Today Dannie and Caitlyn are talking with Monica Rivera of You Wanna Do What.

We believe in accessible content and that anyone who wants to learn from this content should be able to. In order to support this, we’ve had every episode of Season 4 transcribed. The transcriptions are available at the bottom of every episode blog post.

SHOW HIGHLIGHTS:

• How giving a TedTalk isn’t the end all be all.

• How to stop the slide and give yourself something to look forward to for your work week.

• Winning the battle against self-doubt!

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Episode Transcript 

Dannie Lynn Fountain: [00:00:21] Hello and welcome back to the side hustle gal podcast. Today we have with us Monica Rivera, who is actually in the dreamers and doers Facebook group with me. You've probably heard me rave about how amazing that group is. On Instagram because it is truly probably the best business resource I've ever paid for. Um, so we're so glad to have you here, Monica. I'm going to go ahead and let you introduce what you do and why you identify as a side hustle. There. 

Monica Rivera: [00:00:54] Awesome. So thanks Danny for having me and sharing your space with me. I'm Monica . Very good job. I'm pronouncing the name correctly cause not everyone does, which in New York is strange because I feel like I share Rivera with a ton of other Latin people, but it's very cool when people pronounce it correctly.

I am the host and producer of the podcast. You want to do what. And I am a marketer by day, but a podcast or by passion, and that really is my side hustle, podcast consulting and coaching and marketing. Just for fun, not for the full time job that keeps the lights on. 

Dannie Lynn Fountain: [00:01:27] Oh, I love that fellow marketers slash podcaster right here.

Um, so I'm curious because you mentioned that your passion is podcasting, but you do marketing. Is that one of those situations where what you're good at pays the bells, but what you love is what you get to do for fun, or why do you describe it that way? 

Monica Rivera: [00:01:49] Yeah, for sure. So I got into marketing, and I've done this for almost 20 years now of business, the business marketing, but I started in B to C, so business to consumer, which I really enjoyed.

And then life starts to take you in different paths. And I found myself working for different companies, malignancy, B2B, and then reorg happen. And that kept moving me further and further away from what it is that I wanted to do. And I started to learn, Oh, I'm a headcount. I'm a head, I'm a person for myself, but I'm a head count in a big organization and they don't care so much about where I want to be professionally, but at the same time, I have a mortgage and bills to pay and I thought, okay, well I have to go with the flow and I got to this place where I felt like, is this all that there is?

I'm no longer doing the type of marketing that I love to do anymore. I feel very stuck. I have a bunch of passions, which is why the podcast is called you want to do what? Cause I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do. So I kept consuming Ted talks and books and anytime someone was like, watch this video, here's this platitude, anything.

I was like, yes, give it all to me. And at the end of the day, it was still nothing. I still came out with no idea of what I wanted to do. I was an OG podcast listener for 12-13 years. I listened to podcasts and I thought, why don't I just start something? Let me talk to other people like me that are in this stage of their career where they feel like, why is this just rinse and repeat?

I need to do something else. And so I started podcasting. I didn't know anything about it. The closest I had gotten to a Mic with karaoke, and I wasn't good at karaoke, so I thought, well, this could be a disaster. But all I want to do is just show up every week, and that's really how it started for me. The side hustle.

Caitlyn Allen: [00:03:27] Oh my gosh, I love that. I really want to quickly dive into that consuming the content piece because I feel like so many of us who are side hustlers or who have been side hustlers love consuming content. But don't know how to use it properly. So how, I mean, you said you were listening to podcasts. Were you consuming any other content and what were you feeling when you were consuming all of that content?

Monica Rivera: [00:03:55] So to be fair, I work also in marketing analytics. So my full time job is about consumption. And how do these pieces fit together? So I'm always been someone who's been a voracious reader. I go down and you've, it's new to rabbit hole like a lot of us do. So I love consuming content. So the problem wasn't that what I found is that I was consuming content as a way to not start anything.

And that was really the big thing for me, and I thought, I'm getting all this information, but if I'm not using this information, this is a stall tactic. This means that I'm still operating in this space where I don't feel confident to just try. And I had to stop consuming everything and just go into the abyss of having a really crappy first episode and a little less crappy second episode, and then it started to gradually move.

But I love consuming, but it has to be with the intention of actually using it. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. 

