Donovan Dee Donnell
17 min read ⭑
“My passion and my work is about liberation. Not motivation — liberation. Motivation gets you excited. Liberation gets you free, moving and truly living. My honest hope is that people experience the highest quality of living available to them at any given moment.”
At 19 years old, Donovan Dee Donnell was an exotic dancer living for external validation and pretending to be someone he wasn’t. But an encounter with Jesus changed all that, transforming his life and kick-starting his journey into wholeness, authenticity and acceptance in Christ. As a life coach, speaker and published author, Donovan now helps high-achievers clarify their purpose and accomplish their goals in a way that seamlessly blends with who they really are. His newest book, Designed to Succeed, co-written with Pentatonix’s Kevin Olusola, redefines success as something that can only be achieved through God.
Below, Donovan opens up about how God was reaching out for him even while he was dancing in clubs, his favorite ways to find spiritual renewal, and why he actively chooses to surrender every day. He also shares the books, songs, and media that have shaped his life for the better.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
Food is always about more than food; it’s also about home and people and love. So how does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
Here’s something I bet you didn’t know about my hometown in Los Angeles: Here, some of the best food in the city was served inside strip clubs.
I know that sounds like a setup for a joke. It’s not.
Want to know how I know this? I was an exotic dancer in Los Angeles for five years, and I can assure you that L.A.’s exotic clubs figured out early that you could get people in the door — and keep them there — with genuinely incredible food, from lobster and shrimp combos to steak and pasta dishes. It was a major part of their strategy. And for me, a 19-year-old kid who had just moved back home from college with a bruised ego, no real plan and a brand-new job as a male exotic dancer, one of the greatest unexpected gifts of that season of my life was Momma’s Kitchen, which was the name of the restaurant that did all the cooking for the club I worked at.
My favorite thing to eat was the chicken wings — large, crispy and seasoned perfectly. You could tell they were made with love. Momma was the sweetest; she carried that “mother” energy real heavy. I remember how she used to pull me into the back where she was cooking, away from the noise and the lights and all of it and just … talk to me. Not at me. To me. Like my actual mom did in the kitchen at our home when I was a child.
Momma did the cooking for the club, but she was so much more to all the dancers and fans who got a chance to spend time with her. But even though we all loved her, I felt special to her. She saw more in me than what I was doing for a living. She didn’t press it. She didn’t preach. She just spoke to the more that was already in me — the part of me that already knew I was misplaced, even if I wasn’t ready to admit it out loud. She talked about my gift to influence people. About how rare it was. About how different kinds of stages exist in this world, and how the one I was on wasn’t built for what I carried.
Then she’d hand me my plate. And I’d walk back out to the dressing room and sit alone with my chicken wings and think about everything she just said. Have you ever had chicken that tasted like wisdom? Ah-ha, well, I did.
I kept dancing for another four years after that. But I never forgot Momma. She planted seeds in me while she was frying and serving chicken.
She was a godsend. Literally.
Living in L.A. already comes with enormous pressure to look accomplished, to seem successful, to perform a version of yourself that reads well to the room. Multiply that by the pressure of being a young exotic dancer who became a kind of neighborhood celebrity by 19, and you can imagine how easily a mind that age gets pulled toward some very dark places. I was lucky enough to have a woman in a kitchen — with a plate of the best chicken wings I’ve ever tasted — who reminded me, consistently and quietly, that I was more than the role I was playing.
I still think about those moments, 26 years later, when I sit down to eat chicken wings alone. The food was extraordinary. But what fed me most and ultimately assisted in freeing me from my path of foolish, immature decisions had nothing to do with the wings but rather the sides of conversations they come with.
I actually ran into Momma two years ago and got a chance to hug and thank her again. She smiled at me, and that smile said it all: “I told you greater was within you.” Even now, as I think about it, I recognize that she gave me the awareness, but without the courage to do something about it, I’d still be trapped inside a jail cell of my own making with the key in my hand.
