Stéphane and Shalee Schafeitel are the husband-and-wife team, also known as “Stéph & Shay.” They have been named the “world’s No. 1 resilience coaches” by Apple News and the couple moved to Nocatee about two years ago.
Can you please briefly tell us about your background and what led you to being resilience coaches?
Stéphane: My parents came from the old country with my dad Swiss and my mom French, and they came over here to America, so I was the first to be born in America, which is very cool.
My mom being high-fashion Parisian French, she didn’t know how to exist in Greenville, South Carolina, and that was prior to the massive expansion that happened there, so she went from wearing Chanel head to toe to all of a sudden wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt and flip-flops.
It was a culture shock for her, and she wasn’t really happy, and my dad traveled a lot, which is why he was able to take a few thousand dollars to his name and create a multi-million-dollar enterprise in textiles in the 70s and 80s but he was always traveling.
So, there was a lot of strife in the household and my parents ended up getting divorced when I was three years old when my mom left and went back to Europe, and of course, as a three-year-old I took it personally because she was my mom and she left my brother and I.
After that, because my dad had a business, what did he do to raise us both? He put us in the business, so I was working for my dad at 11 years old and already learning about entrepreneurship, hard work, etc.
All that was the back story which helped setup what happened at 16 years old, which is when my dad got divorced again with my stepmom, and then he came to me and in a strong Swiss accent said he would have to go away for a while.
He was gone the next morning, so at 16 years old I was living by myself and had to do what I needed to do to fend for myself and figure it out.
I used that entrepreneurship I had learned and started to mow lawns, which was my first business.
In geometry class they’re sitting there doing geometry work and I’m sitting there balancing a real budget trying to figure out how I’m going to go to the store and how many Lean Cuisines I could buy for dinner.
It was at this time that I was asked by my high school principal to mentor and coach other kids who were struggling at the school.
We got called into the principal’s office and asked to be natural helpers, which was way advanced for its time, and something Shay and I want to maybe eventually establish something similar here.
There were students out there struggling with alcohol abuse, drug abuse, bullying, parental abuse, sexual abuse and all these other things and they weren’t talking to their parents or teachers, but they were talking to their fellow students, so they had us trained in how to handle it if someone came up to us to talk.
As I was leaving the office the principal put his hand on my shoulder and said that my name came up the most (as a reference) and that he was counting on me.
My life was falling apart at the time and now I was being asked to help put students back together while I’m doing the same with mine.
That was when I stepped into my purpose and found that I wanted to make a positive impact on the world.
I feel like I was here to help people, and I’ve always strived to do that in all aspects of my career since then and we eventually started our business in 2009.
Shalee: It got to the point where I saw him enjoying his work to a certain point, but then all of a sudden he didn’t, so I asked him what he enjoyed about the work he had been doing?
He said, “I enjoyed taking raw talent and then helping to coach them up and guide them,” so I said, well go and do that.
Little did I know that I was going to go with him on this journey.
How did the journey in business together start?
Shalee: We had to figure out how do we help people and how we wanted to construct it into a business.
At that time, I had a marketing and graphic design branding business, and I had loved it previously but kind of fell out of love with it, so I was kind of at a crossroads as well, while also going through a health transformation losing about 30 pounds.
I was working out at an MMA gym and got healthy, and then all of a sudden people were coming up to me asking to help them with their health.
So, I went to Steph because I didn’t know how to help them. I mean, I knew how I did it but that doesn’t mean it would work for them.
That’s when he asked me what I wanted to do? And I told him that I wanted to help them be the best person they can be, and not just as a fitness trainer but at life.
No matter what it is in life, it’s all about the mind first and then you just have to get down the consistency, whether it’s nutrition or whatever.
Stéphane: I told her that I thought she was ready to coach people, so we went back to do some more schooling to get an idea about elite level coaching.
Even today, we’re always still educating ourselves through research and we each have five mentors to just continue to help in that growth.
Everything has really just been a culmination of her backstory and my backstory. I had my defining moment at 16 and she had hers at 29.
It got to the point where it’s not just people we’re helping be the best they can be but also businesses, because after all a business is just a group of people that just need the right leadership.
