they'll come to me and say, Hey, I want to lose some weight, or um, I really want to get my blood sugar better controlled. But because I know that I come to them at the level that they're at, and we start to discover truly what the underlying issues is, I go deep. This is not transactional. Hey, go on a diet, go in an exercise program. It's in there. This is the deep work of really what's your why? And why is there so much resistance if you've been really wanting this? And there's a reason. It's because you've been protecting yourself from the underlying pain and suffering that you're afraid you're gonna have by dealing with the issues that are keeping you stuck. That's the work that I love to do. That's taming the inner critic and helping develop that inner coach. Um, it's it's an easy thing and it's a hard thing at the same time. Um, but diets don't work.

SPEAKER_01: 6:54

They don't you know, I some of you quit. It's not that I quit drinking, I just stopped taking, stop drinking. Like I'm I'm not a drinker anymore. I just choose not to have one. Would I have one if it added value? Yes. And the way I did that was, you know, I listened to a book, but I was but the idea behind the book was I'm not gonna promote someone else's stuff here, but the point is I changed the meaning associated with having a drink.

SPEAKER_00: 7:17

And change your identity. That's what you did. You did a reframe. So a lot of I'll work with people who want to quit smoking too. And what'll happen is they they'll walk into a room and they crave the cigarette. I go, Well, you're still a smoker. But when I know they come to me at that moment where they go, Ugh, somebody's smoking? Disgusting. Now they become a non-smoker. It's an identity shift. It's the same with I have another client of mine who was in France in Paris, and he saw this businessman sitting there. Well, he was at the all-you-can-eat buffet. This guy's sitting there with a cup of coffee, perfectly coiffed, you know, his tie and his suit, reading the newspaper, and he's just drinking his coffee. And he looked at him and he said, I want to understand what motivates that guy. And changing that paradigm for him, having him be able to create some shifts in his belief systems. Now he emulates that. Now, when he goes and travels the world as a business leader, it's no longer I have to struggle with avoiding eating all the cakes and cookies and all that. He's like, nope, my identity has shifted. And that's a uh that's the work that I love to do because it's the work that I needed to do myself that made all the difference in the world.

SPEAKER_01: 8:34

Yeah. Well, tell me your definition of success then. Is it is as it exists today? How do you define success?

SPEAKER_00: 8:42

Hmm. You know, success to me is the uh the intersection of the what to do, the how to do it, and the why to do it. Where the three of those intersect is success. Keep it simple.

SPEAKER_01: 9:00

And did that is that something newer? Been there for a while?

SPEAKER_00: 9:04

Uh you know, I learned I learned that through a process, but it's part of Stephen Cubby's work. It's part of sales process that I've learned. And it's just, I don't I've heard it so many times, but I've incorporated it into my process that it's your behavior. So what the what is it what you do, that's your behavior, right? The how you do it is technique. And then the why you do it is attitude, which is why my business is called proattitudes. And where the three of those intersect, you're gonna see a habit, which is what Stephen Covey talked about. But for me, I look at that intersection as success. Because if you can promote habits based on behavior, technique, but also driven by the right why, that's that's gonna be success. And that's the neural pathways in our brain. I don't believe that the the issues that we have today, the chronic illnesses, diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune disease, um, obesity. I don't believe they're just diseases of metabolism. I really truly believe they're diseases of our neural pathways in our brain. And then if we can change the paradigm, if we can shift, reframe the way we think and believe, which is what my specialty is, that changes everything and it makes it a lot easier. You know, you're you don't want to be pushing against resistance, saying, I'm gonna do these things, but I really don't believe it. That's that's you're always gonna go back to old habits. That's why I always start with the why. That's why, you know, I'm the Simon Cynic of Nutrition.

SPEAKER_01: 10:40

What's uh in in that journey, I'm sure you had your own metaphoric ties to cut. I mean, you described someone just like living a life of, oh, I had to go through that as you know, lose weight, do the thing, change my mindset. Uh, but what's been the biggest one to build build the business you have today and be where you are?