Being honest about where I’ve been is how I honor who I’m becoming.
Iana Andreeva; Unsplash
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
What “nonspiritual” activity have you found to be quite spiritual, after all? What quirky proclivity, out-of-the-way interest or unexpected pursuit refreshes your soul?
My favorite thing to do — the thing that fills my heart in a beautifully weird way and that I do with zero shame and at maximum volume — is sing karaoke. At home. Sometimes surprising my unsuspecting house guests, but often alone. While I work and clean.
Back in my photographer days, after a photo shoot, I’d have hours of photo editing ahead of me. So I’d set up my equipment, connect my phone to the Bluetooth speakers, press play on my R&B playlist, open my mouth and proceed to give my greatest vocal performance in any key I could find — to every single song that came on. Every song. Full commitment. Regardless of the audience.
People who know me as a coach, author, and self-proclaimed introvert with an extrovert’s calling find this delightfully strange. But here’s the thing: I didn’t always understand why this activity does what it does for me until I sat with it long enough to really think about it.
I grew up in a home with a mother who sang beautifully. She also kept the house clean and was full of life in a way that made our home feel like a sanctuary, concert, museum, catwalk and Broadway stage all in one. Somewhere in those karaoke sessions — alone in my kitchen or hunched over my editing desk — I’m not just singing. I’m reconnecting with something foundational. With the sound of safety. With the feeling of home before life got complicated.
It’s restorative in a way that many obviously spiritual practices aren’t for me. Nobody is watching to judge. There’s no performance critique happening. I’m not trying to hold anything together. I’m just in the middle of my mess — dishes or digital files — singing at the top of my lungs in whatever key I can reach, sometimes even changing the words.
I think that’s what genuine spiritual renewal actually looks like most of the time. Not candles and silence. But unself-conscious joy in the middle of ordinary life. The kind that surprises you with how much it heals.
My mother gave me that. And some part of me carries her into every room I clean and every song I badly — beautifully — sing.
Authenticity doesn’t always look elevated. Sometimes it sounds like off-key joy in a clean kitchen.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you confront its power?
My kryptonite is the compulsion to manage what people think they’re getting when they get me.
I want to be clear: this isn’t about lying. It’s subtler than that. It’s the very human — and for me, very practiced — art of curating. Of deciding which version of Donovan is appropriate for this room, this platform, this opportunity. Of presenting something true, but edited. Polished. Positioned.
I learned this skill young. When you grow up with one foot in the church and one foot in a world that looks nothing like it, you develop a very sophisticated internal editor. You learn which parts of yourself to lead with and which to let trail quietly behind. That editor kept me functional for years. It also kept me from being fully free.
The irony isn’t lost on me that I now coach people on authenticity and identity for a living. I’ve written books about it. I speak about it. I help others dismantle the masks they built to survive. And still, in my own life, I catch myself reaching for the curatorial instinct — smoothing the edges before anyone gets close enough to see them.
The version of me that emerged from “Designed to Succeed,” from “Evolving the Entrepreneur,” from “Before the “i DO”” — that version is real. But “The Stripped Club” (coming soon) is the version that costs me the most to share. That memoir is where I can’t manage the perception. The story is too specific. Too raw. Too documented by the parts of myself I’d rather not have to reintroduce.
What I’ve discovered — slowly, sometimes painfully — is that the curated self and the free self cannot coexist indefinitely. Eventually, the edited version runs out of energy. And what’s left is just you. And the question becomes: Did you practice being you enough to handle it?
Knowing all of this and perceiving the season I’m presently walking into, preparing to release a new book with all the press releases and interviews associated with that and also preparing to shoot a vodcast/podcast/TV show and all the opportunities for vulnerability associated with that live audience, I knew I needed to do something to help me stay aware and away from this kryptonite. So I created a mantra that I can repeat to myself prior to going on stage, on camera or into any intentional conversation. That mantra is B.E.T. = Be honest, Embrace authenticity and Trust the One who got me here. So far, it’s really helped me resist the compulsion to try and control the perception people have of me and simply be. Hearing myself say it out loud saves me. It rescues me from the smothering worry that exposure of who I am at my core will somehow be damaging to those I’m interacting with.
