This summer I wanted to make some changes in my business.
Not just tactical changes, like a new website or pricing. The changes I wanted to make were going to require something much more difficult: I needed to become a different kind of person. Someone who could tolerate more uncertainty. Make decisions before I had perfect clarity. Stay consistent when motivation disappeared. Let go of old ideas that no longer fit where I was headed.
I could have tried to do all that on my own. I usually do.
But I’ve known myself long enough to know how that usually goes…
So instead of buying another course or reading another business book, I built a container.
I invited half a dozen business owners who were wrestling with similar questions into a four-month experiment. We’ve been meeting regularly. We have a text thread that never really stops. Some grab coffee between calls. We’ve gone to each other’s events. We know what each person is building, what they’re afraid of, what they’re avoiding and what they’re hoping for.
My business has been changing dramatically because of it. But even more exciting: I’ve been transforming.
This group has become more than accountability. It is a container that is holding me while I grow. It’s people who can see me when I can’t see myself. It’s given me practices that keep me moving when I want to retreat. It gives me the stability to experiment, fail, learn and keep going.
It’s been such a good reminder that I don’t grow through information. I grow inside the right containers.
I grew up in church. My dad has been a pastor my whole life. Outside of my family, church was the most formative container of my childhood. It shaped me in thousands of ways I still carry today. It gave me a story larger than myself, adults who cared about me, rituals that anchored my weeks, opportunities to serve and develop skills, friendships that are still blowing up my phone with notifications to this day.
I’m deeply grateful for it.
Eventually I left my dad’s church to plant a new church in South Austin. Years later, I left the institutional church altogether. For a time, I described that season as leaving organized religion.
Now I would describe it differently. I wasn’t rejecting the need for a container, like religion. I had simply outgrown that particular one.
The pot that had helped me grow had become too small. I needed a container spacious enough to hold the questions I was asking and the person I was becoming. I didn’t need less formation - I needed a new container for the next stage of my growth.
I can now see that leaving an unhealthy container doesn’t mean I’ve outgrown my need for containers altogether. In fact, I think one of the tragedies of modern life is that we’ve become very good at dismantling containers and much less skilled at building new ones.
For most of human history, our lives were held inside a web of overlapping communities and shared rhythms. Families lived near one another. People belonged to churches, synagogues, temples, unions, bowling leagues, civic clubs, neighborhood institutions, and workplaces where they might spend decades. They weren’t perfect. Some were rigid. Some were exclusionary. Some desperately needed reform.
But they held people.
Today, much of that has disappeared.
We piece together careers through freelance work and entrepreneurship. We move away from our families. We switch cities, churches, and jobs every few years. We consume endless content but know very few neighbors.
We have more freedom than any generation before us. But that freedom has come at the cost of being unmoored.
Everyone seems to have an explanation for why anxiety, loneliness, and disorientation feel so widespread today. Some blame social media. Others blame politics, capitalism, the economy, or the decline of religion.
I suspect there are many causes. But I wonder if one of them is this: We’ve lost many of the containers that once held us.
The word “container” might sound abstract, but I haven’t yet found a better one :) What I mean by “container” is something that offers four things:
It gives you a story. A way of understanding the world and your place within it.
It gives you a purpose. A reason to show up and contribute.
It gives you a community. People who know your name, remind you who you’re becoming, and carry some of the weight when life becomes heavy.
It gives you practices. Rhythms that shape you slowly through repetition and embodiment.
Whether you’re talking about a family, a recovery group, a company, or a church, a Harry Potter fan-fic group, or a Crossfit gym, these four ingredients are what are present. These are the macro-nutrients of a meaningful container and they nourish a meaningful life.
And when we are starved of those nutrients, we will look for substitutes. We will binge on the empty calories of politics becoming our tribe, productivity becoming our identity, online algorithms becoming our teachers, sports becomes our liturgy. None of thse are inherently bad. They were just never designed to carry the weight of being our primary source of meaning, identity and belonging.
