Sharpening the Saw: Why Working Against Resistance is Like Trying to Tune a Guitar with Tight Strings
There's a story Stephen Covey tells in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People that stops me in my tracks every time I think about it. A lumberjack is sawing down a tree, sweating and struggling as his dull blade tears through the wood with excruciating slowness. A friend walks by and suggests, "Hey, why don't you stop and sharpen the saw?" The lumberjack, never pausing in his laborious work, replies breathlessly, "I don't have time—I have to saw down this tree!"
The foolishness is obvious to everyone except the man with the saw. Fifteen minutes of sharpening would save him hours of struggle and produce better results with far less energy.
But what if I told you that most of us are that lumberjack every single day?
The Room Temperature Problem
Think about your breakfast this morning. Was it spectacular? Probably not. It was likely just... okay. Normal. The kind of meal you eat every day without much thought. You accept it because it's your baseline, your personal room temperature for morning nutrition.
This is exactly how resistance works in our lives. We've become so accustomed to our daily dose of internal friction that we don't even notice it anymore. That slight reluctance to start writing, the low-level dread about checking emails, the vague sense that a task will be "troublesome"—we dismiss these feelings as normal because they're our emotional room temperature.
But here's what I've discovered: if you're getting distracted by anything at all while working, that's resistance talking. If your mind wanders before hitting the natural 20-minute attention span most humans have for focused work, you're feeling resistance. And just like the lumberjack's dull saw, this resistance is costing you enormous amounts of time and energy.
It's time to become sensitive to your personal room temperature so you can adjust it.
My Awakening: The Editing Resistance
Last week, I faced a stack of blog posts that needed proofreading and editing. The moment I thought about the task, I felt that familiar weight in my chest—uninspired, resistant, dreading the work ahead. I knew I could force myself through it, grinding away like the lumberjack with his dull blade.
Instead, I decided to sharpen my saw.
I spent 15 minutes using a technique I call scanning breath, focusing directly on that feeling of resistance. As I breathed and scanned my attention across my body, something remarkable happened. The resistance revealed itself as a blue-tinted shell wrapped around my entire torso. With continued focus, it morphed into a cool rock settled in the bottom of my belly, then transformed into a warm rock, and finally dissolved almost completely.
When I returned to editing, the answers practically suggested themselves. What needed to be done became crystal clear, and I completed the work in a quarter of the time it would have taken if I'd pushed through the resistance. The quality was better too.
I had sharpened my saw.
The Bass Guitar Wisdom
My son plays bass guitar, and he's taught me something profound about preparation. Every time he finishes practicing, he performs a specific ritual: he wipes down the guitar to remove grease and fingerprints, then loosens all the strings. He explains that you need to start with loose strings, otherwise they get stretched and damaged over time.
This means every practice session begins with tuning. But here's what's beautiful—the tuning isn't just preparing the instrument. It's preparing him. Those few minutes of careful listening and adjustment create the mental space for focused practice. The external tuning enables internal tuning.
This is what addressing resistance does for our work. It's not just removing an obstacle; it's creating the optimal conditions for peak performance.
The Resistance Paradox: Why "Soft" is Actually Harder
Now, I can already hear the objections. "This sounds like making excuses." "Real discipline means pushing through resistance." "Winners don't give in to feelings."
But here's the paradox: what I'm describing is actually far more difficult than muscling through resistance. When you use scanning breath to dissolve resistance, you're not avoiding hard work—you're doing the hardest work of all. You're dismantling emotional attachments.
Let me explain with a personal example. When I was a boy, I hated mushrooms. This hatred became part of my identity, helping define who I was. It sounds ridiculous now—mushrooms aren't inherently evil—but that attachment was precious to me. Our dislikes become part of us, and we don't just dislike the things we dislike. We like disliking them.
Every time we encounter something we've decided to hate, we get to feel like victims. We get to suffer, and there's a strange comfort in that suffering because it reinforces our sense of self. We're attached to our attachments, even the painful ones.