Caitlyn Allen: [00:04:49] Yes. That progress over perfection. I feel like so many people purchase courses cause they're like, Oh well I need to learn all of these things because it has to be perfect the first time. And. Booboo. If you're out there and you're listening, it's never going to be perfect. 

Monica Rivera: [00:05:05] Yeah. Say it again. It's so true. I listened to my first episode and the irony of the whole thing is I bought a Mic in 2013 but I never used it. It sat on the desk. It's there to be in judgment. I swear. I felt like it was giving me a side eye and I didn't use the mic.

And when I finally started with in the beginning of 2017 is a three and a half years after I'd bought the mic, I finally started to use it and I didn't even use the mic and my first episode I was, so you need to record an episode now that I recorded straight into my laptop, which is the worst thing you can do, but I know that for me, if I put something out that was crappy, I would never want to put something else out that that was that crappy again.

And that was the way of forcing myself to jump into the deep end of the pool, and now it's out there, so now you have to make it better the next time. 

Caitlyn Allen: [00:05:52] That's such a great takeaway. Oh, I love that. So as we talk about things that we've done wrong or that we've done, knowing that it's going to only get better from there, what is one mistake you feel like you've made at the beginning of your business that you're like, yep, I made that. But now it's gotten so much better. 

Monica Rivera: [00:06:14] Yeah, for sure. Normally, I'm a big planner, so I'm type a personality. I like to plan, plan, plan, and then plan. The more I love the list. I love all of those things that around productivity and organization, which is why I say that's like one of my p's. So, um, purpose, podcasting, and productivity.

Those are the three things that people will ask me about. Those are three things I like to talk about the most. Those are the three things I focus on with my business. But because I was in such a stall pattern for so long, I didn't go in with a plan. I didn't have a strategy of how I wanted the podcast to be or what the goals were for the podcast, which is very different and uncomfortable for me.

But again, because I was stuck, I needed to do something. So the first goal I had was to just show up. I think in retrospect, knowing everything I know about marketing, why did I pick the name? You want to do what that's so not searchable, who is searching for that? No one is searching for those individual words, let alone the collection of words together.

And so now that I've built more of a brand with things like that, like I should have, I thought of a tagline earlier, those types of things. Knowing that I'm in marketing, I didn't necessarily apply that to the creative side of it, and it wasn't until later that I started to see there's a space for me to combine the creative side and the business side and do the two things I love. Let's just start doing them together.

Dannie Lynn Fountain: [00:07:35] So it's fascinating that you're talking about not leaning on your marketing background when you're building a business. I think back to. What I've named my LLC and my first logo and I grown my first logo Caitlyn's laughing right now. My first logo was four circles, a white light blue, dark blue, gray. And like, what does that even mean? Why? 

Caitlyn Allen: [00:08:08] Well, I mean, at least there's good conversion there because buttons that convert better are usually blue.

Dannie Lynn Fountain: [00:08:16] Um, but I think like we all dive in entrepreneurship and forget that we have this body of work and experience that we can lean on. So one specific place that I want to touch on here is you mentioned you're passionate about Ted talks, and you've also given one, and I think. Speakers or even entrepreneurs who haven't spoke yet.

Put Ted and TEDx talks up on a pedestal, is this completely unattainable thing? But if they've spoke before, they have some skills and even if they haven't spoke before, they've probably taught somebody something. So I would love for you to demystify the fact that Ted talks are not as insane as we think they are.

Monica Rivera: [00:09:03] For sure. They're definitely not an insane at all. They were a goal of mine. I definitely wanted to speak at this stage. I also, and I'm actually writing a piece on this. I don't think that's Ted X. It means that your life is going to change overnight either. Cause I think we put so much pressure and expectation on once I get on that stage and I step on that, read that I'm going to become this overnight success and it's not really that go in with what is it that you want to talk about?

What is that message that if it only reached one person. You want to deliver to that one person, and that's how I approach my TEDx talk. So it was very different because it wasn't focused on marketing with them, focused on podcasting. It was really my personal story because my why and everyone should have their line.

I know we hear that all the time and Simon Sinek, and it's almost become very watered down to think of it that way. The really in every choice that I've made in my life and my career and my side hustle, whatever it is that I do, even my hobbies is really goes back to this idea that I talked about in my TEDx talk, which was this idea of loneliness.

And so my TEDx talk was about my parents passing away and really my family passing away in the span of seven years, and I'm an only child, and I came from this place starting at 16 when the first person passed away through 23. Where my life just got completely rocked upside down and all the choices that I've made in that time period and really probably for the next 10 years afterwards, we're based on survival and self-sufficiency.

