S04E152 Becoming Your Best Human with Stanley Bronstein

From unlocking explosive growth to building a thriving team. We connect you with successful firm leaders and industry experts who share their proven strategies and hard law wisdom. So whether you're a season leader or just starting your journey as a law firm owner, the Leadership and Law Podcast is here to equip you with the knowledge and tools you need to build a successful and fulfilling legal practice. Welcome to another episode of the Leadership in Law Podcast.

I'm your host, Marilyn Jenkins. Please join me in welcoming my guest, Stanley Bronstein, to the show today. Stanley is an attorney, CPA, life coach, and author who has dedicated his work to helping people create lasting personal change through discipline, mindset, and long-term thinking. After reaching a peak weight of 367 pounds, Stanley completely rebuilt his help and life, losing more than 220 pounds and keeping it off for nearly 17 years without drugs or surgery.

That journey led him to create The Way of Excellence, a personal development system focused on integrity, persistence, and mind-body alignment. He is the author of six books and creator of the Million Pound Weight Loss Challenge, a free community that's helped thousands of people lose weight sustainably. Today he brings that same framework of personal responsibility and prevention to professionals, including lawyers, who want to perform at a high level without burning out. I'm excited to have you here, Stanley.

Welcome. Thank you for having me, Merlin. Good to be here. Absolutely.

So tell us a bit about your leadership journey. Okay. I would say it started with learning to lead myself. Okay.

My whole career has always been leading others. But like many lawyers, I was reflecting myself along the way. I'll tell you where I'll give you the real quick rundown and then we'll get to the meat of this whole thing. My battle with obesity started when I was eight years old.

My mother died when I was eight, and I was living with my father, who was massively obese, and had no clue how to eat properly, any of those kinds of things. So we both just literally ate ourselves into oblivion. Most men like to brag if they're smaller than they were when they got married. I'm smaller than I was when I was 13 years old, which is pretty crazy when you think about it.

So been obese most of my whole life. Started early, kept going. By the time I went to college, I was already pretty big. My senior year in college, I lost about 75, 80 pounds.

But I didn't do it the right way. I didn't learn how to eat properly. I didn't make any permanent changes. Plus, I went on a road trip with some friends, and there were cookies in the backseat of the car.

And the cookies and I had an intimate love affair during the car trip. And so boom, it sent me right back on the path I was on before. All the weight came back on plus more. You've heard that story all the time.

Exactly. Along the way, and then I graduated college. I was a CPA. I'd always thought about going to law school, wanted to be a lawyer, but never really did it.

One day when I was about 27, 28 years old, I got in an argument with one of my older brothers. We had a real estate company, and I used to draw up the leases all the time for the properties we managed. And I put some, I drafted some legal language, and he says, You're not a lawyer. I don't think it's right.

And I said, No, I'm not a lawyer, but I still think it's right. And he says, You ought to go to law school. And I said, Okay. So I showed him, I decided I'll go to law school at the age of 28.

And so the moral to that story is you can be arguing with someone who's totally full of crap, which he was, but you should be listening to what they say because some words of wisdom may come out of their mouth that you should hear. And it was very wise of him to recommend I go to law school, and I'm glad I did because it changed my life, no doubt about it. So thank you, brother. Appreciate it.

So went to law school, went at night, part-time. So it took me four years instead of the typical three. Okay. This is what I looked like when I was in law school.

Picture on the left. Okay. I maxed out at 367 pounds. I had I'm five foot seven.

I had a 58-inch waist. Wow. Okay. The picture on the right is me today with a 31-inch waist.

I did that with no drugs, no surgeries. We're going to talk about that in a few minutes when we get there. So, anyway, so I'm going through law school. And of course, the stresses of law school, that was when I put on got to my maximum weight.

I put the weight on from being stressed out, working full working a full-time job and going to school at night. So my last year in law school, once again, just like I did in college, I lost weight, this time 100 pounds. And that time, but I still didn't learn how to eat properly. I did it by changing the way I ate, learning to eat less, but it wasn't really learning how to eat properly.