We don’t stop being formed. We just swap out what is forming us.
Growth and freedom do not come from escaping unhealthy containers. Because we never graduate from being formed.
The question has never been whether something is shaping us. The question is what.
The old containers were obvious. You knew when you walked into a church. You knew when you joined a bowling league. You knew when you started a career at the local company. They made no secret of the fact that they were trying to shape you.
Today’s containers are harder to see precisely because they feel like freedom. They feel like anti-containers.
We find ourselves inside containers shaped by personalized feeds. Consumer culture. Political tribes. Personal brands. The assumption that you should build your own identity, create your own meaning, curate your own beliefs, and optimize every area of your life.
These containers don’t ask for membership cards or weekly attendance. They simply shape your attention, your desires, your fears, and your imagination in a thousand nearly invisible ways.
Even the stories our culture tells about success, happiness, and what makes a life worthwhile become containers. They answer the questions human beings are inherently asking: Who am I? What matters? What should I want? Who are my people?
The most powerful containers are often the ones we don’t recognize as containers. They’re nearly invisible - which is what makes them so powerful.
Modern life didn’t eliminate containers - it individualized them.
That’s why simply throwing off old structures doesn’t necessarily make us healthier. It often just makes us more available to new ones.
We don’t escape formation. We simply trade visible forms of formation for invisible ones, shared rituals for personalized algorithms, intentional communities for unconscious culture. We don’t stop being discipled - we just become less aware of who our teachers are.
The goal isn’t to become container-less. It is to become conscious.
To ask, What story is shaping me? What community is forming me? What practices are quietly becoming my liturgy?
If we don’t intentionally chose what we want to form us, there are powerful forces already shaping us into a particular kind of person.
This is both the risk and the opportunity of the time we find ourselves in.
While this is an age of disappearing containers, maybe it can also be an age of becoming architects.
Unlike previous generations, many of us aren’t limited to the handful of set communities in our neighborhood. We can intentionally build the kinds of spaces we wish existed.
That may be the invitation of adulthood in our time. Children inherit containers, adults build them.
Parents create family rituals that didn’t exist when they were growing up. Friends start dinner clubs. Neighbors organize community gardens. Entrepreneurs create mastermind groups. Recovery meetings begin in borrowed basements. Book clubs form around kitchen tables.
Someone decides that our formation will not be left to the forces of individualism, capitalism, consumerism, tribalism.
They build a container.
Without an intentional container, growing into the kind of people we want to be can feel like swimming upstream. We feel burned out from leaning on willpower, trying to manufacture change through sheer discipline. Like a plant trying to grow in a dark closet, beating itself up for shriveling - when all it needs is to be planted in some soil, water and sunlight. What seems impossible in one container becomes natural in another.
I’ve become convinced that transformation rarely happens by trying harder, setting goals, buying a new habits journal. It happens when we intentionally place ourselves inside environments that shape who we’re becoming.
Our formation was never meant to be a solo project. The right container surrounds us with people who remind us who we’re becoming, practices that gently pull us forward, and rhythms that make the next faithful step feel natural, even fun.
We don’t grow by simply escaping old containers. We grow by intentionally placing ourselves inside better ones.
BENEDICTION: May we become more aware of the invisible containers already shaping our lives. May we have the courage to leave the containers no longer lead us toward who we want to be, and the imagination to build new ones that nourish who we are becoming. And may we find ourselves held by stories worth living, people worth walking alongside, and rhythms that make us more fully alive.
If you’re a business owner, creative or leader who is interested in being a part of a container designed to help you live from your True Self, schedule a discovery call here. I’d love to see if it’s a good fit for you!
“He makes everyone feel comfortable to open up - even in areas that you or your team may not feel confident in. There’s no judgement. He makes it easy to get to the core issues. Lean in and trust him fully.”
Kate Davis, Founder