It's like, well, there's no room to pursue what you really want or find your bliss or do any of these really great things when there's no couch to go on, there's no parent's house to go back to. There's no net. I'm the one that I have. I don't have a net, then I don't know what happens to me. So I made all these choices that I thought I need to get an internship, but then it needs to get another internship and I need to make sure I have a job before I graduate.

And all of these survival choices, and I wasn't really thinking about what it was that I wanted to do with myself because I just thought there's no space for that. So what I did was I'm gonna earn a lot of money so that then I have time to play when I'm not working and travel. And. Take a photography lessons and go and take these waves, travel photos and write.

And I never thought, well, let's put those two things together because it was really survival and then it was have some fun. And so it's funny how you mentioned not leaning back on the thing that are part of our skillset, because for me, I thought I needed to run away from everything that was related to my full time job because I want to do something so different.

And it was like, wait a minute. It's not that you dislike marketing. You just don't feel comfortable in this space anymore. So how can you figure out how to bring those things that you have and make a life with it? And for a long time, I didn't know how to make that life happen for myself until I finally got into my mid thirties and I thought, I can make all of these things happen.

And so my Ted talk is about the idea of loneliness and making these decisions from a place of survival. And how can you really tap into yourself. And not so much the TEDx talks and the  self help books and all these other things, which are great. I still turn to them, but really a lot of the things you need to do are already inside of yourself.

Caitlyn Allen: [00:12:16] I just want to say thank you so much for sharing that. Um, I am actually. Was just crying with Dannie before we started this podcast. Cause my mom's in the hospital. So I can relate coming from the place of, I just have to make money. I just have to keep going. I don't have anything to fall back on. I don't have, you know, that type of thing.

And I feel like a lot of people do start side hustling because it's, I don't have anything else. I need to at least make a cushion for myself. Um, so just thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. I. I'm going to go find your Ted talk afterwards. I need to hear it. Um, but what I wanted to ask you was what has surprised you and what have you learned about yourself since becoming an entrepreneur and running your own business?

Monica Rivera: [00:13:04] Yeah. So the first thing is that I'm so much more capable than I was giving myself credit for. And the problem that happens, and you might not even realize it's happening, is when you're working in a job that you're not enjoying. Your lights are starting to dim and other areas, and you get to this place where it's called work.

It's not called, Oh, it's fun. It's not supposed to be a great time all the time, and you sort of rationalize it that way. You say, well, I'm not happy at work, but I'm okay at work, and then, okay, I might slide into I'm content, and then content might slide into, I really hate this. And then it goes into Sunday nights getting this anxiety of, gosh, I dread going to work on Monday.

And that's why my podcast is the tagline. Now your Monday morning battle cry to do more, be more and want more, because it goes into that idea of on Mondays you need to give yourself something to look forward to. So for me, it was having the side hustle and really tapping into that of what did I want it to be for myself. And that's really how I just approached everything. 

Dannie Lynn Fountain: [00:14:04] I still think about those first few jobs that I had in college and after college where. I wasn't satisfied and I was still hungry. And so I did the same thing, right? Like I started this side house to look at feed the hunger. But I'm curious, cause this has definitely happened for me.

I'm curious if it has for you, um, if you become hungrier for your side hustle than you are for your day job and how you keep plugged in to the thing that's paying the bills, even though you're not hungry for it anymore. Well, that's right where I am right now. I'm definitely not a hungry for the full time gig nearly as much.

Monica Rivera: [00:14:43] Um, as I am for everything else, because now that these lights are turned on and I start to see like, Oh, opportunities that I was trying to go for on my corporate gig and doors that weren't opening for me, it started to feel like, why aren't those openings? So then that's the self doubt. A little they opened before what's happened to me now, have I fallen off?

Don't I have the skills? Do people not like me? And you start internalizing all of these things. But as soon as I got into pod, Kathy, and then eventually my business. All those lights lit up like a Christmas tree again, and I thought, Oh, I know how to do this. It just wasn't working in this space, and that's why those opportunities weren't happening for me.

So I started to get my confidence back. I started to get my swag back. I felt more like myself, and I thought, okay, she's still in there. She just got so used to playing in this space of a job's not supposed to make you happy. Then I just thought, well, that's okay. That's like. Even knowing that it really wasn't supposed to feel that way.