I was eating a lot of processed foods, frozen weight watchers' dinners, things like that kind of stuff. Basically portion control. It was, I lost weight because I did better what I was than what I was doing before. I got small enough to where women were interested in dating me.

And I ultimately wound up getting married to a woman I'm still married to today. I'll be 26 years in September. And over time, I started my own law and accounting practice, and I slowly started putting weight back on, putting weight back on, putting weight back on. By the time I got to almost 50 years old, four months before my 50th birthday, February 1st, 2009, I was 320 pounds at the time.

My full max of 367, but I was still way too big. And I was in bad shape. I was eating poorly, had all kinds of bad habits I shouldn't have that were not good for me, that were not helping me, just like many boyers, other professionals to face it. Being a lawyer can be a very stressful job, in case anybody didn't know that.

You notice it wasn't January 1st, it was February 1st. And the reason why was I had made a New Year's resolution on January 1st and I was gonna change things, and I blew it just like we all do. We all do every yeah, we blow our New Year's resolutions and everything because we are imperfect human beings, we are not perfect human beings. On that day, I decided I was no longer going to be perfect.

See, I used to be a 367-pound perfectionist. Okay, I would complain that the people around me weren't perfect enough, they weren't as good as I was, they didn't do things as well as I did all while I was 367 pounds. Makes me laugh when I think about it now. But so decided I'm gonna make some changes.

So, what were the changes I was gonna make? First one was I decided I was no longer going to drink alcohol. Okay. Was I an alcoholic?

I don't think so. But was I drinking more than I should? Probably yes. Was the alcohol serving me or was I serving it?

The answer was I was probably serving it, it was not serving me, and it was not good for me. And I said it's incompatible with the kind of person I want to be and the life I want to live. Because the mental state I was in at that time, I had a very successful law and accounting practice, very successful career. But yet I was disgusted with myself personally.

Okay, I was unhappy with the way I felt, I was unhappy with the way I looked, and to be quite honest with you, I said, Stanley, you are wasting your potential. You can be so much more than what you are right now, and what you're doing in this is disgusting. I mean, that that's how I felt about myself. And so I said, Okay, I'm gonna quit drinking.

I took my last bottle of scotch, poured it down the toilet, hit flush. Gone, haven't touched it in 17 years. And I actually found it pretty easy to quit, which is not to make fun or light of people who find it hard to quit drinking, but it wasn't a problem for me. I think it's because I wasn't addicted to it.

I just I like when I got home from work, I like having drinks, is what it was the way to release your stress, that kind of thing. Then two-liter bottles of soda pop. I was drinking three of those a day. Oh my gosh.

Yes, but they were diet camphine free, so they tell us those are healthy, right? Right. No, no, they're not. And these are all my opinions.

So everything I'm saying is my opinion, so no defamation cases here, lawyers. If you're listening, but so I took my last bottle of soda pop, poured it down the toilet, hit flush, gone. Haven't had one in 17 years. Don't miss it.

And believe it or not, I found it harder to kick the soda pop than I did the alcohol. Really? Yeah, I think it's because I drank that all day, every day. Okay, it was when I drank instead of water.

So I was like, oh, I'm gonna drink this bland water instead of the soda. It was more of a getting used to it. Again, it wasn't an addiction, but it was something you missed. Yeah, it was doing something uncomfortable that I knew that was better for me, that it was making a change that was a little bit uncomfortable in the beginning.

I always liked chicken and turkey, so I said I'm gonna quit eating red meat, beef, and pork. I felt like they say that's healthier, so I said, I'll do that. That's a dietary change on me. Then I said, I need to start moving.

So I said, I need to pick some form of exercise I'm gonna do. And enjoy. I just and enjoy. In the beginning, he didn't enjoy it as much.

I enjoy it now, but we'll talk about that in a second. So I came up with the idea that I'm gonna walk. And the reason I picked walking was I said it's easier, you don't need a lot of special equipment, you can do it almost anywhere, anytime. And I figured it would beat my body up less than other forms of exercise, which considering I was getting ready to turn 50, you're concerned about that.

So I decided I was gonna start walking. And in the beginning, when I started walking, I hurt. I could only walk two or three blocks, I was out of breath. I found a gym that was open 24 hours a day.

