Success in any venture, whether in politics, business, or other areas, always requires the united effort of people. No general can achieve military victory without the cooperation of commanders and soldiers. No business can profitably market and sell a product without the cooperation of a business team who want to sell, and consumers who agree to buy. No man or woman can be elected to office without the cooperation of paid and volunteer help, not to mention the citizens who must agree to cast a favorable vote.

What is the one key element in moving people toward a common goal? The answer: Persuasion. Those who can speak and write and organize people and resources in ways that persuade others are more successful than those who cannot. In large measure, those who can persuade others determine the fate of events and the course of history.

There are other ways to move people, sure. Historically, force and fraud have been the tools favored by tyrants. But the energy of a slavish group of tortured people is no match for free men and women who take action of their own choosing. That’s the key: persuasion alone unleashes the energy of free souls, because when persuaded to do something, men and women do it because they want to.

On July 2, 1776, as the Continental Congress was approving the Lee Resolution for American independence, General George Washington penned the following prose, persuading his officers and the soldiers serving under them to keep up the fight:

The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses, and farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them….We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die….Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world, that a free man contending for liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on Earth.

Several days later, after July 4, Washington ordered the generals of his army to read aloud to their subordinates what would become the most famous persuasive political document in history: the Declaration of Independence. Without the persuasive efforts of Washington and the leaders of the American Revolution, the American experiment in self-government would’ve failed before it began.

The Leadership Program of the Rockies believes the art of persuasion is the timeless key to success for anyone in any station of life, but especially for those who want to recover the precious freedom that we stand at risk of losing today. And that is why LPR proudly announces its latest project: The School of Persuasion.