I still do therapy, and I still have a coach and a few mentors, but this mantra has truly been a beautiful addition to the army of resources that help me stay secure and free within myself.
The call isn’t to be impressive. The call is to be free.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
Freedom is my purpose. And too many people are walking around in invisible cages they’ve decorated so well they’ve forgotten they’re cages. Freedom is not a destination — it’s a practice. But how do you practice it?
I am an author and “Thought Life Coach™.” The distinction matters to me. A coach helps you perform better through specific modalities. A Thought Life Coach™ goes deeper — into the internal landscape where your real decisions are actually made. Into the beliefs, the patterns, the conditioning, the unexamined agreements you made with yourself years ago that are still running the show today.
My passion and my work is about liberation. Not motivation — liberation. Motivation gets you excited. Liberation gets you free, moving and truly living. My honest hope is that people experience the highest quality of living available to them at any given moment. My passion is to help those who are alive to live, but first they must get free, and before they can get free, they must become aware. That’s where I love to meet people, as their awareness companion.
Through my coaching practice, my books — “Before the “i DO”,” “Evolving the Entrepreneur” and now, “Designed to Succeed” with Kevin Olusola of Pentatonix — and my Liberation Framework™, I’m helping people break out of survival-mode conditioning, dismantle performance-driven identities, and build the mental and relational environments where their true selves actually have permission to exist, lead and impact.
The new book drops June 9. Kevin and I wrote it for the person who has achieved success by every outward measure and still feels empty. For the high performer who is secretly exhausted by the version of success they’ve been chasing. We believe — and have learned — that sustainable success is only possible when you align with your divine design and partner with God, your Creator, who designed each of us with specific gifts and a specific purpose.
That’s the work. Not just books. Not just coaching sessions. But a sincere, simple, significant and serious invitation for people to get free — and stay free — from the unnecessaries. From the performances. From the identities they adopted to cope. From the exhausting distance between who they are and who they feel they have to be.
Your purpose deserves more than potential. It deserves a plan. And through my new book, Vodcast and coaching resources coming to my website, www.DonovanDeeDonnell.com, I plan to provide people with the awareness and strategy to pull their potential forward into their daily encounters.
The calling isn’t to look like something. The calling is to be something — and then build from there.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Whether we’re cashiers or CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need God’s love flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
I’ve learned to tell the difference between what I produce and what gets produced through me. They don’t feel the same.
There is a verse in the Bible that says, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:5, ESV). When I started practicing that “still” part in the middle of a speech, in the middle of a coaching session or simply in any moment that I felt the need to “be still,” I experienced the equivalent of God saying, “Let me handle this part real quick.” The first time I think I actually acknowledged this or gave honest credit to God was on a mission trip to South Africa. I was set to minister about relationships at this huge church, but once I arrived, what I prepared no longer felt appropriate, and I couldn’t identify why. Either way, instead of carrying on with my initial plan, I took the stage, took the mic and then took a moment. That moment was the transition I needed to permit or allow myself to “know that [he is] God.”
What I produce on my own has a certain texture to it — it’s competent, it’s crafted, it’s the result of real effort and skill. But there are moments in a coaching session, in the middle of a talk, deep in a writing project, when something comes through that I can only describe as not mine.
It’s cleaner than me. More precise. More directly aimed at what someone actually needed to hear, not what I planned to say.
I’ve had coaching sessions where I said something and then watched the person across from me go completely still. Not because I’m brilliant. But because something landed — something specific, something surgical — that I wasn’t tracking consciously. In those moments I’ve learned to just get quiet and let it work. I don’t chase it. I don’t try to replicate it. I just acknowledge: that was God.