I'd go there and the night hand pool, and I would walk laps in the pool, up and down the pool, up and down the pool in the water, because it didn't beat my body up as much. And then I got one hour, two hours, three hours, and set a goal that by my 50th birthday, I wanted to do a five-hour pool walk. Okay. Lo and behold, by my 50th birthday, I lost about 50 pounds.

I did that five-hour pool walk. Two days later, I did one for five and a half hours. So, you know, I was able to do that, and then I started evolving, slowly losing more weight, slowly changing the way I ate, learning more about healthy nutrition. I eventually got to a point 12 and a half years ago where I became vegetarian.

I quit eating chicken and turkey, but I kept eating eggs, butter, cheese, that type of stuff. Since that day, I'm a vegetarian. I've been sick one time. Really?

In 12 and a half years, and that includes getting exposed to COVID. My wife caught COVID in the airport, brought it home. I felt off for two days, but I still did my walking and I didn't catch COVID. I never tested positive, and my body threw it off.

Now I had the vaccine, so I'm sure that helped. The point is, I've learned that proper nutrition builds your immune system. And I think proper nutrition is equally as important and probably more important than exercise. Okay.

And I want to define healthy nutrition for a second. Let's talk about inputs. Okay. Diet, you think of food, and it's everything, all your inputs are the food you stick in your mouth, the things you drink.

Your diet is not just the food you eat, it's the thoughts that go in your head. What did Gandhi used to say? Never let anyone walk through your mind with their dirty feet. True.

Yeah. What do you tell yourself? What do you think about yourself? I admitted to you that when I started, I was disgusted with myself.

That wasn't a healthy thought, except for the fact that it led me to do something, to change. And the reason why I changed was because when I started, I asked myself, where am I going to be in five years if I keep doing what I'm doing? And the answer was dead. Yeah.

And I said, I don't want to be dead at the age of 55. That's ridiculous. But that was 17 years ago I started. And I'll give you one of the reasons why I'm so concerned about lawyers.

I haven't had this has been probably 10, 11, 12 years ago. I was a sponsor, I'm in Arizona. I was a sponsor of the Arizona State Bar Convention. And I had a booth where I sat there for three days in the booth.

And during the break times, I watched the lawyers walking up and down and just looking at them. And I could just tell from looking at them and watching what they were doing, watching what they were eating and everything. I said, a third of these people are going to have a health crisis in the next five years. It was obvious to me.

So along the way, I continued to refine what I was eating. I reached a point seven and a half years ago where I couldn't get my weight below 180 pounds, no matter what I was doing. And by that time, I was walking 10 to 15 miles every day. Wow.

And someone asked, how can I walk that much? The answer is I have a treadmill with a computer on my treadmill. Okay. I had a doctor recommend to me put a computer on your treadmill and set it to two miles an hour and walk.

I know I help people set up situations like that now. Go into offices, tell people to do that because it's so much healthier and so much better. You hear about the standing disks, that's another thing that's really good in law offices. So I do that, and but I couldn't lose the weight.

So I said, I need to analyze what I'm eating. And I said, I need to stop eating butter, cheese, and ice cream. Three wonderful tasting foods, but butter, no butter, no cheese, no ice cream. So essentially I went vegan.

And when I did that, I melted. I lost five pounds, and I'm sorry, I lost 50 pounds in five minutes. Well, the weight just came off of me. I was getting up every morning lost, and those were fun days.

I'm real big on healthy nutrition. Exercise, and I recommend walking because it doesn't beat you up. You're at the office and you're stressed out. You have 20-30 minutes for lunch.

Go outside and walk for 20 minutes. Eat your lunch while you're out. Bring your lunch to work, something healthy, and eat it while you're out walking for 20 to 30 minutes. Then you can sit there and you can do your work.

I recommend lots of substitutions, changes like that. So now let's flip this forward. What did I learn from this experience? What I learned from the experience was that despite the fact I was already a confident guy, the experience of losing all this weight and keeping it off, the experience of going from a person who can only walk two or three blocks to turning into a walking athlete.

I'm 66 now. I walk a half marathon every day, and I've been doing it every day for the last 15 months. Amazing. And that's at the age of 66.

