Steph West: Starfish Social Club and the Neurodivergent Community

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Welcome to Why Not Me? Embracing Autism and Mental Health Worldwide.
Before we jump in, if you haven't already, I invite
you to tap follow. It only takes a couple of
seconds and it helps this show reach more families who
need to hear these conversations. Thanks for being here. Joining
us today is Steph West, the founder of Starfish Social Club,
where she's helping neurodivergent kids and teens become more confident,
more connected, and more comfortable. Mean exactly who they are.
She's also an author, a speaker, a podcast host, and
someone who probably embraces her own ADHD brain as part
of her superpower. She didn't see just a need, she
stepped into it built something that's changing lives, kids, parents,
and entire communities. Her journey is fantastic. So before we
dive into our episode, we'll be back with an uninterrupted
show right after a word from our sponsors. Thanks for
joining us today.
Yeah, I'm excited to be on.
Yes, my pleasure if you would give us a little
information on yourself and what you do.
Absolutely. I'm Steph West and I am the founder and
director of Starfish Social Club. I provide small groups social
skills groups to kids and teams with autism ADHD learning disabilities,
basically anybody who is nurodivergent and struggling with this social world.
What was it that led you to create the Starfish Club.
That's a great question. I started as a special education
teacher specifically for students with behavioral challenges. So my classroom
was a self contained setting for kids who were not
able to be in the general education setting due to
the severity of their behaviors. Sure, I think sometimes one
of the best ways to realize that you have a
certain skill set is when you notice that other people
don't have that skill set. I think sometimes it requires
comparison to figure that out. And so that's what I
started to notice is a lot of other educators were
coming to me and asking me how I did what
I did. And I started to see that I was
really successful with my students and they were able to
make a lot of growth and a lot of progress,
and my goal was for them to not be in
my classroom anymore. So from there I became a specialist,
an autism and behavior specialist, and so I was working
with districts and parents and administrators. Ok. One day I
was at a training. This group was talking about how
they run social skills groups, and I thought, I'm going
to do that. Yeah, And so that was in February
of twenty sixteen, and I went home and I created
a business, and in June of twenty sixteen, I was
running social skills groups.
So was this the Starfish Club?
Yes? Yes?
How did you come up with a name?
I wanted a name that had the words social in it,
but didn't get confused with social services or something, you know,
not quite the path that I was on. So I
came up with social Club and I really love that.
And then Starfish is from the Starfish Story, which is
about a child walking along a beach seeing stranded starfish
all over the beach, and so she starts running along
the beach and picking them up and throwing them back
into the ocean. And a man walks by and he says,
why are you wasting your time? You can't save all
of them, And she grabs another one and throws it
into the ocean and says, I just saved that one.
So it's really just the concept of I can't support everybody,
but I can support the students that are in my program,
and I can do my best to make the social
world easier for one student at a time.
Nice.
So that's where Starfish. Social Club came from. Has a
nice ring to.
It, it does. I like it.
Yeah, So been around for ten years now, so it's worked.
Tell me a little about your reach. Are you working
mainly in your local community or are you connecting with
families across the country or even globally.
I do primarily in person groups. I'm in San Antonio, Texas,
so primarily my students are local and in person, and
I offer groups on Zoom. So I do have the
ability to support students really anywhere, as long as they
can meet during the times that we meet, which are
evening in North America.
Sure. Sure, So I have.
Had many students from all over the US, and I've
worked one on one with students in other countries not
in the US. But being in the groups is usually
a time challenge if they're not in our time zones.
But if students are homeschooled, for example, then it's not
always such a barrier.
Yeah, I totally get that. I talk with many people
in the UK and parts of Europe and there about
six hours ahead of us. Now, tell me, was there
any challenges you had getting this up and going? Did
you ever say why am I doing this? And if
you did, what got you through it? Oh?
My goodness. So I'm what I call an accidental entrepreneur.
I never in my life saw myself running a business.