What I’ve found is that I can create conditions for this to happen more consistently. I call it building the environment for what you want to exist in. It means I don’t just show up to work — I show up prepared. Prayed up. Honest about my own state. Willing to be used as a vessel, not just a voice.
The Holy Spirit doesn’t work around my ego. He works through my surrender. And surrender isn’t passive — it’s the most active choice I make in my work every single day.
When I get out of the way, the people I serve get something I could never manufacture. And they feel it. And I feel it. And in that exchange, I’m reminded of how I’m able to do any of this life-changing work. Not by might, not by power, but by the Spirit of God.
Trust the One who got you here — not just in theory, but in the actual room, in real time.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
The practice that’s carrying me most in this season is one I call the tombstone visualization. It sounds morbid. It isn’t.
I sit with the image of the end of my life — specifically, what’s written on my tombstone. And in this visualization, it says three words: “He simply was.”
Not “He produced.” Not “He built.” Not “He published” or “He achieved” or “He influenced.” Who he loved or who was loved by him. Just: “He simply was.”
When I sit with that image, I take the biggest breath — and then I exhale. And in that exhale is everything I’ve been clutching too tightly. Every metric I’ve been tracking. Every version of myself I’ve been managing. Every anxious question about whether I’m doing enough, being enough, becoming enough.
It all releases. Because the tombstone doesn’t care about any of it. The tombstone only asks: What will be remembered?
The Bible tells us it’s better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting. I think about that often. Funerals do something to us that celebrations rarely do — they strip away the noise and force us to reckon with what actually matters. They reprioritize everything. They make the essential things obvious and challenge how you invest your time, energy and attention, which is your life.
My tombstone practice does that for me daily. It pulls me out of the race long enough to ask: is this the race I was designed to run? Am I living, or performing a life? Am I present to this moment or already rehearsing the next one?
He simply was. That’s a beautiful imagination to sit in. To occupy life as an undivided being. To live a life that didn’t just do impressive things — but was something true.
Everything else I do spiritually feeds that. But this practice is the anchor. It reminds me that my legacy isn’t built or my calling fulfilled in the spotlight. It’s built and accomplished in every moment I’m simply present and being.
Trusting God means trusting that who I am is enough — even before what I do catches up.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and changed your heart?
1. “Who Moved My Cheese?” by Dr. Spencer Johnson
This was the first book I ever completed cover to cover. My mother made my sister and me read it — and that act of a parent saying this matters enough to assign it is something I still carry. The parable cracked something open in me early: the importance of staying curious and courageous, of not expecting life to stay the way it’s always been, and of sometimes being the one who moves first instead of waiting for the cheese to come back. It also taught me patience — the value of being still in the middle of the maze. I was young when I read it. But the seeds it planted took root in an entrepreneur and a man who would later need to know how to pivot without panicking and embrace the new and uncomfortable instead of falling to pieces when my wishes are not my reality.
2. “I Don’t Have to Pretend” by Victory
This one isn’t a book — it’s a song. But it has functioned as one of the most clarifying resources in my walk with God. The temptation for those trying to live by faith is to curate a public image of holiness so polished that no one sees the real struggle. That path creates an invisible weight that is genuinely crushing — and it’s a lie. This song cut straight through that noise and reminded me: God didn’t call me to pretend. Not with anyone. Not for any opportunity. That freedom is not small. That freedom is the whole thing. I’ve returned to it in every season where performance started masquerading as faithfulness.
3. “The Chosen” (Series)
Nothing in recent memory has grounded my faith the way this series has. Watching the artistic portrayal of the humanity of Jesus — his humor, his patience, his grief, his specific way of seeing people — made Scripture inhabit my body differently. I cried big tears in almost every episode. And I’ve learned that tears like those are rarely about sadness. They’re about release. About something locked inside finally getting permission to come out. I walked away from each episode feeling more aligned with God, more honest within myself and freer to pursue the vision he placed in me. “The Chosen” didn’t give me new theology. It gave me a felt experience of what I already believed. That’s a rare, necessary and powerful thing if your desire is to continue aligning deeper with your faith.
