While you are taking your full breath and your arms are fully resting by your sides you can check your posture. Are you balanced? Do you have one leg crossed over the other? Are you leaning to one side or another? Crossing your legs might actually be a polite posture, depending on the clothing you are wearing. Balance out they way you are contorting your body by crossing them the other way. If you don't need to cross your legs, teach yourself to be comfortable without crossing them. Stand or sit with equal weight to each side of your body so that when you need to lean or step to one side for linguistic reasons, you can return to neutral or to the opposite contrastive side with ease.
Now, here's another tip. This one comes from Dr. Clayton Valli, ASL Poet and former Gallaudet professor. He told me the story about how he would use leg posture to help him quickly decide the quality of the interpreters at Gallaudet.
Years ago Gallaudet had what we called "Dual Services"... I don't know that the practice is still going on, but back in the day that meant that we had INTERPRETING on one side of the stage and TRANSLITERATING on the other. When Dr. Valli joined the faculty he initially sat with all of the DEAF POWER Deaf members near the INTERPRETING side. But he would check out the other interpretation at the other end of the stage and found that sometimes that message was easier to understand. Eventually he started sitting in the middle of the auditorium and when the interpreting teams changed he would spend a few moments looking at each one until he decided which one was more clear. Once he made that decision he stuck with it until the next change of interpreters and he would make his comparisons again. Eventually Dr. Valli noticed one consistent behavioral feature that had significant predictive power. He noticed the interpreters' feet, or rather the distance between the feet, provided enough information that he no longer needed to compare the signing to decide which interpreter was more clear. If the feet were together, then the interpreter would be unable to use contrastive signing space. If the feet were shoulder-width apart then the interpreter WOULD be making use of contrastive signing space. Regardless of what the interpreter thought they were doing - INTERPRETING or TRANSLITERATING - if they did it with their feet locked together, they were going to be useless to Dr. Valli.
So balance yourself, allow yourself to lean, or even STEP INTO contrastive signing space, and breathe.
