Meet Donna Cash

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Donna Cash. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Donna below.

Donna, we are so happy that our community is going to have a chance to learn more about you, your story and hopefully even take in some of the lessons you’ve learned along the way. Let’s start with self-care – what do you do for self-care and has it had any impact on your effectiveness?
We each get one chance at life. We each have one body in this life to take care of. There are no do-overs. I am a firm believer in taking care of ourselves daily. I consider how I exercise each day. I consider what I eat each day. I consider how my choices will affect my health and well-being. I look at my body like a machine. Everything I do, eat and think should allow my body to work efficiently. As a wife, mother, grandmother, and creative entrepreneur, I have a lot of responsibilities each day. If I don’t take care of myself, in body, mind, and spirit, how can I take care of all those who need my time and efforts throughout the day? I am often pulled in many different directions and need clarity to manage this while keeping a smile on my face.
What do I do for self-care? I’m a morning person so it’s easy for me to get up early and start my day at 4:15 a.m. This allows me to have time with my God in prayer. I’m a firm believer in journaling and writing my visions for life so this takes place each day after prayer. To take care of my body, I take the time to go out for a brisk walk, followed by yoga and meditation. This all takes place before I get ready for work.
Taking care of myself first allows me to dive right into work or anything else that comes my way during the day. For me to be at my utmost for the day, self-care comes first.
We end yoga practice with Namaste. This is a Sanskrit term meaning, “May the Spirit in me honor the Spirit in you.” I want to live my life as this saying.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I am an entrepreneur and started my business, Designs by Donna Atlanta in 1989, out of my passion for sewing. I had quit my corporate job a few years earlier to stay home with our two young children. The focus of my business was designing and fabricating custom window treatments, pillows, and bedding for busy homeowners. With the business in our home, I was able to work while the children were napping, and later as they were school-age, I worked additional hours. As they grew, so did my business. Designing and making beautiful things with fabric is an amazing creative outlet for me. It is fulfilling to collaborate with busy homeowners, listening to their desires and needs for their homes, finding fabrics and trimmings, presenting my ideas, and creating one-of-a-kind designs we install in their homes. This is the ideal job for me. I feel as if I am not working, but using my passions, gifts, and abilities, to bring beauty and joy into my clients’ homes.
My style of design has a lot to do with my background in sewing. As a young child, I learned to sew. I enjoyed making my own clothing. Details in the clothing were something with which I was fascinated. My designs in home fashion are much the same. Dressmaker details are much a part of what I create. The more creative the details, the better.
As I grew my business, I realized I had a passion for sharing my knowledge with others in the home décor industry. Specifically, designers and workroom owners. New doors opened and teaching and speaking opportunities came my way. This opened a new income stream for my business.
I updated my mission statement, ‘To use my passions, gifts, and abilities to bring joy and beauty into the lives of others through exquisite design, teaching, and sharing.’
This has been the roadmap for my business allowing Designs by Donna Atlanta to thrive and grow to new highs.
My workdays are filled with creating beautiful things for my clients, holding hands-on workshops to teach bedding and pillow making, creating videos on sewing techniques, speaking at window treatment conferences, and traveling to speak to drapery workrooms around the country. Encouraging and inspiring others is the perfect way to spend my days.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
Great question! For me, the top three were doing something I love to do and finding a way to make a living doing this, listening to my gut, and following it, and persistence to keep going when the going got tough. When I realized my passion for teaching, I had to get out of my own way because I was painfully shy. Teaching meant I had to get up to speak in front of groups of people. My passion overcame my shyness. I soon realized when I was speaking and teaching something I was passionate about and helping others overcome obstacles, the words flowed easily.
Wherever you are in your life, young or older, my advice is to listen to yourself. Find what you love. Find what brings you joy. Write these things down in a journal. Read your words. Share your dreams with a trusted person in your life. Visualize yourself in your dream and ask yourself how you can incorporate this into your career. Follow your gut. Get out of your own way and believe in yourself. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes as these are learning opportunities. Take small steps first if you must. Taking many small steps will eventually lead you to making larger steps and finally realizing your dreams.

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?
Developing our strengths is always good. I am a highly creative person who enjoys the challenge of developing innovative design and teaching opportunities to reach all the personalities of the students I teach. However, I have also taken my greatest weakness, being terribly shy, and turned it into my greatest strength. When I was younger, I always said I could never be in sales because I’d have to speak to strangers. If I had kept that mindset, I would not have had the opportunity to teach, share, encourage, and inspire professionals in the home décor industry. Now, I am paid to speak to strangers and am blessed by this.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Christina Wedge Photography – headshots

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