That was never something that I If anybody would have
told me that's what I would have ended up doing,
I would thought that was just ridiculous. An accidental entrepreneur,
to me is someone who ends up running a business
because it's how we're able to do what we are
wanting to do in the world. And at this point
I actually coach other people who are like me, who
are accidental entrepreneurs, okay specifically because we have zero business background,
zero business knowledge. And so what I find, even with
myself and the people that I now coach, is that
we really have no idea what we're doing when it
comes to running a business. Sure, and the reality is
if your business can't stay afloat, you're not helping anybody, right,
And so I have a second business helping people run
businesses like mine because I've have learned a lot in
the process and I feel like I kind of know
how to make it happen now. I very naively thought
that when I started this business, it's such a great
idea that everybody would come sign up and it would
just be amazing. Sure, that absolutely is not how things work.
I did have the fortune that I've been in the
special education world in my city for a while, and
so in different capacities, even outside of the school setting,
I've been associated with a lot of nonprofit organizations, so
I had the benefit of having a lot of connections
in the industry in my city that went a long
way toward helping me get up and running and getting
my first students in the door and that kind of thing.
But yes, marketing was definitely a significant challenge in the
beginning because I had no idea how to do that.
Even things like figuring out pricing when you've never charged
anybody for anything before is a big challenge. And then
it got to the point where I needed to start
hiring staff members, and that's another huge challenge. It's like
everything is very difficult the first time, and then you
kind of figure out what works and what's helpful and
you can build a path and move forward.
Did you have any other challenges that you faced during
this whole process?
You know, So, my business before Covid was one hundred
percent in person. I didn't have online options because I
never would have even considered that most of my students
have ADHD as do I, and so I thought, there's
no way we're doing online classes. And so Covid came
and my business was entirely shut down.
Oh yeah, I know that feeling right.
It's my source of income.
Yeah, So that.
Was probably my greatest example of the most challenging time
in the business. Okay, when we were completely shut down
and I had no money coming in, but still had
to pay rent. The rent payments didn't stop even though
we weren't in using the building. But out of that
came my online classes, and out of that is when
I created my own curriculum, which is what I teach now.
I teach my own thing that I wrote, and I
licensed other people to teach it also. Yeah nice, So
I think definitely came out in a better position, but
it was incredibly painful to go through that. My population,
that enrollment in my program has never been as high
as it was before COVID. Yeah, so there's even been
you know, just from that perspective, things are just different.
Yeah, they certainly are. Now you mentioned ADHD. I think
I saw it where you say that you are an
ADHD brain. You call it your superpower. How has that
been your superpower with everything you've created?
In one regard, it absolutely helps me understand my students.
I think in a way that someone who doesn't have
a NERD divergent brain can understand people who do. So
it absolutely helps me understand what my students are thinking,
how they're feeling, why they're struggling in the ways that
they are and how I can help them. Sure, So
it makes it much easier for me to support my
students because I understand them.
Right.
So, I'm incredibly impulsive, but I use that to my
advantage by acting on most of my impulses. So I
don't have time to second guess myself, Okay, i don't
have time to worry about things because I'm just going
to make a decision and.
Move forward, right right.
So I also think it makes me very open to risk.
I'm very risk tolerant, okay, And so I'm willing to
try things. I'm willing to do things that I think
probably most people wouldn't recommend, but it helps me come
up with new creative ways of doing things.
You mentioned Understanding your kids. I've always said the best
teachers sometimes can be the autistic kids that the teachers
are trying to teach. What have the autistic children that
you work with taught you.
It's interesting sometimes people in the industry, but often people
not in the industry, making statements about autism or talking
about autism.
And saying things that I have experienced firsthand are not accurate. So,
for example, saying that autistic people don't have the ability
to be empathetic. For example, that I find to be
very interesting is when being with my students, they show
me all the ways that they are misunderstood, and so
I appreciate the opportunity to spend so much time with
so many amazing human beings who can show me the
world through their perspective.
