Exercise: Finding a Ready Position

In what situations, other than a formal presentation, do you envision employing the Ready Position? Think about the many types of formulated Ready Positions in playing a sport or an instrument, setting your body in a patterned Ready Position before using a sharp knife to chop onions, or before a young child leaps into your arms.

When you practice patterning your body to be ready before you execute a physical activity or motion, you concentrate and pay attention differently.

In everyday, low risk face-to-face communications and virtual environments, purposefully set your body in a Ready Position when you communicate or present. Observe what occurs in not only your thoughts and feelings as you communicate out loud, but also how a communication partner interacts with you or responds to you. In everyday communications, during group discussions, for professional or technical interactions, or in presentation situations, practice the Ready Position BEFORE you speak. You want the body to register the Ready Position as a familiar and necessary pattern. 

As you practice the Ready Position, what are you noticing about how you respond internally to a Stance that sets up a more open Emotional Center. What are the strategic implications for you in recognizing how physical positioning impacts your Emotional Center?

Practice these tools with structured content.

You can choose about 20 to 30 seconds of professional, educational or personal experience material that you have previously presented on, or that you know well and could present. Or, you could simply introduce yourself with this pattern:

Tell your name.

Share a bit about where you are in your professional or educational journey.

Reveal something interesting that you like to do or a hobby you engage in.

Once you have your content in mind, frame your body in the Ready Position and then practice the material out loud. Practice staying anchored in the Ready Position and resist traveling. Instead, expend that energy, as well as any impulses to move your feet and body, into your arms and hands and allow gestures to utilize that energy.

Keep practicing a Ready Position with different kinds of structured content or improvised content. You are developing a pattern of a confident and engaged body during oral delivery and presentation.

Try to become conscious of how this simple physical framing suppresses wandering thoughts and encourages engagement in the communication with your audience.

Recall the Physical Orientation lesson. You can combine aspects of Physical Orientation with your Ready Position practice.

Ready Position in Full Front will be different than a Ready Position in a Quarter Turn. Line Focus changes can be employed to amplify or soften the focus relationship without sacrificing your readiness.