We Were Always Dingos

An allegory about finding our own success

Aug 17, 2022

I’ve got a story for you this week. It’s about Coyotes and Dingos.

I recently joined a local half-marathon training team (HMTT) in preparation for a race in November. My husband and I have trained with them in the past, and decided to join again this year for accountability, motivation, and a chance to connect with other runners. The team includes a schedule for training, workshops throughout the season, and a once-a-week organized group run. You are assigned to a small team to run with on these group run days. These smaller teams are based on three things- whether you plan to do the group runs on Saturday or Sunday, whether you’ve ever run a half marathon before or not (intermediate vs. novice), and your pace. Each small team has a group of coaches. All the teams have animal names.

We were assigned to the Coyotes. When we arrived for the first group run the head coach mentioned in his introduction that the average pace for group was 7:30 min/mile to 9:00 min/mile. Five years ago I ran a half marathon in just under 2 hours, so I have run at the upper end of that range, however coming off a season of less running, and taking into account the soupy late summer Virginia humidity, my current comfortable pace is at 10:30/11:00 per mile.

For the first mile or so of the inaugural run of the Coyotes I kept up with the back of the pack, but I quickly wore myself out and slowed down to my more comfortable pace.

Coyote. Photo by Tristan Frank on Unsplash

There was another intermediate team running on Sundays— the Dingos. While I was bringing up the Coyotes tail, I ended up running with some of front end of the Dingos team (the nose, I guess, to stick with my anatomy analogy). The pace felt right in line with mine. I thought: this is great- I’ll just switch teams.

And then immediately followed that thought with: wait, shouldn’t I be pushing myself? I need to stay where I am and use it train to a faster pace. I shouldn’t just take the easy way out.

And so instead of just immediately sending an email requesting to switch teams (it’s that simple), I waffled, thinking: but I will get faster, and being with the faster team will be a good push and it’s not supposed to feel easy today, and don’t quit. My husband and I spent some time talking about the Coyotes versus Dingos conundrum (he was less tip of the tail of the Coyote, perhaps more like the base of it). We went back and forth, to switch or not to switch. Eventually the conversation turned back to our initial goals in signing up for HMTT this year: accountability, motivation, meeting people.

Either team was going to keep us accountable. Every Sunday there will be a group of people gathering to run. The motivation is baked in as well— the mileage on those long runs increases each week and it will be hard to keep up if we don’t do the training runs throughout the week. But the meeting people, how likely was that to happen when we were off pace from the team? Most teammates would finish before us and go home, eliminating post-run socializing. I wouldn’t be pacing with anyone on the Coyotes team, so if I was meeting anyone during the runs, they’d likely be Dingos, anyway.

And then it was easy. Becoming a Dingo just made sense.

It was the clear way to meet all three of my goals for joining a training team in the first place. I just let myself get distracted with all those shoulds, and coulds, and don’t quits. I lost sight of what I wanted out of this experience and instead gave into deeply ingrained messages around performance.

Dingo. Photo by Tarryn Myburgh on Unsplash

I tell you this story of Coyotes and Dingos for a reason. Just like we get a lot of messages about athletic performance (harder, better, faster, stronger) we get a lot of messages about success in business and how to achieve it. Some of this is direct: things like videos and articles about how to make a high six figure income or hit a million followers on Instagram. A lot of it is also indirect: a glance at someone’s follower number on this or that social site or the number of comments/likes their posts draw.

It’s super easy to default to defining success in these very traditional and outward facing ways, but if our goal here as healthier hustlers is to go about our businesses and creative work differently— perhaps it also makes sense to think a little differently about success. A little more personally.

If you shut out all the societal messages we’re given, how do YOU define success for yourself.

Is your version of success completing a novel, finishing a painting, making your own set of pottery dishes you use everyday? Is it documenting family stories? Coaching a group of 10 people who really resonate with your philosophies, taking on one new freelance client a year in your marketing business. If your version of success is more numbers based— what is the income you need to truly feel comfortable (maybe it’s a high six figure or maybe not)* or maybe your financial goal is about paying down debt aggressively and less about a “magic number” you need to hit. Maybe you do have a goal of 10K followers on social media or subscribers on your newsletter, but also, what are the interactions you hope to have with your audience? Maybe a really engaged 300 actually allows for that.

Let’s be honest- even once you’ve got a clear picture of what success looks like to you, it’s hard to stop those messages about what you should, could, must do from slipping in. I had clear goals going into my training team and still almost talked myself into running with the Coyotes when I knew all along I was a Dingo.

Here’s a couple things I’e found that help me stay pointed toward my individual north stars of success (or get realigned when I slip off track):

1) Finding touchstones. The people who keep you grounded. The ones who help you drown out the shoulds, coulds, musts when they get REAL loud. Touchstones come in two forms:

People in your day-to-day circle. These are your mentors, trusted friends, business partners, partner partners, coaches. The folks you share your goals with. The ones you talk about success with. Perhaps the ones who reflect back to your what seems to make you light up the most. Likely, the very ones who helped you arrive at that definition of success on your terms in the first place.
People whose public work resonates with you. These are people you don’t really know well or possibly not at all, but they’ve written articles or books or have newsletters or podcasts that talk about business and creativity and success in a way that resonates with you. A way that reminds you there are all kinds of right ways to do things. The ones who make you feel like you aren’t the only person out there who thinks about this differently. Here are two of mine, as examples:
- I can’t even tell you how many years I’ve subscribed to Dan Blank’s newsletter— but it’s lots. And many, many Fridays his email lands in my inbox with the timeliest of reminders that there is no “easy” button on getting your work in front of readers and how important it is to nurture connections with the humans who are interested in what you create.
- Caroline and Jason Zook’s podcast lands in my ear many weeks with reminders about things like the fact that my business and creative work don’t have the “dent the universe”** to be impactful. They talk a lot about success on your own terms, creating space for all the things you value and defining enough.

My touchstones may not be yours (I mean clearly the first ones likely aren’t). But find them for yourself and hold on. The messages about better, faster, stronger, never-give-up will keep coming and one of the best ways to quiet them is to know exactly were to find the support you need.

2) Trusting your gut. It’s cliche because it’s true. In my coyote/dingo allegory I knew the answer before I finished that first run. I just let myself think myself into a circle about it. Very often this is true. It feels awkward or different, maybe even just plain wrong somehow to think about success differently than it’s packaged up and sold in society and we convince ourselves someone else knows better, when we’ve actually known all along.

We were always dingos.

Things of Beauty

Just a few things that felt particularly soul-nourishing recently (or maybe just made me smile).

💃 I Feel Like Dancing / Jason Mraz with Raining Jane and Molly Miller - such a fun video, where the musicians talk about the experience of playing the song live the first time and the synergy they felt with the audience!

✒️ This quote: “I’ve just seen too many writers run themselves into the ground because they are told to do a million things, and end up feeling burned out and bitter. I want you to feel a sense of joy and purpose in how you share your writing.” — From: Finding Joy & Purpose in How You Share by Dan Blank (aka my Friday morning newsletter touchstone)

😎 And since I shared a running allegory, I’ll also share these sunglasses from Goodr which are great for running and other sweaty, sunny, outdoor activities (not a sponsorship in any way, I just like them and the fun colors bring me joy):