Where Magic Meets Strategy: Standards, Support, Staying, and Dreaming
Welcome to the very first episode of Visibility Medicine! In this inaugural episode, Danielle Cohen lays the foundation for everything to come, sharing the four essential pillars of entrepreneurship: standards, support, staying, and dreams. These are practices of visibility that help us see ourselves clearly, let others see us, and bring our unique magic into the world.
This episode is an invitation. Danielle encourages you to notice these pillars as you listen to the interviews in this series. You’ll hear how each guest embodies them in their own way: raising their standards, finding and nurturing support, staying the course, and dreaming.
Through her thoughtful storytelling and grounded wisdom, Danielle sets the stage for the rich conversations ahead. Whether you’re building something new or navigating a season of growth, this episode offers insights and encouragement to help you align with what truly matters—and create a life and business that feel deeply visible and deeply yours.
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Transcript:
Visibility Medicine: Where Magic Meets Strategy: Standards, Support, Staying, and Dreaming
[00:01:46] Welcome beautiful humans. Before we dive into the rich conversations in the following episodes, I want to share something foundational with you. Something I've seen again and again in my own journey and in the lives of the visionary creatives, healers, leaders, and entrepreneurs I have the honor of working and collaborating with.
These are what I've come to recognize as four essential pillars of every successful thriving entrepreneur. They're not rules or formulas. They're alive. They evolve as you do. They hold you steady as you stretch toward more of what you want, while staying rooted in what matters most to you. As you listen to the interviews in this series, you'll hear these pillars echoed in different ways through my guest stories.
My hope is that this episode gives you a lens to see them in the world around you and in your own life. That it invites you to reflect, to reach for your own needs and to [00:02:46] take bold steps toward the version of your life and work that you truly crave. Let's start with the first pillar standards. Every entrepreneur I know who has built a lasting, beautiful, fulfilling, and impactful business has hit a moment
a line in the sand where they've said enough. For many, if not most of us, there's a season in the early stages of our business that's all about saying yes to pretty much everything that comes our way. There's a hustle energy there, like real hustle, work ethic, rigor. We're building, we're stretching, we're figuring it out.
And that's fine. It's often a necessary part of growth. And let me be clear, it doesn't only neatly live in the early stages of our business. It often shows up again and again. Sometimes, in a true way. A way that's accurate. It is a season for that kind of energy. And other times, [00:03:46] it's a habit. or a trigger response.
But eventually we hit a point where it's no longer about saying yes to everything. And we know that that rhythm and cadence is just not working anymore. The season has shifted. It's not about saying yes to everything, it's about saying yes to the right for us things. And now that we have some experience, we have a sense of what the right for us things are.
That's when it's time to raise our standards, or as I like to say, to right size them. And let me be clear, raising your standards isn't about being elitist, or looking better than another, or being better than another. It's about coherence and deep alignment. It's about seeing who you are, and what your work is, and who your best match clients are.
And mostly it's about knowing what you truly need in order to do the work you love to do and to do it well. [00:04:46] It's about creating the conditions that help you thrive so you can do your best work, not just for a year or two, but for the long haul. Right sizing your standards might mean changing the clients you work with, redesigning how you spend your time, shifting your prices, your business model, or your offers.
It might mean setting boundaries around your energy and commitments, hiring or calling in more support, or remixing your systems and operations so they align with your values or the ways that you need to work. Here's the truth. When you raise your standards, you'll have to release what doesn't fit.
Some things will rise to meet you and some will fall away, or will need to fall away. And that can feel terrifying. But it's also liberating. Every time you rightsize your standards, you honor your values, you honor your needs, and you create [00:05:46] more space for who you really are. And that's an act of visibility.
Okay, the second pillar is support. And let me tell you something that's absolutely true. No one, no one, builds a sustainable, thriving business or life alone. I know the myth of the self made entrepreneur is tempting or just deeply ingrained, but it's an unloving myth that's not here for our thriving. So let's break that spell right now with this truth.
