The Mindful Freelancer: Why Agency of Attention Matters More Than Hustle Culture with Aaron Hendon

For many freelancers, work can gradually become a constant cycle of hustle, burnout, and distraction. But when your agency of attention is pulled in a hundred directions, it becomes surprisingly difficult to know how to build a sustainable business and protect your mental well-being.

In this episode of The Freelance Insider Show, I talk with Aaron Hendon about mindfulness, overcoming hustle culture, decision-making, performance, and the challenge of building agency of attention as a freelancer or entrepreneur.

Aaron also shares why high performers and billionaires swear by mindfulness, why well-being is the foundation of performance, and how a simple ten-minute daily practice can transform your business mindset.

Watch the Episode

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Why agency of attention matters more than sheer hustle culture
• How work identity and exhaustion affect freelance decisions about sales and clients
• The real meaning of mindfulness in a practical business context
• Why the highest-performing people and billionaires incorporate mindfulness into their routines
• How to recognize when your mind is hijacked by constant distractions
• The connection between success, personal well-being, and professional results
• How to use the simple “coffee meditation” practice to build agency of attention
• Why treating mindfulness as a tool for performance changes everything
• How to overcome scarcity mindset and stop losing sales to commission breath
• Why the return—catching your mind wandering—is the actual practice of meditation

Episode Transcript

Well Aaron thanks for coming on today. I appreciate it.

Aaron Hendon: Al, I appreciate the opportunity to be with you. Thanks.

Al: Gonna start off with a bit about your background, I guess. You spent thirty years helping people perform at higher levels. You’ve coached more than ten thousand people. And you’ve built businesses yourself. So what originally led you down the path of helping people change the way they work and live?

Aaron Hendon: Um, let’s see. I owned my own business at the time. I had a bakery in Albuquerque, and I hired a business coach. And you know, we worked well together. He was, I found his advice to be actionable and useful in a lot of ways. So I trusted him, and he recommends that I do a Transformational Weekend program called the Landmark Forum.

Al: Okay.

Aaron Hendon: So I thought, all right, well, it’s costing me less than I’m paying him. Let me try it. See what it’s like. I didn’t know anything about it other than he advised me to do it. And so I jumped in and I did it, and it frankly completely changed my life. It blew my mind. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m from New York originally. We were just talking about that preshow. So I’m predisposed to being cynical and, you know, nothing makes any difference at all. Sounds like West Coast mojo hippie guru nonsense to me, you know.

Al: Yeah.

Aaron Hendon: And so here I am in a room full of a hundred and fifty people for a weekend, and I would never have done anything like that had he not recommended it. But I’ll tell you, it completely changed my perspective. And one of the ways in which it changed my perspective was it uncovered the commitment that I’ve subsequently found that I think is inherent in all people, and that is the desire to have our lives matter.

Al: Right.

Aaron Hendon: You know, I think there are many people who’ve decided their lives don’t or their lives can’t or it doesn’t make any difference or they’re resigned, but that’s all on top of “I have a commitment or desire that I would like my life to matter to other people.” That underlying desire is always there for sure. It’s always there and it’s there for everyone and it’s there from a young age. And sometimes it gets beaten, you know, like worn out of us by life, but the fact is it’s there.

Given the other results I got—like, you know, I got freed up around my relationships with women, my business became profitable, all these different results—I wound up with agency in areas I just didn’t have agency before. Um, I thought, oh, this would make a difference. So I learned how to lead programs for Landmark, and in that capacity, that’s really the first place I got a taste of working with people who are committed to unleashing something in their lives. And I’ve been working with people for the last thirty years in that capacity. Never stopped doing it.

The Connection Between Success and Well-Being

Al: So you talked about your bagel shop you had there. From owning a bagel shop to becoming a top-producing real estate agent—yes, it’s a natural path, everyone does that. From there you find yourself eventually focusing heavily on mindfulness, which is what leads us into the conversation today. What do those different experiences teach you about the relationship between success and personal well-being?

Aaron Hendon: Well, here’s the problem I have with framing anything in the domain of personal well-being. On one hand, the relationship could not be more obvious. Who’s the one having the success? The Dalai Lama says, you know, we’re not grateful for our teeth, but we really do notice when one of them hurts. So you’re not present to well-being unless it’s absent, right?

How much business are you gonna get done if you have a hole in your tooth? None, zero. You’ve got to go handle that. So well-being is the foundation; it’s the floor, it’s what you get to perform on top of. Without that, there’s nothing. Everyone knows this on an intellectual level. But it’s too easy to put it off. A freelancer, an entrepreneur, a business owner, anyone who lives inside the current paradigm of hustle culture—which is really the name for the current paradigm of business these days—has been that for a while. It’s not some new phenomenon.