So what has taught me is I'm more powerful than I ever imagined. Way more powerful. That's why I do what I do, because I'm in year 18 of this process. I'm in year 18 of looking for my limits, and I haven't found them.

Fantastic. But now, people listening, that's enough about me. Let's talk about you. If I'm more powerful than I ever imagined, what does that say about you?

Am I more special than you? No. Am I more powerful than you? No.

Am I any better than you? We are all special, each and every one of us. If I am more powerful than I ever imagined, so are you. If you're listening, you are more powerful than you ever imagined.

Start believing. Because when you believe it, that's when the magic starts to happen. And when I realized how powerful I was, it led me to ask a question. And the question was if I could do all these things, what else is out there waiting for me to do that I haven't done yet that I should be doing?

Okay. And the answer I came up with was turn this into a system. I'm a CPA, I'm a systems thinker. So turn this into a system that people can use, not only for weight loss, weight loss is my story.

Yours may be something different, might just be how to de-stress yourself, how to optimize your life, but turn it into a system that people can use in their own way, in a way that works for them, to help them become a better person. So what I essentially created was I created a unit operating system. Okay. Think of it as Windows 11, Mac OS, Android, for what it is to be a human being, the excellent, optimized human being.

Okay. That system I came up with, I called it the way of excellence. And you can tell by this nice color-coded chart how Align everything lines up and everything. And the reason why I call it excellence and not perfection is because, like we briefly discussed before, we are all imperfect human beings.

Sure. Your goal should not be perfection. Your goal should be excellence. Now let's talk about what the difference is.

When you're a perfectionist, there's only one thing that's good enough, and that's being perfect. And I've already told you, you're never going to be perfect. Never. The people around you are never going to be perfect.

If you start from a floor that I call good enough, if you become what I call a good enoughist, when you realize that good enough is good enough. But just because you're a good enough, it doesn't mean you can't work to get better. Doesn't mean you can't go farther, doesn't mean you can't get stronger, doesn't mean you can't optimize what you're doing. Those are all things, that's what excellence is constantly working to improve yourself.

And that's the difference. When you make a mistake, you can either do what I used to do, which is beat yourself upside the head, say you're no good, say you're worthless, and turn back to whatever your crutch is, be it alcohol, be it food, be it whatever, keep sliding down into that hole. Or you can sit there and say, I messed up. Mistakes are proof that I'm trying.

What can I learn from the mistake? Pick myself back up and get going again. The old me would fall down seven times, get up eight. Me, I've probably fallen down a thousand times, gotten up a thousand and one.

When I got up that last time, I was a heck of a lot stronger for the things I learned. A thousand times more. Would if I could go back and change things that happened to me from the time I was eight years old till now, if I can change some things, would I? Sure.

Absolutely, I would. But do I have any regrets for what I went through? And the answer is no. Because the experiences I went through were necessary to teach me what I know now and to turn me into the person I am now.

A person who has the knowledge and experience to help other people to get better because that's what life's about. Okay, I'm 66, I've had a successful career. I could retire right now. Go sit on the beach, go relax.

But I don't want to because I'm just getting started. I'm warmed up now, I'm excited. And you probably can tell I'm a little passionate about this subject. Yes.

And actually care about other people, believe it or not. And but I think we all should care about other people besides ourselves. I think that's what makes the world good. Agreed.

And that's why I like that's why I like what you're doing with your podcast. So turn it into a system and do these things. Now all of these things that I have, I've put them on my website, and I've made everything I have available for free. It's not that I don't like money.

It's not that I don't have people hire me to work with them. I do. I realize that not everyone has money. And I don't want money to get in the way.

My message. And the message is personal empowerment. Okay. You are more powerful than you ever imagined.

If you want to change your life, just get started and keep going, keep going and keep going. The whole all boils down to two major things. The system's more complicated than that, but I'm going to hit the two highlights. The first one is admitting to yourself the way things are.

Like I said, I'm going to change or I'm going to be good. I'm doing all these things that are bad, they're incompatible with the person I want to be, and then acting on it. Temporary action isn't going to cut it, has to be permanent act. So the question, so it becomes this three most important words in the English language.

