On a recent episode of William Shatner's podcast No Time But Now, something happened that had nothing to do with the interview topic, and at the same time, everything to do with it.
On a recent episode of the No Time But Now podcast, Shatner and his daughter, Melanie, sat down with physician and trauma researcher Dr. Gabor Maté to talk about stress. Before they'd even gotten through the introductions, the tech glitched. The call dropped. And Melanie—as she puts it, a grown woman, mid-conversation with a guest she deeply admired—described feeling like she was "on the Titanic," certain everything was about to go wrong.
Maté didn't let the moment pass. He asked her directly: what was it like, as a kid, when you got something wrong?
Her answer was one word: "Terror."
A dropped Zoom call is not a childhood trauma. But our nervous systems don't know the difference. As Maté put it, what she experienced wasn't really about the technical issue; it was an old, implicit memory flooding into the present. That's his definition of being triggered: something happens now, and everything old comes with it.
Maté's framework is simple. Stress isn't just the external event (what he calls the stressor). There's a second layer in between, the processing apparatus; the internal machinery that interprets the event based on everything that came before it.
Two people can face the identical stressor and have completely different physiological responses, because they're processing it through different histories.
This is precisely the mechanism Dr. Andrew Shatte, meQ's co-founder and chief science officer, has spent decades studying, and it's why his concept of iceberg beliefs has become one of the most useful ideas in resilience science.
An iceberg belief is a deep, often unconscious rule about how the world works or what you must do to be safe, valued, or competent. Examples include I can never let people down, asking for help means I've failed, or if I'm not in control, something bad will happen. These beliefs form early, usually long before we have the language to question them, and they sit below the surface of everyday awareness, which is exactly why they're so easy to miss... and so hard to argue with in the moment.
Most of the time, they're invisible. Then a specific situation—a dropped call, a blunt email, a missed deadline, a manager's raised eyebrow—hits close enough to that belief to trigger a reaction that's completely out of proportion to the actual event. Melanie didn't panic because a podcast recording was delayed for a few minutes. She panicked because the delay activated a belief formed decades earlier about what happens when things go wrong.
It's tempting to file this under "personal growth" and move on. But every one of your employees has their own iceberg. And workplaces are extraordinarily good at bumping into them.
A terse Slack message can land as an accusation. Being left off a meeting invite can register as exclusion. Critical feedback can feel like proof of a belief the person has held about themselves since childhood: I'm not good enough. None of these are really about the Slack message, the invite, or the feedback; they're about what's underneath.
This is where the "coach, not clinician" distinction that runs through meQ's approach becomes so important. Nobody is asking managers to diagnose their team's childhood wounds; that's not their job, and it's not appropriate. But managers and HR leaders need to recognize that a disproportionate reaction is information, not just a problem to manage. The goal isn't to excavate someone's trauma. It's to help your people build the self-awareness and regulation skills that let them notice their own iceberg before it capsizes the conversation.
Maté offered two distinct paths for working with this, and they map directly onto how meQ thinks about building resilience:
1. Work on the belief itself. This is the deeper, longer-arc work. Recognizing the pattern, understanding where it came from, and gradually loosening its grip so the same trigger stops producing the same outsized reaction. This is the work of real self-awareness: naming the belief instead of just living inside it.
2. Regulate in the moment. You don't have to fully resolve a lifelong belief to get through a stressful Tuesday. Breathing techniques, a walk, a few minutes away from the screen; these won't dissolve an iceberg belief, but they interrupt the physiological spiral long enough for someone to respond from the present instead of reacting from the past.
Both approaches are important. The second without the first just manages symptoms. The first without the second leaves people with insight but no tools for the next hard moment.
One more thread from the conversation is worth calling out. Maté talked about how unresolved stress doesn't stay contained to one person, that it moves through relationships, and through generations, until someone becomes conscious of it and interrupts the pattern.
Workplaces aren't families, but the mechanism isn't so different. A manager operating from an unexamined iceberg belief (I can't show any weakness, falling behind means I'm failing) doesn't just carry that stress personally. It shapes how they show up for their team: what feedback they give, what they model under pressure, the overall level of psychological safety for the team. Managers carry an outsized share of team culture, which means their unexamined triggers don't stay theirs alone.
That's why it's especially critical for your manager population to build the kind of self-awareness and regulation skills that let them catch the pattern before it becomes someone else's problem too.
Melanie's moment on that podcast wasn't a flaw, it was a completely ordinary demonstration of how every human nervous system works. The stressor is never the whole story. What's underneath it usually is.
The organizations that get this right aren't trying to eliminate triggers (that's not possible). They're building people's capacity to notice their own reactions, understand where the disproportionate ones come from, and choose a response instead of being run by an old belief. That's resilience.
Resilience isn't something we're born with or without. It's a learnable skill. See how meQ can build resilience across your workforce to help your people become the best version of themselves. Meet with a meQ specialist today.