But anyone who’s operating inside that world knows this phenomenon all too well: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” or “We wear busy like a badge of honor.” You know, you brag about how busy you are and how overwhelmed you are and how little sleep you get. If you frame the whole thing in well-being, it becomes optional or delayable. So I’ve developed a commitment that certainly as far as mindfulness goes, or any of the practices that you might otherwise consider useful for mental health, to stop framing them that way, because you’ll forget about it. You won’t do it. It’ll be optional. You gotta frame it in the world of performance for people: “This will increase your results.” Oh, now I’m interested!

Agency of Intention Versus Agency of Attention

Al: Mindset is everything. You can’t find two coaches in the world that don’t talk about the importance of mindset as it relates to sales. What do freelancers and entrepreneurs do when motivation wears off?

Aaron Hendon: Everyone’s got agency of intention, like goal setting (“I intend to be present with my family”). No one has a problem setting their intentions. Any of the freelancers, business owners, entrepreneurs listening have goals, targets, a vision. But agency of attention? Not so much.

We find ourselves at the dinner table far too frequently running tomorrow’s meeting in our head or relitigating the sales that we just lost. Our agency of attention—our ability to leave our attention where we want it—is missing. And there’s very little conversation for what can be done to develop that. And that’s really where I have found the most use for myself these days.

What Mindfulness Actually Means in a Business Context

Al: You describe yourself as the “mindful CEO,” but mindfulness feels like an abstract concept to a lot of people. What do you actually mean by mindfulness in a truly business context?

Aaron Hendon: Whether it’s in a business context or a personal context, mindfulness doesn’t change. It’s the ability to pay attention in the present, on purpose, without judgment.

Where that’s useful in a business context is when a client’s talking to you. It’d be useful to be present, on purpose, without judgment. Normally when we talk, we’re not really listening; we’re figuring out what we can say to what they’re saying. What’s objection handling in sales? None of it’s based in curiosity, in wonder, in openness, in inquiry without attachment to an outcome. You can smell a salesman that needs a sale every single time—commission breath is a thing.

When you meet someone who’s actually there listening for you without attachment, we like to say around the office: all things being equal, people will buy from someone they know, like, and trust. When things aren’t equal, they buy from someone they know, like, and trust. They will only buy from people they know, like, and trust, period. Well, how much more trustworthy can you get than someone who doesn’t need anything from you, who’s just there listening and providing feedback without attachment? That’s a trustworthy person. That’s why the people I train in mindfulness increase their sales without doing any more work. They just stop losing sales that they would have had otherwise.

Overcoming Exhaustion and Hustle Culture

Al: You mentioned that motivation can get you started, but if your underlying mindset is wired for exhaustion, the old patterns eventually win. Can you speak on what that means exactly?

Aaron Hendon: Our ability to control what we rest our attention on is limited, and we live in the most distracting time in human history. You have the most distracting device ever invented within arm’s reach at all times, pinging, buzzing, vibrating. Google has spent two hundred million dollars to discover which of forty-three shades of blue gets the most clicks. We’re part of an experiment!

Our attention is being hijacked by people that are good at it. If we don’t train our attention, it’s gonna go wherever shiny objects go. And the more exhausted we are, the less say we have about that. If we have practices first of all to develop agency of attention—training your brain to rest where you’d like it to rest versus wherever it’s pulled to go—that practice is called meditation.

The FMRIs are clear. Meditation physically changes your brain the way exercise changes the body. You rewire the neuronal pathways in your brain. Your prefrontal cortex gets more active, and your amygdala becomes less active—permanently, once it becomes a practice.

Practical Mindfulness: The Coffee Meditation

Al: So for a freelancer or entrepreneur that has five or ten minutes a day, what practice would you recommend they start with?

Aaron Hendon: Sit down with your cup of coffee or tea. No phone, no TV, no radio. Just you and the cup. Feel the warmth, feel the weight. Get interested in the color of the cup, look at the oil on top of the coffee, feel what it feels like to bring it up to your lips, the heat, the smell. Taste the coffee.

The thing that they gotta watch out for is that the mind wanders. And you catch it and you bring it back—it’s like training a puppy. The mind wandering isn’t a problem; you notice the mind wandered and you come back. The return is the practice. That’s developing agency of attention. Ten minutes a day of drinking a cup of coffee with intention is as good of a mindfulness practice as sitting closed eyes watching your breath.

Where to Find Aaron

Al: If people want to reach out and learn more, is your website the best place to start?

Aaron Hendon: Absolutely, Aaronhendon.com. I offer meditation coaching on a pay-what-you-want basis so people can pay whatever they want to learn how to meditate with me.

Al: We’ll include that in the show notes as well. Thanks so much for coming by today, Aaron!

Aaron Hendon: Thank you, Al.