Episode
Gratitude, Agency, and building the life you're grateful to have with Aaron Hendon
- Podcast
- Hapitalist
- Published
- May 29, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 3280
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Summary
* Listen on the app of your choice Aaron Henden — author, speaker, meditation teacher, and managing broker of a real estate team based on a small island in Puget Sound — joins Russell for a conversation that moves from the philosophy of gratitude all the way to frameworks for coaching, selling, and building a business that earns trust before it asks for anything. 1. Why Gratitude Journals Don’t Work (And What Does) Both Russell and Aaron share a bone-deep allergy to the gratitude journal. Aaron’s argument: writing down “my dog, my car, my wife” over and over isn’t accessing gratitude — it’s putting icing on dog shit and pretending it tastes like cake. It treats gratitude as a performance rather than an experience. His alternative is what he calls “agency of attention”, which is the practice of intentionally directing your focus rather than letting an increasingly engineered world do it for you. Most people walk through life like a cafeteria, taking what gets slopped on the plate. The work is learning to choose what goes on it. 2. The Problem With Toxic Positivity This episode takes a harder line on forced positivity than most wellness conversations are willing to. Aaron’s framework — Awareness, Allowance, Acceptance — is built on the premise that you can’t change your behavior until you go through this process. Telling yourself “I’m safe” during a panic attack doesn’t produce safety; it produces a nervous system that associates safety with panic attacks. Telling yourself everything is fine when it clearly isn’t doesn’t make it fine. Instead, it gaslights your own body. 3. “I Think That” vs. “I Had That Thought” The shift from “I am angry” to “I am a person who has anger” — or from “I think this” to “I had that thought” — creates the sliver of space between you and the…