SPEAKER_00: 10:59

Huh. Well, that's a loaded question, and there's a lot going in there. To be successful for me was first understanding that I actually had those voices in my head and they were real and they're normal, everybody's got them. And I don't have to listen to those voices. Those are not me. My inner coach is the one that's listening to the inner voices. And you'll know that if you ask yourself when you hear something in your head, is that me or is that a based on a feeling or a thought? You'll know the difference. When I understood that and I was able to acknowledge those thoughts and know that they were coming from my inner critic, I was able to then separate myself out. That self-awareness was the first step for me. And then acceptance that, hey, I'm human just like everybody else. How do I develop? I call it the attitude muscle. How do you develop the attitude muscle so that you don't, you're not the inner critic's not the CEO of your life, the inner coaches? And you need the inner coach to be the CEO, and you can't get rid of your inner critics. You need to make friends with them. That happened to me at a very young age because of how I'm a result of trauma. I had trauma as a kid, um, bullied as a kid too, very sickly as a kid. So I had to make some decisions. Do I want to end up like the rest of my family with all these diseases and then dying young? Um, do I want to end up like my brother, who is four four years older than me and obese? And do I, you know, my mom called it baby fad, but it wasn't. Like, I need to do the work. So I looked in the mirror and realized no one's here to save me. I've got to do the Goggins thing, right? I didn't know Goggins back then, but it was looking in the mirror and realizing there's work to be done here. Let's just do it and not worry about tomorrow and don't regret about yesterday, just focus on today. And that is to me, when I started this business five years ago, which was after the corporate run that I loved and enjoyed it, but COVID gave me the opportunity to come back to doing what I really truly have a passion for. Um, I sat down with a very different perspective because I had all that experience, plus I tamed my inner critic. And that's yeah, that's what I love bringing to other people. It's like it's not a hard thing to do.

SPEAKER_01: 13:20

I'm Ella, you you know the moments that happened, like you know, and you in yours is definitely there's uh there's like a building moment that happened that got me to hear it, it got me to hear. Do you remember the moment though you had the first breakthrough with a client?

SPEAKER_00: 13:35

Wow, okay. Um not that I mean, I've been doing this for a long time. So I go I don't remember the first one, but there is one but memorable one where I cannot believe that happened kind of thing. Yeah. I had a client come to me from a doctor. She was over 500 pounds. We didn't know how much she weighed because we could we didn't have a scale to weigh her. And she was bleeding in the wrong in the wrong place, and they couldn't put her, she was too big for the MRI machine. And the doctor said, if you don't go see Evan, you're gonna die. And I remember this poor woman coming into my into my office and just just dreading working with me, and not was bad enough, she sat down and the chair broke. I mean, I'm not even sure. I'm surprised you didn't have to go to her. I mean, 500 pounds, like most hurt. Well, I what ended up happening was um we started working together and I helped her get down to below 300. But what's more important, she was a travel agent, and she said, You saved my life. She and you got me back to what I love to do. She couldn't drive, she was too heavy to drive, she had to have somebody drive her. So I remember the first time she called me and she said, I guess where I am. I'm sitting in my brand new car. What a wonderful feeling! Like she, you know, and now she could travel places. Then the first time she was able to get on an airplane again.

SPEAKER_01: 14:59

It gives me chills just thinking about how I she'd probably gotten to travel because she loves travel and now can't travel. That's like the most depressing thing in the world. Like, yeah. I live in a golf course that I can't afford the membership behind me, and it's like I just go look at this beautiful, top-rated, and I'm like, one day I'm gonna be able to pull the trigger on that.