Life becomes easier only when we let go of the very things we want to hold onto most. This is why the "soft" approach of working with resistance is actually brutally difficult—it requires surrendering pieces of our identity.
The Three Pillars of Working with Natural Rhythms
Over the years, I've discovered three interconnected approaches that honor our natural rhythms instead of fighting them:
Scanning Breath: This specific breathing pattern involves scanning your attention across your body while focusing on feelings of resistance. I've written extensively about the technique in other posts, but the key is treating emotions like physical sensations you can observe and dissolve.
Grease the Groove: This training concept applies to both physical exercise and mental work. Instead of pushing to 100% and creating pain, you work at 80% of your capacity. You leave room, avoiding the negative emotions and physical damage that come from maxing out. The challenge is doing multiple short sessions throughout the day rather than one exhausting marathon.
Strategic Breaks: I work in 15-minute focused sessions with 5-minute breaks. This isn't laziness—it's optimization. Just as my son spaces out his guitar practice, I've found that brief, frequent engagement creates better results than long slogs through resistance.
The Geology of Change
In geology, there are two types of change: the dramatic, cataclysmic shifts caused by earthquakes and volcanoes, and the slow, persistent erosion that carves canyons over millennia. Most personal development focuses on the earthquake model—dramatic breakthroughs and sudden transformations.
Working with resistance through scanning breath is erosion. It happens so slowly you almost don't notice it, but it's so persistent that over time it creates unbelievable changes.
Think of it like gardening. You plant seeds in soil, water them, and tend the earth. But you don't see anything for a long time. You have to believe, even when there's no visible progress.
The Realistic Timeline and Promise
Here's what I wish someone had told me when I started this work: you're not going to see results in three months. You'll spend long stretches where the seeds are still underground, working purely on faith.
In my experience, it takes about a year before you start seeing the first shoots of change. Another year or two before you notice substantial growth. Around the three-year mark, you begin harvesting small amounts of fruit—real moments of freedom where you feel genuinely unencumbered by resistance.
But when that fruit finally ripens, it's extraordinary. You discover you can feel good regardless of your environment. Things you used to like no longer need to be present for your happiness. Things you used to dislike no longer ruin your mood when they appear. You develop what I call environmental independence—a lightness of being that comes from releasing the attachments that once defined and confined you.
This is true freedom.
Getting Started: Your First 15 Minutes
If you're ready to start sharpening your saw, begin by developing sensitivity to resistance. Remember, if you want to take a break before the natural 20-minute attention span expires, you're feeling resistance. If your mind starts wandering to other tasks, that's resistance too.
When you notice resistance, try the magnifying lens technique. Focus your attention on the feeling as if you're examining it through a magnifying glass. The feeling doesn't actually get bigger—it just occupies your entire attention. Do this while practicing scanning breath for 15 minutes.
The hardest part isn't the breathing or the scanning. It's identifying the feeling, grabbing onto it, and holding it in your awareness. Most of the time, we let these feelings slip by unnoticed, like background music we've stopped hearing.
Remember: you're not avoiding hard work. You're choosing to do the hardest work of all—releasing the very things that your ego insists you need to keep.
The Tuned Life
Every morning, my son picks up his bass guitar and begins with tuning. He could skip this step and jump straight into playing, but the music would suffer. The strings would fight him. The notes would be off.
Every day, we face the same choice. We can grab our metaphorical saw and start hacking away with whatever dullness yesterday left us with. We can force ourselves through tasks while swimming upstream against our own resistance.
Or we can take a few minutes to tune our instruments. We can sharpen our saws. We can address the resistance that makes everything harder than it needs to be.
The lumberjack in Covey's story never learned this lesson. He remained trapped in his own urgent busyness, convinced that stopping to sharpen would cost him time.
But you don't have to be that lumberjack.
What resistance will you address today?