Take the 30-Day Unfinished Business Challenge

I do not consider myself a self-help expert. I'm a workaholic who improved his life by reaching out to others and making amends. In the process, I learned that tending to your unfinished emotional business can help you focus your energy on what's truly important: family and friends; living productively and purposefully in harmony with what you most authentically value and believe.

As this new year begins, I encourage you to commit to taking care of just one item on your own list of unfinished business -- and to take 30 days to complete it. Make that commitment and you'll begin experiencing immediate and lasting rewards.

Addressing your unfinished business is a five-step process. It involves:

* Taking stock

* Facing your fears

* Reaching out

* Making amends

* Reflection and personal growth

Each of these five steps is important to the process. Taking stock prepares the way for you to identify and own up to the wrongs you've committed. You need to face your fears before you can reach out to the people you've wronged and make sincere amends. It is by reflecting on your experiences that you refine your conscience and commit to keep acting according to your highest ideals.

I have assembled the strategies that worked best for me in the Unfinished Business Toolkit. You'll find tips for taking stock, facing your fears, reaching out to others and making amends. The Unfinished Business Worksheet is designed to help you organize and reflect on your experience.

Throughout the 30-Day Challenge I encourage you to use me as a sounding board and as your personal cheerleading squad. (You can contact me below or at www.myunfinishedbusiness.com.) After you've completed your item, please send me a summary of the lessons you've learned, so I might share them with others.

As I've written before: "All of us have unfinished business. It can be a friend we lost touch with or a mentor we never thanked; it can be a call we meant to make or a pledge we put on hold. Too often, life takes over and pushes the experiences that might enrich, enlarge or even complete us to the bottom of our to-do list."

Tackling your unfinished business -- even just one item of it -- can transform your life.

Take the 30-Day Challenge. I'll be here to cheer you on.