SPEAKER_00: 15:18

The truth is, well, you'll find joy in other things, which is part of what I, you know, that's my that's my my tagline is I help people find more mojo, more moments of spontaneous joy through your habits, through mindfulness, through your nutrition, through your total fitness. It's gonna lead to more moments of spontaneous joy because what do people do in business? They work, work, work. Oh, I gotta work more because that's the one thing I have is I can just turn up the volume, I can do more. That overdrives samurai. That's one of the inner critics. And what happens? You you burn out. And then that burnout leads to abuse. You know, you might go in a drink binge, you might go just say no to everything. You go eating, go out to eat on the weekends. It could be work, work, work, and then you're off on the weekends and you're in this terrible cycle till all of a sudden it catches up with you.

SPEAKER_01: 16:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 16:13

Those are the kinds of clients I love working with because they are so successful in business, but they haven't learned how to take the skill set that they have in business and translate it over to taking better care of themselves. And it's there, they've got it, they do it in business. Why can't they do it for themselves?

SPEAKER_01: 16:29

It you know, it's uh I read uh Ronald, Dr. Ronald Siegel's book, I think Siegler or Siegel. Yeah. Siegel, the science of mindfulness. And David. David Eagleman is that the Lightmire guy, the life guy he wrote with Livewired. I well, no, this guy's like a Harvard professor, so these were his lectures. And what I took from it, like there's a lot you can take from, but but I took from it was uh was a realization, an epiphany that people, you know, we've only had about a hundred years of technology, let's say, at most. Like and for millennials, like millennium, like years, thousands of years, tens all hundreds of thousands of years.

SPEAKER_00: 17:08

We're our we're right, we're hardwired a certain way. We're our our hardware hasn't updated.

SPEAKER_01: 17:13

We we have and but for but for thousands of years, like five, six thousand years, there there are been people who've just studied because there was nothing else to do, apparently, but they just studied how the mind and body worked, and how you you know, before there was modern medicine, like how you can be healthy through your mind, and it made me think like we dismiss all that so fast, but they have thousands of and millions of people have have spent their life studying and like the the works that you read from, you're like, Well, there's actually real science behind that that we just kind of dismiss that's already been discovered. And and and you just don't even you just dismiss it as all that was years ago. There we were people back then were no dumber than today. We have not evolved anything.

SPEAKER_00: 17:52

I mean you know why though? In the this this was a major focus in science up until about the 60s, 50s and 60s, when all of a sudden pharmaceuticals came into and then everybody thought, oh, we'll give you we'll have a pill to solve everything, and everything went on the wayside. Now, what I'm really excited about is what's happening now with the NIH and make America Healthy again. The focus is not political, it's about getting back to the root of science and innovation, which I think in the next two to three years, you're going to see an absolute explosion of opportunity and also solutions to the problems that we've had for the last 30, 40 years because big pharma and big agro have been leading us down this path that is not sustainable, but somebody's putting money in their pocket.

SPEAKER_01: 18:44

You're you're uh we are we're in the age of pharma. Um we'll go to that. That could be a whole show, but like a whole podcast. So uh what do you most uh like, you know, you know, or let me say it differently. How do you measure impact of what you do?