Certain things can be godsends, helping us survive, even thrive, in our fast-paced world. What’s one resource you can’t do without right now?
Right now, the resource at the center of my current season is “Designed to Succeed” — not only because I co-authored it, but because writing it with the incredibly passionate Kevin Olusoula was, as I’ve said publicly, a brotherhood “purpose boot camp” I didn’t fully anticipate signing up for.
God has a way of assigning to you the people and message you need most. Working through the ideas in this book with Kevin, specifically — particularly around sustainable success, God-designed identity and the trap of performing your way toward a life that was never built for you — has been personally transformative in ways that will take years to fully understand.
The point is, get you a brother, a sister or someone to partner with as you accomplish your calling. It’s probably one of the greatest resources for living a life of faith.
And for the reader picking up “Designed to Succeed,” I hope it does for you what the writing of it did for Kevin and me: dismantles the myth that grinding harder is the answer and replaces it with something more honest — that you were designed by God, for a purpose, and that the path to real success runs through who you actually are, not through who you’ve been performing.
The resources that change you aren’t always the ones you chose. Sometimes God assigns the curriculum.
QUESTION #8: dream
God’s continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
There’s something building in me that I don’t have a full name for yet. And that’s honestly how I know it’s real.
“The Stripped Club” is coming.
It’s my memoir — and it pulls back the curtain on my years as a male exotic dancer, not for shock value and not for confession’s sake, but for truth. It’s a story about performance and identity and the devastating cost of living for external validation while your internal world slowly collapses under the weight of the person you’re pretending to be.
This isn’t just a story about the club. It’s about the lies we wear. The masks we strip away — sometimes violently, sometimes gradually, sometimes only after we’ve lost something we can’t get back. It’s about the environments that shape who we think we have to be and the God who keeps showing up in the most unexpected places — in a kitchen, in a conversation with the chef who whispered, in a quiet voice that kept saying: this isn’t you, this isn’t home, this isn’t it.
Writing it means being the most publicly vulnerable I have ever been. And I won’t pretend that feels comfortable.
My primary concern in this season isn’t whether the story is worth telling — I know it is. My concern is finding the right publishing home for it. A story this personal, this specific, this redemptive deserves a partner who understands what it’s carrying and who will steward it with the same care it took to live it and then write it. That search for the right publisher matters deeply to me, and I’m trusting God to make that path clear.
Because Yahweh didn’t bring me through that season of my life just to keep it hidden. He brought me through it so that I could hand someone else a light in the same or similar darkness I once stood in. So that the 19-year-old version of someone, sitting alone with their temptations and their convicting thoughts, would know: there is more in you than what this room can see. And God hasn’t stopped calling for it.
That’s what “The Stripped Club” is. A call to look within, come out of the pretend, find others that are doing the same and then join arms to light this world up!
Be honest. Embrace authenticity. Trust the One who got you here. I’m betting on all three.
Donovan’s method of relaxing by belting out his favorite songs at unexpected moments isn’t simply something fun to do. It’s a healthy habit.
Research shows that music lights up every area of our brains, engaging sensations of pleasure, motivation and reward. Singing does the same thing, but since you’re creating the sound, it has the added benefit of forcing different areas of your brain to coordinate — essentially a cognitive workout.
So next time you’re washing dishes, exercising or performing some other mindless task, consider pumping yourself up with your favorite song. It may do you more good than you think.
Donovan Dee Donnell is the co-author of Designed to Succeed. He is a former male exotic dancer who experienced his own transformation through Christ. He now lives out his purpose as a published author, international life coach and speaker, creating and leading trainings in the fields of leadership, entrepreneurship, relationships, personal development, mental health and suicide prevention. Donovan has helped countless individuals clarify their purpose and obtain personal success without compromising their faith, morals or identity.