Step 6: Entirely Ready

Step Six reads: 'Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character' (page 59). It is one of the shortest instructions in the whole program, and it is easy to hurry past. But Step Six is where the program stops being only about what we did while drinking and starts being about who we are. Steps Four and Five showed us the wreckage and the patterns behind it. Step Six asks a simple, searching question: now that we have seen these things clearly, are we willing to live without them? Notice that we do not remove anything ourselves. Our job is readiness. The removing belongs to God.

Where Step 6 Lives in the Big Book

The Step itself appears in the list of the Twelve Steps in the chapter How It Works (page 59). The instructions for working it come one chapter later, in Into Action, on page 76. The Big Book gives Step Six exactly one paragraph, and that brevity is not neglect. It is a signal that the work here is inward. The setup matters too. After Step Five, the Book has us return home, find a quiet hour, and review the first five Steps carefully, because 'we are building an arch through which we shall walk a free man at last' (page 75). We check our work the way a builder checks a foundation. Only when we are satisfied that those first five stones are solid do we look at Step Six.

How the Big Book Says to Work It

The paragraph on page 76 opens plainly: 'We have emphasized willingness as being indispensable.' Then it puts a question to us: 'Are we now ready to let God remove from us all the things which we have admitted are objectionable?' It presses the point further, asking whether He can take them all, every single one (page 76). Read that slowly. The list of objectionable things did not come from a preacher or a pamphlet. It came from our own Fourth Step inventory and our own mouth in Step Five. We admitted these things ourselves. Step Six only asks whether we meant it.

Then comes the sentence that makes this Step workable for real human beings: 'If we still cling to something we will not let go, we ask God to help us be willing' (page 76). That is the entire method. We sit quietly with what the inventory showed us. We ask the question honestly. Where the answer is yes, we thank God. Where the answer is no, we do not fake it and we do not despair. We pray for the willingness we lack. The Book has already told us why we cannot simply fix ourselves; page 62 traces our troubles to their root: 'Selfishness—self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles.' A self-centered mind cannot uproot its own self-centeredness. So we ask for help becoming ready, the same way we asked for help getting sober.

What Changes When We Become Entirely Ready

Something quiet but real shifts in Step Six. We stop defending the very things that have been beating us. For years we protected our resentments because they felt like justice, our fears because they felt like caution, our pride because it felt like dignity. Becoming entirely ready means we finally file them where the inventory said they belong: not as personality, but as the blocks standing between us and God and other people. This is the Third Step decision applied to our character. And it does not demand instant sainthood. Page 60 says it straight: 'We claim spiritual progress rather than spiritual perfection.' Entirely ready does not mean entirely fixed. It means nothing on the list is off the table anymore.

Here is the honest part. Most of us reach Step Six and discover we still like some of our defects. Anger gets results. Pride feels like backbone. Worry feels responsible. Underneath sits a real fear: if God removes all of this, what is left of me? That fear deserves respect, not shame, and the Book quietly answers it. It never asks us to feel ready or to enjoy the prospect. It asks whether we are willing, and when we are not, it hands us one instruction: ask God to help us be willing (page 76). Willingness to become willing counts. What we cannot do is carve out a favorite defect and keep it on purpose, because page 59 already warned us that 'Half measures availed us nothing.'

When we can answer with a wholehearted yes, or at least an honest prayer toward yes, the Book moves us straight ahead. The very next lines on page 76 give us Step Seven, where we humbly ask God to take what we have become ready to release. Step Six packs the bags. Step Seven hands them over.