I used to say they were I love you. Now I say they are are you willing? Okay. Because unless and until you become willing to permanently and positively change for the rest of your hopefully very long, hopefully very happy, hopefully very healthy life, you're not going to get where you want to be.

That's true. Yep. You're straightforward. So that's number one.

And number two is once you get started, never stop, keep going, never give up, never surrender. Be the little energizer bunny. Keep going and going. Except I'm not the energizer bunny, I'm the energizer snail.

I keep moving and keep moving. Say hi to everyone in the audience. Hello. This is Stanley the Snail.

That's what it's all about. If you have concerns about where you're at, all you do when you go to my website, take a look around. The very first, it's got three tabs. I got the website as simple as can be.

First tab, you scroll down it, and it's got videos on every one of the parts of the system. The videos are eight to twelve minutes each. Watch one a day. Okay.

And this is theway of excellence.com. Yes, the wayofexcellence.com.

Okay. You sit there and do that. Please put that in the show notes. I will.

You sit there and you do that. And watch one a day in less than a month, you learn the system. Then I have tons of free guidebooks on different topics where I talk about anger management, you know, how to optimize yourself, talk about you know how to become a long-term thinker. See, because one of the things I've learned is life is a long-term game.

But the problem is we live in a short-term world. Everything is instant, instant. We want instant gratification. We need to learn to think in decades, but then act daily.

See, see how many people have a five-year plan? For me, the lawyers listening, a lot of you are probably high achievers. So I would say probably a larger number, larger percentage of you probably have a five-year plan. Do you have a 10-year plan, 20-year plan, 50-year plan?

I'm 60. Okay, I'm 66. Don't know how long how long I'm gonna live. But I have a 100-year plan.

Am I gonna get there? Don't know. But if I do, I know what I want to do along the way. And that doesn't mean you can't revise the plan along the way.

Sure, you're constantly revising things. That's normal as you learn more. But if you suspect or just want to be better than what you already are, I can help you. See, and that's one of the reasons I'm doing this, is because all the lawyer assistance programs that I've found around the country, I don't like them.

Don't get me wrong, I think they're good and they're necessary. I think they focus too much on how do you help the lawyer after they've fallen apart and there's a problem. Okay. I believe it is not necessary to fall apart.

It is not necessary to have a problem before you can change yourself and prove yourself. See, my whole I'm a true transactional attorney. I'm not a litigator, I don't have the stomach to be a litigator. It's not who I am.

My whole career has been how do I anticipate problems and how do I avoid problems. And if I did my job well, you never went to court and you never had a problem, and everything worked smoothly. That's the same approach I take to this. You don't need to fall apart.

If you suspect you're going down the wrong path, if you're not spending enough time with your kids, if you're if you have a drinking problem, you have a drug problem, or you just you're all are you're just stressed out, or you feel like you're overwhelming, you want to get in shape. That's the third tab on my website is healthy living. Gives you a lot of guidance, especially on weight loss. What is a healthy diet?

Healthy nutrition, learning, because a lot of it is knowledge. The information that is out there is very conflicting, and most of the information is being given to us by people who want to make money off of us. They're trying to sell us something. This is my opinion again, here.

And I think that's bad. That's one of the reasons everything on my website is available for free. Because I don't, I think I would be a hypocrite if I sat there complaining about people who are trying to constantly sell us stuff and make a buck off of us. If I go out and do the same thing.

Fortunately, I'm in a place in my life where I can do that. So that's what I have chosen to do. If anybody wants to contact me when they go to the website, the bottom of every page, it's got a link. Click here to contact Steam.

All you do is drop me a note, send me an email. If you even want to just say thank you, you know, you can do that. I appreciate what people say, thank you. That's most of it, and that's who I am.

You have any questions, any thoughts? That's that's incredible. I love that you're looking at doing making people better humans instead of trying to address maybe just burnout when it could be so much more or so much deeper. And I do encourage everyone, of course, to go to thewayavexcellence.

com. That will be in the show notes. And uh yeah, do you for somebody who's listening and say, say if is the when is the best time to to do this inner looking, to look inside and decide, is it when you feel stuck or burnt out or unhealthy or just how now let me tell you something else. Even if you don't feel stuck, even if you don't feel burned out, doesn't mean you can't get better.

