If you’ve ever yearned for your immigrant parents’ approval and felt the weight of their high expectations or the burden of unspoken obligations, you’re not alone.
In “Unfinished Business,” Amy takes us on a heartfelt journey from detachment to deep connection with her own parents. With warmth, wit, and vulnerability, she explores the profound influence her parents had on her life and the choices she made, while revealing how their own circumstances shaped them.
Too often, we hesitate to ask our parents about their lives, held back by mistaken beliefs or past conflicts. Amy illuminates the power of conversation as she invites us to see the world through her parents’ eyes. By engaging in meaningful dialogues and taking the time to truly understand their experiences and struggles, we discover that our parents are not just figures from our past, but complex individuals with their own hopes, dreams, and fears.
“Unfinished Business” is both a memoir and a guidebook, offering a roadmap to navigate conversations with your own parents. Each chapter provides a framework of self-reflective prompts, practical tips, and thought-provoking questions to ask your parents, empowering you to embark on your own journey of connection. Because, regardless of the generation we belong to, we all long to be heard and understood. And that includes our parents.
Join Amy on this poignant exploration of family, identity, and the power of conversation. It’s time to embrace the unfinished business, unravel the untold stories, and forge a deeper bond with the ones who shaped us.
This is not and was never going to be easy. But it can get easier.
Amy Yip is a Somatic Life Transformation and Mental Fitness coach, keynote speaker, trainer, and author. She works with women of color to strengthen their mental fitness, heal intergenerational wounds, and have agency to let go of all the ‘shoulds’ so they can be the author of their own life story. Her mission to empower all women of color to become the embodied version of themselves.
In January 2020, after 16+ years of building and leading global teams in organizations like Google, Clorox, and Booz Allen, Amy left the corporate world, sold everything, and took a 1-way flight to Ghana with her husband to volunteer at a breast cancer non-profit and travel the world. COVID shifted their plans; they got stuck in Ghana for 7 months.
One of her greatest learnings:
Your mindset, NOT your circumstance, makes all the difference in your happiness and success.
Through this lens, she works with organizational leaders, including corporate executives, non-profits, and social entrepreneurs to find their voice and the courage to speak up, build self-confidence, navigate change, and discover what they REALLY want next in their life and career.
Amy is an ICF PCC, Certified Hudson Institute Coach, Certified Strozzi Somatics Coach, and a pioneer Mental Fitness Coach certified through Positive Intelligence. She is also one of fifteen Positive Intelligence Mastery Program Facilitators. Amy holds a MBA from Anderson UCLA, a MS in Communication Technology from Strayer University, and a BS in Computer Science, BA in Communications from University of Maryland.
Amy resides in Maryland with Greg, her best friend and husband, and her son Logan, the cutest kid ever.
Learn MoreAmy is an Asian American role model with a winding path to success. While striving to meet expectations of her immigrant parents, Amy was also able to find herself along the way. This book makes for a fascinating read for one growing up in a western society while under the influence of eastern culture, yet managing to find the right balance to find success in life.
—Cecil Fong, Executive Director, Diversity Summit
Amy Yip has written something incredibly unique, powerful, and transformational. Unfinished Business is a story of intergenerational trauma, gifts, love and healing the likes of which I have never seen, and it's laid out in intimate detail. I am in awe of what Amy and her parents have brought together via their challenging and both heartbreaking and heartwarming conversations.
Amy is an inspiring powerhouse just based on her "external" achievements, but this story and her willingness to share her (and her parents') "internal" world, as well as the loving bond between them are what's so powerful. If you are a high achiever that struggles with anxiety, an Asian American like me, or someone seeking to heal their relationship with themselves and their loved ones, this is the book you need.
—Newton Cheng, Director, Health + Performance Program, Google
This is the book I wish I had read when I was younger. It is the book I needed to read while struggling to straddle two worlds, American culture and that of my parents - Vietnamese refugees who escaped into the United States with only the clothing on our backs. This book is for anyone who wants to heal intergenerational trauma through kindness, conversations, and practical exercises. In Unfinished Business, Amy tells her story of finding her way home by examining her relationship with her parents. In doing so, she tells many of our stories with warmth and vulnerability, shining a light on the tenuous but beautiful of the parent-child relationship.
—Lan Phan, community of SEVEN, CEO