Every truly successful entrepreneur that I know has a network of support, mentors, coaches, therapists, cohorts. thought partners, co conspirators, beloved mischief makers, collaborators who hold space for them, challenge them, steady them, and help them grow. And of course these relationships are reciprocal.
Support doesn't mean [00:06:46] surrendering your agency, outsourcing your dreams, or abdicating your power. It's about creating an ecosystem that keeps you anchored, buoyant, inspired, and resilient. It's about having people who can strategize with you, hold you accountable, offer you a pep talk when you're struggling, see you when you can't see yourself, and remind you of the vision when you've forgotten it.
I also want to say this. Support in the form of too much input can become its own form of hiding. If you're drowning in too many voices, it might be time to simplify. Find the ones that truly resonate with you, the one or two or three, or just ask your people to be with you, but maybe lay off on the input and feedback for a while so you can hear your own thoughts.
It's not about more. It's about right sizing and right shape [00:07:46] of support. And if you've been around me long, you've likely heard me say many times that entrepreneurship, having your own business, doing your work in the world in these ways is a completely inadvertent personal development and healing journey that you probably didn't realize you were signing up for.
Most of us didn't. And for that reason alone, support is essential, but there's also just so many hats we wear, so many things to figure out. It's not a one person job. internally or externally. Just know that your need and desire for support is nothing less than wise and investing in deep support isn't a luxury indulgence.
It's savvy. It's really a non negotiable, whether it's a one on one mentor, a transformative, truly group program, or a tight knit circle of peers, or some combo of all of the above. The key is to find the support that aligns with your capacity, your [00:08:46] needs, your values, and your ambitions. There is no one perfect thing that unlocks everything.
This is about an ecosystem, a network. And when you're supported, you're unstoppable. And when we rewrite the lie that says leadership and success are solo endeavors that we're supposed to do alone, we create ripples of good change. The third pillar is staying. Staying doesn't mean doing the same thing forever or never taking a break.
It means staying connected to your soul, your vision, your evolution, and your purpose. Look at the entrepreneurs that you admire most. The ones who seem deeply fulfilled and rooted, the ones having a great time and also having a great impact on their own lives and on the lives of the people they work with in the larger world.
They all have this thing in common. They've [00:09:46] stuck around through the slow seasons, the discouraging moments, the scary times, and the pivots that they never saw coming. They stayed in the game. Even if they took a time out, most of us have. They got back out there. Staying isn't easy. It requires persistence, tenacity, hope, and a willingness to weather uncertainty.
It asks us to rest when we need to, to rise after failure, and to keep on learning. Always. And sometimes staying means iterating, pivoting, resting even more, even giving up, if that's what's called for. But then get back up. Come back in. If you're feeling discouraged, remember this. Success isn't a straight line.
It's a cycle and a spiral and a squiggly line. It's a journey. The ones who stay in the work, the work of [00:10:46] understanding themselves, of what they're here to contribute, of how they're here to participate, the ones who keep nourishing their own medicine and pouring that back out into the world, They're the ones who see the fruits of their labor.
Staying is a sacred act of trust in yourself and in your vision. The fourth pillar is dreams. Let me say this. Dreams are not frivolous and desires are not indulgent. They're holy, they are the seeds of your vision and giving yourself permission to dream, really dream is one of the boldest acts of visibility there is.
Dreaming requires you to look inward and ask yourself what truly matters. What do you long for? What feels so good and true that you almost don't dare to name it? What's the world you most want to live in? What does [00:11:46] it look like? Your dreams don't have to be grand or world changing in an obvious way in order to matter.
Maybe your dream is creating a business that gives you more time to be with your beloveds. Maybe it's about writing a book that shifts one person's life. Maybe it's about taking a creative risk that feels like an identity shift or a claiming of you. Or maybe it's simply about creating more ease, more joy, more abundance in your everyday life.
Even now, even when.
