The 3 Pillars of Quiet Confidence – Pillar 1: Grounding & Stability

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 grounding and stability, the most fundamental aspect to ensuring that you feel safe and secure on your own feet.

What is Grounding?

Grounding is the first of our core elements that allows us to experience, monitor and be aware of how we are at any point in time.

Grounding allows you to stay stable and secure.

This is done through our sole connection to the ground – our feet.

Why do we need Grounding?

It’s easy to ask the question: Do we even need grounding in the first place? Isn’t our feet on the ground good enough to go about our daily lives? The answer is: Yes, we do need grounding. In some situations, it may even become essential to keeping yourself and others around you safe.

This is because our feet are our sole connection from the ground to the rest of the body. It serves as a foundation that the rest of the body is built upon, and so if that foundation is weak, then so too is the balance and structure of our body. If we build a strong foundation with good grounding, then we feel stable and secure on our feet, and the rest of the body will follow and function in good health. You’ll feel normal and comfortable.

In other words, it’s our natural state.

Remember, without a proper connection to the ground, we’d be falling all over the place! Balance, for example, begins with awareness of how we’re currently standing on our feet. If we’re too far forward, we’d feel our toes dig into the ground (more on this later in the article!) and we’ll feel an urge to lurch back to correct our balance.

Conversely, elderly people who can’t feel on their feet are in danger and fear of falling often as they can’t sense their connection to the ground, which shows just how necessary this basic function is, yet it is one of the most neglected areas to solve.

A car can’t drive without wheels

I once watched an interview with the Vodafone team of the Australian V8s, while they had a winning streak of a few years. They were asked how they managed to always be at the front of the race every time. The team explained that if they have a powerful engine, but the power goes to the wheels and the wheels just spin, they’re not going anywhere. But, if the power goes to the ground through the wheels (through traction), then it puts them out to the front.

So instead of focusing on pure power output and spinning the wheel with no traction, they focused on the connection of the wheel to the ground to achieve maximum traction.

What they’re getting at is that it’s that connection to the ground which allows them to utilize the power, not the amount of power itself. For example, people normally try to focus on asserting their upper body – such as puffing out their chest to appear more confident – rather than ensuring they have a stable connection to the ground that will naturally give them that confidence by being stable within their body.

Most people are unaware of their grounding

If grounding is so important, then how come nobody’s really heard of it? This is to do with the fact that most people are able to go about their lives functioning at mediocre levels and still survive, and so there is no pressing need to improve their grounding. For example, people can eat only junk food and live their daily lives, but it is not how we optimally function, and so other aspects of our lives take a toll.

In this case, the toll of not being grounded results in higher stress and being highly reactive to high pressure situations. This is because our feet and posture are subconsciously linked to our mood and how we react. This all happens before our conscious mind is aware, which explains how people become reactive to high pressure situations without understanding that it is caused by their grounding.

This has been further amplified with the modern luxury of wearing thick padded shoes, which effectively remove our natural connection to the ground. And because we are brought up wearing these shoes all the time outside, we never get a chance growing up to naturally become aware of how we are on our feet.
Now, this is not to say we must abolish shoes from society altogether, as it is still possible to reconnect with our feet and the ground, we just now have to learn how to do it consciously.

Where we are on our feet and the fight or flight response

Because we lack this awareness of our own feet, we tend to be tilted off center on our feet while we stand or walk – for example, leaning back while walking backwards when someone is walking aggressively towards you.

Being this unstable on our feet sends alarm bells ringing in our subconscious mind, and triggers us straight into a fight-or-flight response. For a very long time, animals have evolved this response as an effective way to deal with any threats close by as quick as possible – the quicker the animal made a response, the less likely it was to be caught and eaten. Because this evolutionary trait is so deeply embedded within our evolutionary history, it has become a part deep within our subconscious, and thus is difficult to control.

The most common example again in modern times is being on the backs of our feet while someone is approaching is threateningly; while we are on the backs of our feet, it is easier for us to tilt back even further and feel as if we’re going to fall down from imbalance, and so in a classic fight-or-flight response we either try to lash out at whoever is approaching or we stumble backwards and further compromise our stability. This is, of course, less than ideal.

However, when we’re grounded solidly on our feet, our body feels naturally more settled and comfortable (along with stacking), and as a result the subconscious feels like we are safe within our own body, therefore becoming less reactive. This subdues the fight-or-flight response, and therefore in response to others we are able to appear confident with no aggression or ego, which is the principle of Quiet Confidence.

You can tell how a man is by the way he walks.

In other words, you are in control of your fight-or-flight response, and therefore to a degree your subconscious mind. I say to a degree, as it is impossible to fully control your own subconscious; however, it is possible to harness areas of it through awareness and the feeling of our own body.

How to ground yourself in the first place

So how do we even ground ourselves in the first place? The very first step is to understand the fact that we are unaware of how we feel on our feet, which I hope this post has convinced you of thus far.

The second step is through simple exercises that help us to explore and reconnect with the ground. Through this simple and basic awareness, we can then continue to develop a connection with the ground and learn how to correct ourselves appropriately in any situation.

Grounding Exercise: Drifting on our feet

1. Stand up and drift forward until you can feel your toes grab the ground. This is where the brain will start to react and want to pull back to prevent yourself from falling – but don’t let yourself involuntarily pull back. Rather, go to the very edge of this feeling just before you feel yourself pulling back.
2. Recenter yourself and this time drift backward until you can feel all your weight on your heels and your toes lift. This is where the brain will react and want to lurch yourself forward to present yourself from falling back. Again, like the first step, go to the edge of what you are capable of and remember the feeling.
3. The last step is to drift around the entire edges of your feet, while staying on the edge of what you are capable of.

Do this a couple of times a day, or really whenever you have any spare time, in order to get into your head and body what it feels like to not be centered on your feet. That way, when you find yourself on the backs of your feet and you feel pressure, you have an opportunity to recenter yourself because of your awareness.

You can do this barefoot, with socks and with shoes!

Avoiding Fight or flight response – regrounding yourself

Now, when you are confronted with a stressful situation, use the awareness you learnt in 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, the list goes on.

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 1st of the 3 pillars)

And with that, we have covered the first 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 (this post!)
2. Stacking – carrying ourselves with structure (coming soon!)
3. Volume – personal space that you have a right to live in (coming soon!)

If you are wondering why grounding is the first pillar in Quiet Confidence, this is because you need grounding in order to build a foundation in order to stack, and you need stacking in order to expand and have volume. To put it another way:

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.

As a final note, 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!