Yeah. Now, part of what you do is teach the
autistic children how to make friends. What do you find
that most people, especially neurotypical, misunderstand about friendship for neurodivergent children.
One of the things that's important to me when when
I talk about the concept of friends is that a
friend is someone we choose to spend time with. That's
how I describe a friend, right, And so that means
it could be somebody that we play online video games with, yeah,
even if we haven't physically seen them in three years.
It could be somebody that you know, we hang out
and watch movies and our favorite genre together, even if
we're not having a conversation for two hours.
Right.
I think sometimes the concept of friendship can be pretty
narrow for a lot of people, but really it's again
my definition is someone we choose to spend time with.
But that can look very different for different people. It
can even be somebody that you text every evening even
if you don't ever. You know, you might not even
live in the same place, but you're choosing to spend
time with that person in the way that works for
both of you, as opposed to in kind of the
way that society tends to define a friendship.
Yeah. Now, parents when they find out that their child
is autistic, it is overwhelming. They don't know what to do.
They have everyone telling them what they should be doing.
There is just so much to learn. It's a real
tough situation to be in. How do you go about
helping the parents of the autistic child when they don't
understand exactly what's going on.
One of the things that I really try to do
is I try to be an interpreter for whomever the
audiences are that I'm speaking to. Typically in my work
it's a student and their parents, but it could also
be a student and their teacher. It could be an
adult student and an employer. It can be bouses where
one is nurodivirgin and the other one isn't. I really
try to be an interpreter because, especially in the social world,
when it comes to neurodivergence, it is really set up.
Most social programs are set up with the mindset that
the neurodivergent person is doing things that are socially incorrect
and they need to be corrected. My approach is that
we're speaking different social languages. What I try to do
is interpret if I'm speaking to Even the night before
we're recording this, I met with a new student who's
starting in my groups next week and was sharing a
strategy with his mom on how to help him recognize
topics that other people would also be interested in talking about,
so that we're looking for things we have in common.
Goal is to help her better understand his social language
that he's most likely not aware of the fact that
other people don't always care about the same things that
he does. Because in the groups, I'm helping my students
understand the social language of the neurotypical world, but I
think it's equally important that the people in their world
understand their social language. Yeah, So that's really my goal
anytime I'm working with parents, teachers, people other than my
students is creating that two way understanding so that I'm
more of an interpreter and helping other people understand how
my student's social world is created.
Now, your work is deeply human and deeply emotional. Where
you're working with all these kids that need help, because
you have empathy for them, you will loss of times
feel that pain. How do you protect your own energy
while showing up to help those kids.
That's such a great question. I am definitely an EmPATH.
I'm the most emotional person I've ever known. Okay, but
it goes both ways. The positive emotions are very very
prevalent for me as well. Sure, my time with the
students is my favorite. It's my favorite place to be
when I'm with the students because it's so enjoyable, enjoyable
to be with a group of people where we're all
working on something together and they're excited to be there,
and they have such great relationships with each other. It's
just a very positive environment, I think. You know, sometimes
people ask me if what the students learn in my
groups translate outside of my group. The realistic answer to
that question is there's no way for me to know
that unless somebody tells me. That's the realistic answer. Sure,
And what I also know is that if the other
adults in their world are not interacting with them the
way that I do. I don't know how much of
it's translating. If they're getting shut down and rejected out
in the world, they're probably not using the skills that
we're working on if they're not in a receptive, supportive environment, Right.
But I think I focus on what I can control,
which is the time they have when they're with me.
That's what I can control. And so that's how I
kind of regulate my own emotional engagement is focusing on
the two hours at a time that I'm with this
group of students. I can control that. I can control
the mood of that. I can control how it goes.
I can control how supported my students feel.
Right, That's what.
I can control.
Yeah, Now, when it's all said and done, what am
do you hope that your work leaves on the kids,
the families, and of course, if you're helping the kids
and the families, you're helping the world too.