Visionaries aren't only born. Maybe some folks have always had big ideas and have an endless supply of possibility and optimism. But for most of us, we have to work for it. And what really turns us into seasoned rooted visionaries is our willingness to dream, to have a larger imagining, [00:12:46] to cultivate a sense of possibility, to trust our deep desires and know that inside of them is something holy and good, and to give ourselves permission to want.
To see our own longings clearly is an act of visibility. It requires us to look inward, to connect with what truly matters to us, and to honor it enough to take action on it. That's some seriously bold shit. Dreaming is magic. It's one of the first steps of bringing ideas into form. Look around your room, right now, the space you're in, wherever you are.
Everything that didn't come straight from nature was first an idea. It was a dream. The cup you love. The book you read. The fact that I am talking to you through a microphone on the internet. This all came from someone's [00:13:46] dream or many dreams.
Dreaming is magic. It's one of the first steps of bringing ideas into form. We need the dreams, and we need to dream. When we look around at the world, at the most painful, tricky, hardest parts of our world, at the unsolved and unsolvable, or seemingly unsolvable problems, what we need is bigger dreams.
Larger imaginings, not less. So whatever your dream is, whatever the size, whatever the shape. Let it matter, treat it like it's sacred because it is, and when you honor your dreams, they grow, stay with them, and they become even more interesting. And when you act on your dreams, you don't just create something cool from them, you become even more of your core self in the process.
You expand, [00:14:46] you grow. And you inspire others to do the same.
Okay, my friends, as you listen to the episodes ahead, I really want to invite you to notice these four pillars in my guest stories. You'll hear how they raise their standards to create the lives and businesses they wanted, how they sought out the support they need, how they stay connected to their work through the challenges.
And how their dreams and desires lead them to new, beautiful possibilities. And I hope you'll start to see how these pillars can and do show up in your own journey.
And how maybe you can call on more of them. What standards are you ready to right size? What support would make all the difference in this season? How are you staying in the game? And what dream is waiting for you to say yes? Because your visibility, your work, and your medicine matter. They matter [00:15:46] deeply, and I am so here for it.
Time Stamps:
[01:45] Setting the Stage for Growth Danielle opens with her intention for this episode: to share the four pillars that show up in every thriving business and to invite listeners to notice how these themes resonate in their own lives and how these themes are reflected in the interviews to come.
[2:46] Pillar One: Standards Danielle reflects on how entrepreneurs often reach a pivotal moment of saying, “enough.” She explores what it means to right-size your standards—raising them not out of rigidity but to create conditions for your own thriving.
[04:46] Pillar Two: Support “No one does this alone.” Danielle emphasizes the importance of having the right support—mentors, coaches, peers, or trusted advisors—and shares why investing in support is a wise and essential move for any entrepreneur.
[07:46] Pillar Three: Staying Success isn’t about avoiding setbacks; it’s about showing up for the work, even when it’s messy or hard. Danielle talks about the power of resilience, iteration, and commitment to staying in your journey, no matter the challenges.
[10:46] Pillar Four: Dreams and Desires Danielle explores how honoring your dreams and desires can be a profound act of visibility. She encourages listeners to trust their longings, no matter how big or small, and to let those dreams guide their path forward.
[14:46] The Thread of Visibility: Danielle ties the pillars together, showing how they all connect to visibility—seeing yourself, being seen by others, and bringing the invisible to light.
Invitation to Listener:
These four pillars—standards, support, staying, and dreams—are the foundation for creating not just a thriving business, but a life that feels deeply aligned and fulfilling.
Take a moment to consider:
What’s one small shift you could make today to honor your own visibility? Maybe it’s raising a standard, reaching out for support, recommitting to your path, or giving one of your dreams a little more breathing room.
If this episode sparked something in you, we’d love to hear about it. Leave a review, share it with a friend who needs this reminder, or connect with us on social media. Your visibility, your work, and your unique medicine matter more than you know and we are so here for it.
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This podcast was produced by The Willoughby Co.