Crossing the Rubicon: Seven Steps to Writing Your Own Personal Strategy is a mechanism to apply best practice business strategies to your personal and professional life. Crossing the Rubicon is a metaphor for releasing your potential, transforming your life and achieving personal and professional success. It helps you move from knowing about the best ideas and success techniques to doing something practical about the implementation of your life's purpose.
Crossing the Rubicon is a personal strategy exercise that provides you with a road map to pull all your thinking and ambitions together into one co-ordinated whole. Personal Strategy is beyond goal setting, career planning and personal coaching. It is personal leadership, talent management and motivational planning all rolled into one. It is about maximising your personal capital. It is about formulating a clarity, purpose and high degree of expectation to your current personal/professional situation and future direction. It builds a framework or set of tracks for your desired future. The primary objective of writing a personal strategy is to help you transform your life for the better and achieve the goals you set- this is the key- for yourself, not just to achieve the goals that circumstances deliver. A compelling rubicon strategy is 'an integrated whole' rather than a 'bits and parts' approach to personal and professional management. The term Crossing the Rubicon goes back to Roman times. In 49 BC Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon river and entered Italy from Gaul with a standing army. To do so was treason, an act of audacity against the Roman state and it effectively started a bloody civil war.
Crossing the Rubicon wasthe point of no return for Caesar. It was an act of war, an irreversible step with no turning back. He knew the implications of his actions. When he had crossed the river he said: "The die is now cast, there is no going back, ever again." He was irrevocably committed to that course of action.
Crossing the Rubicon is, therefore, a term for taking bold, decisive and irreversible action. It is the point of no return. When you write your personal strategy you cross the point of no return in that you take control of your own life and set a transformational course of action into play.
You effectively burn your bridges and face down your best excuses. Move from knowing about the steps to transform your situation to doing something very practical about it. 'To know and not to do is not yet to know' is how Confucius put it over 2500 years ago. Moving from knowing to doing is crossing the rubicon.