My three goals for my students are they become more
socially competent so they understand the nurotypical world better, they're
able to navigate it easier than they were when they
started the program. Okay, that they become more socially confident,
meaning they feel more comfortable trying things, speaking up for themselves,
taking risks right, and they become more socially connected. Sure,
so within the groups themselves, the students just tend to
always find at least one other person that they really
get along with. And I've had, you know, students outside
of the group form genuine friendships. I've had students in
the past that I think are going to get married someday.
Like I just creating these connections that even if they
don't persist outside of my groups, that's real while it's happening.
That's a real authentic connection in the moment. So those
are my three goals for my students in the program
is social competence, confidence, and connection. For the parents, my
goal is for them to better understand how their child
speaks socially, how they perceive the social world, and to
give them some tools and strategies to support their child
in their social journey along the way of becoming more competent, confident, connected.
And I think for the world, it's back to that
topic of helping in a neurotypical world, helping nurotypical people
recognize that narro divergent people speak our own social language,
and it's not bad, it's not wrong, it's not less
than it is sure, and so helping nurotypical people recognize
the social language that we are speaking, and how can
we mesh those together so that we can all support
and understand each other.
If there's one message that you think is important that
the listeners here today and the person is thinking why
not me, but hasn't taken that step yet, what would
you tell them to do.
I believe that anytime any person has an idea pop
into their brain from the universe, whatever you want to
call this, I believe it's because it's meant for you.
Okay.
I think if it wasn't meant for you, it wouldn't
have been implanted into your brain. For example, I don't
ever think about being a WNBA star, right like, it's
never a thought that comes into my mind. It's not
for me. I don't ever think about like being a
crypto bro right like, it's not for me. But I
think anytime an idea pops into your brain, it's because
it's for you, And so why not you? If you're
thinking about it, it's for you? So I think, what's
the next step. What's one small thing that you can
do today that might move that a little bit closer
to reality. What's one thing you can do today? So yeah,
I think why not me is exactly right, Like why
not me? Yeah, exactly because if you're thinking about it,
it's meant for you.
The world can be a scary place. San Antonio is
a great city, been there many times. With that said,
when you're dealing with neurotypical and neurodivergent in a world
that was built for neurotypical, sometimes it can always be
a struggle. They're trying to fit in in a place
that makes it difficult for them to fit in. What
could an everyday person do that feels very unqualified to
do it because you know how city hall can be
at times. What would you tell them to get them
off the edge of thinking about it to actually doing
it with getting out there and helping.
Yeah, I think if I ever give it TED talk,
it's going to be on the topic of giving people
helpful social feedback. I think what's really interesting is that
my students tend to and I don't even think this
is about my students. I think in society in general speaking, obviously,
I live in the US, so I can only speak
to our culture. Here. We tend to either give people
no social feedback, meaning we just kind of ignore what's happening,
we don't say anything, we let it go sure, or
we give people negative social feedback, so we say disrespectful things,
we give them the look, we talk about them to
other people and for any of us. One of the
things I joke with my students about is we are
all annoying to somebody. Yeah, every one of us is
annoying to somebody. Oh yeah, but almost exclusively not intentionally, right.
So we're all out there in the world doing things
that bother other people, either nobody's saying anything or they're
being rude about it. And so imagine if we could
all instead give each other helpful social feedback. And that's
part of my curriculum. I teach my students how to
do that with each other. So I teach them how
to let somebody know. Though, I say the three criteria
for giving helpful social feedback is if somebody's in danger
of harming themselves, like they're about to trip over something.
If somebody's in danger of harming someone else, maybe even
by the words they're about to say, or if they're
in danger of harming their reputation. We talk extensively about
what a reputation is. We can give them helpful social feedback.
So it could even be something like, would you mind
scooting over you're a little bit too close to me?
Sure? Right, right?
