Unfinished Business

One of my favorite past-times with my wife is to find a good show on Netflix and to binge-watch together. We’ve watched everything from episodes of Stranger Things, Queer Eye, & countless other shows, however one of the most interesting and convicting shows we’ve watch lately is Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.

Now if you aren’t familiar with Tidying Up with Marie Kondo it is a reality show that Netflix released earlier this year that  follows Marie Kondo, a Japanese organizing consultant and creator of the KonMari method, as she visits families to help them organize and tidy their homes. Each family has individual backgrounds and needs, which the show addresses with both hands-on guidance from Kondo and cutaways of Kondo giving additional KonMari explanations.

While her method to cleaning is effective in organizing people’s homes and environments, Kondo stresses that her method is “far more psychological than it is practical.” And as a result the families that participate in the process are able to conquer some of the unfinished business in their homes, as well as in their personal lives.

Here’s the takeaway: unfinished business will hold you back because with unfinished business you are continually focused on fixing the past. This is how it works…and not just with the mess in your garage.

Think about you own life, do you have a garage of things in a terminal holding pattern? Do you have projects that you have started that are collecting physical or emotional dust, dormant and half finished?

Because here’s the thing: When we allow relationships, commitments, and projects to go unfinished, the value of the initial investment steadily diminishes. And if neglected long enough, the investment will not only decrease in yield, it will become a deficit.

Unfinished business does not just happen. It is the direct result of a commitment that, for some reason or another, we are unwilling to complete. So how do you keep this from happening you ask?

The time to stop unfinished business is before you agree to the commitment. Unraveling the reason behind the when and the why you make random promises with the actual desire to fulfill them can be addressed by answering the following three questions:

1. How did you make the agreement for this unfinished business?  Take the opportunity that is here to seriously consider why you made some of these commitments.
2. Consider the nature of your commitment. We tend to think of commitments as only distinct, verbal agreements, but there are a number of implied promises that we make on a daily basis. The key here is to become more deliberate up-front and to renegotiate both implied and explicit promises when you see the possibility of a breakdown on the horizon…before it become an unfulfilled commitment.
3. What do I do with my unfinished business? Give yourself a deadline. 24 hours? A week? The deadline needs to be specific. Maybe you need to re-negotiate the original commitment. Or you may need to get out of the commitment all together!

But as you think about the barriers that seem to stop you from going forward in your life, remember, unfinished business plays a substantial part. You have to have the conversations you need to have, finish the jobs that need finishing, and if you need to, ask to be released from commitments that you realize you should have never made in the first place.

And furthermore, the greater the number of commitments, or possibilities from the past you leave undone, the higher your chances of closing down present possibilities because of the psychological and relational carry-over from those events.

So my challenge to you is to identify the areas in your life you could improve by identifying your unfinished business. Then finish the unfinished business!

Here’s the key though: In any of these, ask for forgiveness for how you dropped the ball, and don’t beat yourself up over it. Just deal with it and be done.

Don’t worry, we’ll talk more on the forgiveness piece in the next post.