Speak: Find Your Voice, Trust Your Gut, and Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

Tunde Oyeneyin, a Peloton fitness instructor and first-generation American of Nigerian descent, organizes her memoir around five pillars she calls SPEAK: Surrender, Power, Empathy, Authenticity, and Knowledge. Rather than following a strict chronology, the book moves thematically through episodes from her life, each chapter anchored to one of these pillars, tracing her path from a self-conscious girl in Houston, Texas, to a public figure reaching millions.

Oyeneyin grew up in Katy, a Houston suburb, where her parents, Veronica and Festus, settled after emigrating from Nigeria. Her father worked as a taxi driver and security guard while running a delivery company, and the household included three brothers, Tony, Tosin, and the youngest, Tope, plus two cousins Festus brought from Nigeria.

From an early age, Oyeneyin struggled with body image. At 14, she was mortified when a bridesmaid dress for an auntie's wedding did not come in her size. She refused a prettier alternative because wearing a different style would reveal she could not fit into the one everyone else wore. Her mother told her that if her weight mattered to her, she would have to make a change, then bought two of the dresses and sewed them together so her daughter could blend in. That summer, Oyeneyin began exercising at a gym next to her pizza shop job and lost 30 pounds. She realized that what had truly changed was not just her body but her willingness to show people who she really was.

Makeup became her primary form of self-expression. Her mother introduced her to cosmetics in sixth grade, and Oyeneyin became obsessed. While studying communications at the University of Houston, she was hired at a well-known makeup brand at Macy's and discovered she loved the work for the human connection, not the sales. A formative encounter with Lacey, a young woman undergoing chemotherapy who needed to learn how to draw on her lost eyebrows, cemented her understanding that her purpose was about helping people see their own beauty.

Her friends Kim Caldwell, a former American Idol top-ten finalist, and Kim's younger sister Kristy, Oyeneyin's close friend since sixth grade, convinced her to move to Los Angeles. She left college and drove to LA with $500. After the internship Kim had arranged fell through, she landed a job at a globally recognized makeup brand she admired, turning down a safer offer from her old company because it did not make foundation for her skin tone. She watched an educator named Cynthia command a training room and realized she wanted to become a trainer, not just an artist, rising eventually to national trainer.

In 2009, her youngest brother Tope died suddenly at 19, collapsing at home while watching a movie with his girlfriend. In Yoruba culture, the second-largest ethnic group in Nigeria, parents are not supposed to bury their children, so Veronica and Festus could not attend the funeral. Oyeneyin organized the service and delivered an unscripted eulogy, channeling a prayer her mother always said: that whatever Yetunde, Oyeneyin's given first name, says will be the right thing. Her seven-year-old nephew Silas, who had always called Tope "Best Friend," read a tribute that reduced the room to sobs. Oyeneyin stayed in Houston for three months, supporting her parents through their grief.

By 2016, she felt deeply unfulfilled in her makeup career. During a work trip to New York, she took her first cycling class. The 45-minute ride became a moving meditation. Walking home through foggy Chelsea, she stopped, laughing, and felt what she describes as a blue light running through her body. She saw her future with certainty: She would cycle for the rest of her life, teach it to others, and do so on the world's biggest platform.

She did not quit her job. Instead, she began riding at a heated cycling studio in LA called the Sweat Shoppe and auditioned as an instructor. After seven months of teaching there, Cody Rigsby, the director of cycling at Peloton, a rapidly growing exercise bike and live-class platform, invited her to audition. She flew to New York and rode alone in the Peloton studio under blue lighting. Two weeks later, Cody emailed to say they were not moving forward. She was devastated.

She continued teaching and reframed her frustration as fuel, treating each class as if she were already on the Peloton stage. In the spring of 2019, Cody called back. Over two days of interviews, she showed up as herself. On the ride to the airport, Cody called and made a formal offer. They both cried.

Loss continued to shape her throughout these years. Her father Festus died of organ failure just after Christmas 2011. Approximately two years later, her mother Veronica was diagnosed with aggressive ovarian cancer, having privately survived breast cancer 19 years earlier. Oyeneyin flew home and lay by her side for seven days during hospice care. In a brief window of lucidity, Veronica gave her final instructions: Do not leave your brothers, do not forget them, do not fight with them. Oyeneyin insisted on doing her mother's funeral makeup herself, applying red lipstick, red nails, and White Diamond perfume.

Oyeneyin also examines the cost of misplaced empathy through her five-year relationship with Brian, her first serious boyfriend. Despite his refusal to work and his increasingly troubling behavior, including breaking into her apartment after their breakup, she stayed too long because she sympathized with his difficult childhood in foster care. The experience taught her that placing someone else's well-being above her own eroded her self-worth, a lesson that informed her eventual breakup with her boyfriend Johnny when she moved to New York for Peloton.

She arrived in New York in June 2019 and began teaching at Peloton, leading with vulnerability and sharing her story on camera. People began complimenting her muscular arms, the very feature she had inherited her mother's shame about, and riders said they wanted "Tunde arms."

In May 2020, George Floyd was murdered. Six days later, Oyeneyin recorded a raw video from her bedroom floor urging people to confront their biases. With Peloton's support, she designed a 30-minute ride called "Speak Up," connecting it to SPEAK, the women's accountability group she had previously founded. Twenty-two thousand people rode live, the second-highest-attended class in Peloton history at the time. She told riders, "If Black lives don't matter, there is no all" (152). Afterward, lying on the podium, she saw a blue light from a camera and felt her life had synced with the vision from that Chelsea sidewalk.

A year later, she shaved her head, shedding the weaves and braids she had worn since childhood as emotional armor. Her colleague Jess King gasped: "I can see you. For the first time I can see all of you" (172). Riders responded by cutting their own hair and showing their natural selves.

The COVID-19 pandemic tested her further. Only seven months into her Peloton career, she struggled with isolation and lost motivation. She reflects on being single at almost 36, deciding to freeze her eggs and buy a condo in Brooklyn on her own terms. Looking back at the building after her first visit, she noticed it was brick with blue gates and a red door, just like the house in Katy where she grew up.

In the afterword, Oyeneyin returns to a phrase her mother repeated throughout her childhood: "Black and shine." She now understands her mother was not describing her shiny skin but recognizing a power in her daughter that Oyeneyin could not yet see. By the time she unwrapped that gift, her mother was gone, but its recognition, she writes, will last forever.