And so I think in the world at large, we
very very rarely do that. We very rarely give people
helpful social feedback. We ignore them or we're rude about it,
right right. And so I think in the world if
everybody started doing that, we could change the world.
Yeah. Absolutely, Now, how do people find you? This way
they get to know more about what you're doing.
Yeah, absolutely, starfishsocialclub dot org.
What's one story it can be with a child or
with their parents that you think about and when you
think about it, it reminds you of why you're doing this.
The first one that comes to mind is actually an
example of what I was just talking about about helpful
social feedback.
Okay.
Also, I want to throw in here for a neurotypical person,
it's often very uncomfortable to think about being blunt with
their narrow, divergent child. And I'm here to say that
we appreciate and we need blunt communication. Right, So there's
a huge difference between blunt and rude. Right, Oh, absolutely,
but we need blunt communication. Students can stay in my
program for as long as they want to, so I
frequently have students that stay for years. And I had
a student who I think at the time he was
maybe twelve, and he had been with me for a
couple of years, and at this time, in particular, he
started to be pretty disrespectful to the other students. He's
kind of snarky. He would say things that he knew
the other students wouldn't realize were disrespectful and just really
not getting along with the other students in the group.
And this had not been how he had been historically,
and so it was just kind of surprising. And at
the time, I had a very elderly dog that went
to all the groups with me. Everybody loved her, partly
because she was so old. And I took him aside
one day and started talking to him about what was
going on, and he said, well, I don't really need
any of this because I just want to walk dogs
for a living, and so I don't even need to
deal with people. I just want to be around dogs.
I just want to walk dogs for a living. That's
a really reasonable thing to want to do for a living,
and that's a really reasonable reason to want to do that, right, Yeah,
So I don't ever invalidate anything that my students are
thinking or feeling. But I did say, you know, I'll
tell you that I would never pay you to walk Molly.
He looked at me and he asked me why, and
I said, because of the way that you treat people.
And I said, the person that I would pay to
walk my dog is someone that's really good to dogs
and also really good to people. Because I'm Molly's person,
and so anybody I pay to take care of her
would also have to be good to me. Yeah, and
he just got completely quiet, and we just sat there
for a while. I don't ever know what the outcome
of conversations are going to be, right, None of us do.
So I had no idea what was going to happen.
And so after a few minutes, I asked him if
he wanted to go back to the group or if
he wanted to stay by himself, and he chose to
go back to the group, and that was the last
time he was ever disrespectful to the other student.
Yeah, that's a great story, Like, I.
Can't make that happen, right, But I took what he
was thinking and I just grounded it in reality and
I helped him understand a different perspective than his own.
In closing, if you was to teach every school, every parent,
every community, what would this world look like?
That would be an amazing, amazing outcome for what I've created.
I wish that every student who wanted what I offer
had the ability to access it. I do. I've started
coaching and licensing other people to open centers like mine,
because while I do offer online groups, the reality is
it's much more effective in person, right, It just is,
And so I would love for there to be social
clubs like mine all over the world, run by people
who feel like they know what they're doing and they
figured this thing out. But I really do think especially
kids who want help making friends, that is honestly, my
ultimate goal is for there to be a program for
them in their community, which is why I teach people
how to do that. And it's almost exclusively parents that
approach me about wanting to start a club, because they
come across me and they're not in San Antonio, Texas,
and so the next that's all, is to either start
their own or find someone in their community to start it.
That absolutely would be. My ultimate goal is for everybody
who wants support with this to be able to get
it again. It's not just about helping the students, it's
about helping their parents and their teachers and the community
better understand their social language.
Well, this has been a great conversation. I really appreciate
you taking the time to join us today.
Thank you, thanks for having me. I'm really glad I
got the opportunity to be here.
It's my pleasure. Thanks again, A big thank you to
our guest for sharing their journey. If today's conversation helped
you see the world a little differently, then we're doing
exactly what we hope to do. Until next time, keep believing,
keep learning, and most importantly, keep asking yourself why not me?
Thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to
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