So now that I'm in this space where I'm creative and I'm working with people and clients and speaking, it feels awesome, but it is challenging in the full time job knowing that. They still don't see all of the things that I'm capable of. And I look at it quite honestly from a practical standpoint, this pragmatic standpoint of I still need this full time job.

These people, they're not bad people. They're not harming me in any way. It's just not what I love to do, but it does keep the lights on and it keeps funding. The side hustle. And so the side hustle can become the fulltime hustle one day. And if that doesn't happen, it's still okay because I found this place where I can really honestly be graceful now to say, well, well, you didn't see in me, allowed me to find the things that I needed in myself.

And I've done this now for, um, a few years. Uh, for two years now, and it's working so far. And that's just really how I approached the full time job. Now from this place of thank you for the little tiny things that you can give me in terms of not minimizing the salary of course, but any additional skill that they get, the people are cool, but I know that it won't be the thing forever.

Dannie Lynn Fountain: [00:16:46] I love that. It's a good. It's a good attitude to have. Like I think gratitude is really important, but it's also, like you said, like that pragmatic gratitude doesn't diminish the powerful work that you're doing. 

Monica Rivera: [00:17:01] Right, and I live in New York city. It's expensive. You have to be a pragmatist when you get to a certain point. And with my background as I shared with my family and not having that net, I have to be pragmatic. But what I've been able to do is giving myself the space to have more choice now and to say, well, what ways can I experiment and play and still do the things that light me up and not have to just go into work feeling like this dread every Monday or how many down so Friday?

Because if you keep counting down, so Friday, you know, missing your life at this point because you're trying to blow past five days to get to the two. And that's just not a way to live because. It's just, you don't know how many of those five days you have to get to the two. Do you want to try to make sure those five days in between as fulfilling as you can make them? And my side hustle makes me feel great. 

Caitlyn Allen: [00:17:50] Ooh. Just want to take a moment to like soak that in. Um, that's so, I mean, I feel, I feel that on so many levels. Um, what has made you decide not to quit. Your day job and take your side hustle full time. 

Monica Rivera: [00:18:06] So that's a complicated question. There's so many things. I feel mostly it was a real obligation to the people that are close to me. So my family, I call them, which is like my friends that are my family like I do. I have two nieces that I call my nieces. And so I help put money towards their college fund. And so there's this obligation that I have in my mind, I think to those people  feel like, well, now that I've created this family for myself in this way, I don't feel completely comfortable just cutting and switching just yet.

And then also there's a part of me that starts to think, what if I want to have a family of my own? Am I sore that I want to fully commit to this thing and can I keep this running? If it's just me as the main engine without as much support, will I still be able to do that? So they'll, I'm right now in this pivotal point of trying to figure those things out and what's really feasible for myself, but it's still the pragmatic side of me that keeps me in this place where right now.

Caitlyn Allen: [00:19:02] That's so cool to hear you say that. I think, um, some of the guests that we're going to be talking to are mompreneurs as well this season, and I'm excited to get their perspective on how they have side hustle does, how they run their businesses alongside a family. Um, because I literally just blows my mind when people are like, yeah, I run a family, or like women, I run a family and I run my business and I'm like, okay. I could barely run my business.

Monica Rivera: [00:19:33] My niece is two years old. She just turned two and she just wants all of the attention. She really does. Like, she's amazing. I love to give her the attention, but I can't imagine reading a pamphlet, let alone anything else, like when I'm with her, because that's the level. Of attention as she wants. And she's an only child and I understand all of it.

But how could I think of actually doing somewhere I was going gonna pay the bills when I can't get through the back of the cereal box and make sure she can eat when I'm about to feed her. So it's like all of those questions that I just, I remain in awe of the moms who do it and any parent who does it because, uh, I can only imagine that will be quite the challenge if I decided to go in that space in the future.

Caitlyn Allen: [00:20:13] Oh, that's so good. Okay, so I have a fun T spilling question for you. What is something in marketing that you believe is true, but nobody, nobody believes it, or everybody disagrees with you on, 

Monica Rivera: [00:20:28] Oh my gosh, everyone's specifically in podcasting thing. Instagram is the way it's the end all be all in order to get listeners and it's rising or not.

Then I say Apple and Amazon don't Mark it the same way, so you shouldn't market the same way either. So there's this thing of like, I have to be omnipresent and all of these channels and people are like, I'm going to learn how to dance. I could get on sick talk and, um, and as someone can listen to my podcast, and I'm like, no, like, don't do that.