I don't feel stuck, I don't feel burned out. I most days I wake up every morning, I'm fortunate, I work on only what I want to work on, not what I have to work on. I feel good about myself, but I am constantly looking at how I can improve myself. Program I call Optimize You.

I have a whole book on. It's called The Way of You. It's on my website, it's free. You can read it on my website for free, or you can put it on your tablet or your phone.

But my version of that is called Optimize Stanley. I spend time on that every day. How can I optimize myself? I've achieved my goals.

So it's time to come up with new ones. Yeah, exactly. It sounds like become the better, best version of yourself, is what you're coaching people to do. I can't sit here and coach people how to be a better person if I say I'm already where I need to be and I'm not working on trying to improve myself.

True. I'd be a hypocrite. Trust me, I spent enough of my life being a hypocrite where I don't want to do it. This sounds like definitely a life-changing program, and I love that you make it available for free so that more people can get in touch with themselves and direct and into their goals.

You're welcome. I'm glad that I can. I know that I know our listeners may want to reach out to you and connect with you. Obviously, thewayavexcellence.

com. We'll put that in the show notes. Where else can they connect with you and learn more about you and maybe work with you? That's the best place at the present time.

I'm also on YouTube under the Way of Excellence. But I'm getting ready in another month or two. I'm going to be reactivating that. I'm going to be adding a bunch of more material to it.

I'm going to be starting my own podcast. Okay. And that type of thing. So there will be more there at that time.

But it's all on the website, it's the best place to go. And you can contact me from there too. And if you want to work together, there's I do it multiple ways. We can do it all remotely.

Or if you want me to, I'll hop on a plane and I'll come to you. That obviously costs more money. But whatever you want to do that works with you, but it's also better in a lot of ways because I can sit there and I can see your environment. And we can work together and implement changes that are in specific to your environment.

Because that's so much of what this all is. We talked about your inputs. What is your environment? In my house, there is no unhealthy food in my house.

And that's worried because after 17 plus years in the process, when I started, my wife would have ice cream in the freezer and cookies and other things like that. She doesn't eat that stuff very much anymore. She would have those things, so I had to develop the discipline to say that just because those things were there doesn't mean I need to eat them. True.

And in other words, taking personal responsibility. Yeah. Don't say, hey, you brought this garbage into the house, look, you're sabotaging me. She wasn't sabotaging me.

She brought it in the house because she wanted to eat it. And she was skinny and she could handle it. It's not her fault. Yeah.

That's one of the things I've learned is that blame gets us nowhere. True. And if you're a politician in Washington, please realize that blame gets us nowhere. Let's just start working together.

Yeah. That's my political soapbox. All right. I really appreciate that.

Now you made some really valid points that I think really hit home. And I'm going to have a look at more of the videos on the Way of Excellent. It is a great website. Stanley, again, this has been a really great conversation.

I've enjoyed what you've been able to share with attorneys and how they can become better humans and reach their goals and be healthier and happier in what they're doing. Thank you, Maryland. That's a wrap on today's episode of the Leadership in Law Podcast. Before you go, I want to make sure that you know about something that could be a real game changer for your firm.

If you've been doing the work, showing up, serving clients, but your marketing still isn't producing the caseload you know you deserve. That's exactly the problem Law Marketing Zone was built to solve. My team and I work exclusively with law firms, and we don't do cookie cutter. We build a strategy around your practice, your market, and your goals.

More high-quality leads, better cases, less stress, and more profit. Head over to LawmarketingZone.com/slash book a call and book your free case growth session today. The link is in the show notes.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next episode. Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Leadership in Law Podcast. Remember, you're not alone on this journey. There's a whole community of law firm owners out there facing similar challenges and striving for the same success.

Head over to our website at LawMarketingZone.com. From there, connect with other listeners, access valuable resources, and stay up to date on the latest episodes. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us to review on your favorite podcast platform.

Until next time, keep leading with vision and keep growing your firm.