The 3 Pillars of Quiet Confidence – Pillar 2: Stacking

In this introductory series, we cover the principles of Quiet Confidence – the 3 pillars:

1. Grounding & Stability
2. Stacking
3. Volume (Personal Space)

These 3 pillars are the 3 guiding principles that help develop awareness in your own body, as well as allow you to control how you feel in your body and therefore parts of your subconscious, and ultimately to feel fully safe and secure within your own body and space.

Here, we are going to cover stacking, the next step to ensuring that you feel safe and secure within your entire body.

What is stacking?

Stacking your structure is the second of the core elements we use in Quiet Confidence. It allows us to be comfortable within ourselves – to carry ourselves with integrity.

Our body, as we use it in our day to day lives, needs to be kept up with good shape. This means things that we are taught in school: Have good posture, keep your back straight and keep your head up. But what is good posture?
Some people, for example have their back too straight which will cause strain to the spine, and others while standing up tall have their shoulders all tense and high, which leads to migraines and sore shoulders. The problem with all these postures and what the majority of people are missing is the subsequent connection of each body part to each other part.

We are like puppets with strings running through our whole body, except that the strings are nerves.

That is, just as grounding is the connection to the ground, stacking is the connection of each body part to each other.

Through your structure you carry the person you are.

Why do you need stacking?

Being aware of your structure will help you in many ways. Good structure means you:

• Use less energy
• Portray to others that you are confident within yourself
• Gain the ability to change situations that have put pressure on us
• Feel more comfortable within your own body
• Reduces tension

Stacking is allowing your body structure to stand in its natural format. Whereas grounding is how your naturally connect to the ground (how stable you are on the ground), stacking is how you carry your body mass on your frame, and is equally as important.

As discussed before, it will lead to a more natural posture that fits you, leading you to reduce tension in your muscles and feel more comfortable in your body, and in return this will let you use less energy in you day-to-day activities.

It will also let you build yourself up while staying connected, which will build a much more powerful aura than one who simply tries to exert the top half of their upper body, for instance, which is something we touched upon in grounding and stability. And just with the idea of reasserting your grounding when faced with the pressured situation, this too can work with stacking, which will let you gain the ability to redirect high pressured situations.

How people are unaware of their stacking

As previously mentioned, many people suffer from shoulder and neck pain, as they are unnaturally using only the small upper body muscle groups to carry their posture. This is what leads to tight shoulders, and compression in the upper body, which makes you feel small.

It is, however, easy to solve – we’ve just forgotten how!

After years of subconscious programming, watching the people around us suffer from the same ailments and mimicking their postures, we as humans have forgotten how to naturally carry ourselves with our entire body. However, with some simple exercises and continuous practice, this habit CAN be reversed so we feel natural in our bodies again.

Returning to the fight or flight response

When people are tired or stressed, it is natural to react by positioning their body by compressing. However, this is only meant to be temporary, and with people suffering from chronic stress (fight of flight), tight body posture now simply feeds into this stress loop. However, sometimes all it takes is the awareness of your tightness in your upper muscles in order for you to relax your muscles and regain the lost posture.

This compression during fight or flight is most often seen in order to defend themselves, such as shielding with their arms and tucking their head. This does not need to be the full motion, and can be very subtle, such that one doesn’t even realize they’re doing it until they feel aches in these areas. It may occur because of:

• An oppressive work environment, which forces you to appear inconspicuous.
• Somebody attempting to dominate or intimidate you,
• Highly stressful lives, that you are constantly anxious (such as about deadlines) and therefore are stuck in fight-or-flight

In all these cases, it will create a compressed structure (which also shrinks your volume or personal space) and puts all the tension on your chest, shoulders, neck and back. Many people suffer from chronic aches in these areas because they’re conditioned to always be in fight-or-flight such as for the above reasons, and have to resort to massages and other contraptions to relieve the pain. However, this is treating the symptom, rather than prevention.

Non aggressive confidence

On top of our stable grounding we carry our structure. And the way we carry or use our structure enables us to change or accept where we are. Once we toss structure we loss confidence and feel vulnerable. So good structure gives you confidence without aggression.

On top of our stable grounding, we carry our structure. The way we carry or use structure allows us to change or accept where we are. Through this small change and ability, we acquire confidence without aggression – confidence that is directed to oneself, rather than projected onto others. Once we toss structure, however, we lose confidence and feel vulnerable.

How to stack your body in the first place

Again, in order to stack one must be aware of their own body first. This is the very first point to tackle and will be the most effective method for beginners, as it opens the gateway for you to do your own exploring of your body and find what works for you.

Grounding Exercise: Stacking our Body

1. Stand on your grounded feet, and in your mind scan up to your knees – if there’s any tension, then try and release the tension by letting your knees rest into something natural.
2. Scan the hips, and if they are tense, rotate the hips upward as if you’re tightening on your stomach which will then lessen pressure on the lower spine.
3. Roll and lower your shoulders back, which will open and release your chest (which can be compressed), and put all this weight onto the back lats.
4. Take the jaw and lift as if there’s a string lifting your head, which will extend the last vertebrae on top of the spine. people tend to lower their chin or have goose neck posture, and this can help to fix that problem.

Remember to feel throughout the exercise how moving and releasing each section of the body interacts with every other part.

It’s good to try this exercise every morning and every night to make it a habit, and when you’re next in a stressful situation you can look back to this exercise, see how your body feels, and readjust accordingly to ensure you feel stable and confident again.

Avoiding Fight or flight response – restacking yourself

Now, when you are confronted with a stressful situation, use the awareness you learnt in the stacking exercise (along with the drifting exercise) to recenter yourself on your feet, and regain stability that will help grant you peace of mind. This could be any situation – an encounter with your angry boss, a high-stakes business meeting, a person trying to intimidate you, etc.

In upcoming posts, we’ll discuss this idea and more exercises further, as well as in our course where you can see this right in action. For now, however one must start with the fundamentals in order to move onto these more advanced techniques, and the drifting exercise alone will prove to be effective in everyday life.

How this feeds into the bigger picture (the 2nd of the 3 pillars)

And with that, we have covered the second of the 3 pillars of Quiet Confidence.

As mentioned before covered in this series is:

1. Grounding and stability – how we feel on our feet (found here)
2. Stacking – carrying ourselves with structure (this post!)
3. Volume – personal space that you have a right to live in (coming soon!)

Again, remember the order of these 3 pillars are such because of the following:

Without grounding you cannot have stacking, and without stacking you cannot have volume.

All three are needed in order to be fully aware of our body and the space around it – once we are aware, it will allow you to stay calm throughout the day and most situations that approach you. This also allows you to portray an aura of confidence while minimizing ego and aggression, which is the essence of Quiet Confidence.

Stacking is the second pillar as you must build a strong foundation before moving onto the rest of the body (and volume). Just like how a house needs to have a strong foundation before building the actual spaces above it, it is the same for the body and your posture.
This is how stacking is needed for volume, which will come next. When pouring water into a vessel, the water will take the shape of the vessel, and therefore it’s important to make sure that the vessel itself is strong and is able to keep its shape with water.
The next post will be dealing with volume, which is the most abstract and difficult concept to grasp, as it’s invisible (many would say it sounds like mumbo jumbo because it’s intangible, but all it really is is personal space).

As a final note, I would like to remind you that while these 3 concepts may be the most boring or mundane, these are also the most fundamental and important concepts to all other aspects of our life, making them vital to fully understand despite how boring it may seem.

Once you find your grounding and are aware of it, you begin to be able to connect this concept with your everyday life, and soon it’ll feed into your habits and become a part of your daily life.

Have fun exploring!