Like that. Is your listener even on sick path? Like I don't think so. Like that's so strange to me, but there's this thing of I have to do it just the same way everyone else is doing it and you don't, you have to just take a step back, put down all the content and things. Who are, who's listening to me, who's consuming my product, who is buying my service, where are they and how can I talk to them there?

And also the other thing I'll say, and I see this a lot in the podcasting space, his podcast, it was like to go to other podcasting conferences and I've gone, I'm speaking at one and it's month. I do. I love the community that's there, but you can't just talk to yourself all the time. You have to get out and talk to other people. And so that's, I think also a big thing that people are missing. Let me just stay within this community where you really have to extend outwards and reach the audience that you're trying to get.

Dannie Lynn Fountain: [00:21:46] I love that so much. 

Monica Rivera: [00:21:49] So you won't find me trying to dance on six dogs. It's not going to work. If I do, I'll probably blow out my knee and that'll be like first video, last video, grand opening.

Dannie Lynn Fountain: [00:22:01] So before we wrap things up, I want to ask. Well, a little bit of a more serious question, and that is, you live in New York and New York is one of the most amazing places in the world, and one of the most dangerous, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world, but the most expensive, What have you learned from being an entrepreneur in New York? That those of us that live in a completely different climates, culture spaces could learn from? 

Monica Rivera: [00:22:32] So the one thing about New York, it's very dog eat dog, like it's very much survival of the fittest in New York. And I'm a lifelong new Yorker, and to me that doesn't change at all. It's very rare when you find people who truly want to be collaborative, especially working in other cities, and I've done consulting in my careers.

I've spent time in other cities. I lived in Iowa for a year. I spent time in D C is that New York sometimes likes to hoard the information, like everything is proprietary. Everything is IP in this. So that can be very challenging. But one of the things that I've learned is that if you can try to actually build relationships in New York and really have something to offer someone else and be willing to have those kind of conversations with people, there can be such quick acceleration in New York more than other places because there's so many things here that this person can connect connected to this person and that other person.

But if you're going to start to do business in New York, know that in the beginning to get past that initial gate can be very challenging because there's so many people. I'm thinking about it. We're trying to find apartment space or trying to find a seat on the subway. We're trying to push each other out of the way for a taxi.

Before we had Uber and Lyft, it's always like fighting for space. And that doesn't change when it comes like into the business world as well. There's always a little bit of elbowing each other, but if you can break through that and really build genuine relationships, you will have friends and partners for life that are trying to help you succeed.

So don't take that initial thing personally in New York can be great. You just have to kind of get past that gate. 

Caitlyn Allen: [00:24:08] Wow. I've never even thought about like the connections. I think that's cool though about the creative entrepreneur space is that we can make connections on the internet and it not feel.

Sometimes like, I mean sometimes it's dog eat dog out there, but, um, that community over competition that a lot of us are really resonating with nowadays, that connection is such a big deal and The feeling of loneliness going back to that and entrepreneurship and knowing that there, even if there might not be.

Anything right here in our backyard. Like me, for example, I live out in the middle of the desert. Like there's literally nobody I can go talk to about the things that I do in my business. And then you have you who is the complete opposite. He like get out my way clearly. Um, Oh, that's just so good. The concept of collaboration though is.

Such a, such a big one, especially for side hustlers. And that's how Dannie and I met. We met at college, we made a connection. And from there, you know, Danny's just made my business, so it's a thing. Anyways. Okay, well we would love to hear where we can find you. Find more information and we're for sure linking your TEDx talk in the description.

Monica Rivera: [00:25:26] Thank you. I appreciate that. So you can find me at, soyouwannadowhat.com it's w a N, N, a. So you want to do at.com and all the socials is this same branding. And I'm really on a mission to help 100 women launch their podcast because we have so many things to say. I think for a long time, other people have told our stories for us, I think it's time that we tell our own stories than our own words, and however it is want to say you without apologizing for it.

And so if I can help you not have your first episode be a hot mess like mine is, then come reach out to me. You want to do what? And I'm happy to talk to you and collaborate because although I'm in New York, I don't hoard information I like to share and pervasive. So let's do it. And let's have community and collaboration over conferences.

Caitlyn Allen: [00:26:11] Oh my gosh. Thank you so much for being on today. 

Monica Rivera: [00:26:14] Thank you for having me. This has been awesome.