SPEAKER_00: 19:00

Well, I'm uh a leader myself, and I was leading a team. So I know that if you can't measure, you can't improve it. So there are certain things that I'll do with my clients um that I will measure. I they get a commitment log, and in that commitment log, there's daily habits. I call it the day daily mindfulness work, and then there's weekly commitments, and then at the end of the month, we also do a review, a monthly review, then we do a quarterly review, we do a six-month review, very much like you would in business, but it's not the the stuff that's going to make you feel like, oh, I'm not accomplishing anything. I focus on positive reinforcement and also reinforcing the positive neural pathways that they've created. So there's a method to my madness in this process of measuring it. So I'm measuring things like, well, what actual habits have they improved upon? And there are definite specific ways that I can do that in that um that kind of uh coaching that I do and the tools that I create as far as the you know, quarterly review, six-month review. And they see it. And honestly, it it makes a difference when you do that kind of review and go, you know, don't just look at what you should be doing, look at what you've already accomplished because say, well, that's where I used to be. Wow. Look how far I've come. Well, this is where I want to go. Okay, that's fine. Don't be hard on yourself. Now, here's the gap. And we're always working on, well, what's the plan for the next three steps? And it's it's really that simple to get people on my program. Of course, I provide them a tremendous amount of knowledge and skill. I give them tools in the toolbox. One of them is my better bite buddy, which is an AI-driven tool to help them learn how to incorporate all of my tools with them when I'm not around. Um, and they can practice and ask it, like, you know, what you know, how do I get how do I solve the the cravings at eight o'clock at night when I want to go and grab the ice cream? Or um I'm going out to dinner. What's the best choice? How do I can I eat healthier? How can I understand what the inner critic is doing versus what the inner coach is doing? It has some really great um logic built into it, but it it sounds like me, it acts like me, and I love that tool on top of the other 60 tools that I've created that are built into that AI tool that my clients love using. And you know, because everybody needs something different, but I love having uh being able to create these things. Um, and they're from 30, I've been doing it for 30 years, so there's a lot of tools.

SPEAKER_01: 21:46

You got a wealth of knowledge. If there was a question I should have asked you today, though, and I didn't, what would that question have been?

SPEAKER_00: 21:53

Um, what's my favorite thing to do?

SPEAKER_01: 21:55

What is your favorite thing to do?

SPEAKER_00: 21:57

I'm a gardener. You know, when I was a kid, um, I I learned how to garden working with uh Mrs. Wolf. I write about her all the time. She had a five-acre estate on the Hudson, and she was an uh a widow, and she had um an acre of gardens that needed five gardeners. But I was this teenager stuck out there in 98 degree weather, pulling the weeds. By the time I finished one end, the weeds were knee high on the other. But she taught me everything that I know. And part of it is she'd also taught me how to dig a five-dollar hole for a 50 cent plant. She taught me that um you you take care. You the what you call the law of nature, the law of the gardener is you nurture it, you water it, you make sure it's in the right place, and it will grow. And, you know, lessons that I learned as a kid, um, and I now cultivate optimism for my clients because that's really what I do. And um I love uh I have a garden in my front yard. It has I have no lawn, it's all flower gardens. And I have a public garden that I create for my. There's a uh in Huntington, we have this beautiful park that's a hundred years old that was getting dilapidated. And my wife and I eight years ago decided to take on this uh area that was full of weeds. We asked the town, can we make an a garden here? And he let us. And now it's the amity garden, and people come from all over to take a look at it. Amity Garden of Heckshire Park, it's uh at Heckshire Park is on uh in my Facebook group. Just you know, not a lot of people in it, but you know what? It's a labor of love to help bring people together. So you can see that's a passion of mine, too.

SPEAKER_01: 23:40

That's great. I love that. Uh all right, so shameless plug down. How do they get a hold of you? Who should get a hold of you?

SPEAKER_00: 23:45

Oh, shameless plug. You know what? I'm available. Um, are we going to be giving any links? I'll tell you proattitudes. Great.

SPEAKER_01: 23:53

Yeah, they'll show them notes.

SPEAKER_00: 23:54

So proAttitudes.com forward slash follow will take you to my link train. So you can make an appointment with me, you can take the inner critic quiz, you can also take the lifestyle check-in quiz. I've got lots of tools. The better bite buddy, though, is a little different because it's brand new. So if you want to use the better bite buddy, um, reach out to me on uh either LinkedIn. It's on I'm on LinkedIn. Evan Messman uh is my name, and you can find me there and also my business pro attitudes. Wonderful. Thanks for coming on today. Appreciate it, Evan. I had a great time. Thanks for uh asking me on.

SPEAKER_01: 24:30

And anybody listening at this point or watching, you rock, you must have a great attitude to be here. And if this is the first time you were here, I hope it's the first of many. And if you've been here before, you know what to do. Get out there, go cut the tide to whatever's holding you back, but first define that success on your own terms so you know what's holding you back from it. Thanks for listening.