Meet Brooke Donnelly

We were lucky to catch up with Brooke Donnelly recently and have shared our conversation below.

Brooke, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
With every passing year, I’m a stronger believer in the fact that we don’t ever really “find” our purpose, instead I believe that God has designed this beautiful life path for each of us and we get to follow it and watch it ( and our purpose) unfold over the course of our lives.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’m Brooke, a professional interior designer turned home and lifestyle YouTuber and Blogger.

In everything that I do, I want to inspire others to design homes they love and lives they love living. I love sharing realistic home DIY projects, and how to thrift home décor and style your house on a major budget. My favorite way to do that is through sharing videos on my YouTube Channels.

I also love to repurpose and re-home old décor I find on my thrifting adventures in my little online décor shop. And one of my newest and most popular endeavors is my repurposed vintage vessel candle collection where I find old glassware and bowls that are just sitting on thrift store shelves and destined for the landfill, and use them to create beautiful, hand poured, non-toxic candles. And I’m getting really excited for my next collection coming this fall! It’s going to be my largest and ( MOST BEAUTIFUL) one yet!

I just love sharing my passion and my heart for all things home, design and a happy life in everything I do.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I think first and foremost is relentless consistency. JUST. KEEP. GOING. When I first started my blog 5 years ago, I was still working full time for a design firm and that blog looked absolutely NOTHING like what it looks like now. ( THANK GOODNESS!) And I know that in another 5 years it’ll look totally different than it does now and I can’t wait to see what that looks like! But I’m so thankful I just kept going, kept pivoting, and kept trying and I absolutely wouldn’t be living the dream I am now if I hadn’t just started when I did and kept going.

Secondly I would have to say the ability to relate to your people. This is a skill I feel like I had to really work hard to get good at, as someone who came from a professional interior design background, I had to really work hard to strip that back and approach projects as a home owner, not as a designer, because that’s who my people are. They are homeowners, they don’t care about fancy terminology or “technicalities” they just want to be inspired to DIY their own home projects and create a home they love! So being able to take your professional skills but embody them in a way that is relatable to your people I think it so so valuable.

And lastly, I would have to say the ability to trust your intuition. While I had no clue what it would look like, I knew deep down when I was working my 9-5 that I was meant to do something else and that was NOT my lifelong career. I was designed to live a different life than the one I was living, but I had to walk through that path before I could get here. So just trust your intuition and trust that God placed the dreams that are on your heart there for a reason.

We’ve all got limited resources, time, energy, focus etc – so if you had to choose between going all in on your strengths or working on areas where you aren’t as strong, what would you choose?
I’m torn on this. On one hand, I believe that we should always be improving and learning, and that would especially include improving and working on our weaknesses right?

However, I also deeply believe that the strengths and the traits that we have are God given gifts that we should be embracing, leaning into and not trying to “round out” or “balance out”. There is a reason that we are designed with the exact combination of strengths that we have. And there is a reason why other people may have the exact opposite combination of traits.

I actually recently heard a quote concerning this that I really appreciated, this isn’t word for word but essentially ” if a child is a star in their dance class but struggling in math, get them a dance coach, not a math tutor” . In other words, we should be embracing our gifts instead of focusing on our weaknesses.

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Image Credits
All photos were self taken.

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