You Already Know What You Need to Say. This Book Will Help You Say It.
Most of us have a voice we use at work, a voice we use at home, and a third voice — the quieter one — that we’ve learned to keep mostly to ourselves. The one that knows what we actually want. The one that sees what’s really happening. The one that, if we’re being honest, we’ve been slowly talking ourselves out of trusting.
Tunde Oyeneyin built her life — and her career — by learning to trust that voice. And she wrote Speak so you could too.
Speak: Find Your Voice, Trust Your Gut, and Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be was published in 2022, and we’re recommending it now because it’s the kind of book that doesn’t have a shelf life. The question it asks — are you actually living on purpose? — is as relevant today as it was the day it came out.
Who Is Tunde Oyeneyin?
If you’ve ever taken a Peloton class, there’s a reasonable chance Tunde has already changed your day. She trains nearly 20,000 riders on any given day, and is known for a style that’s equal parts demanding and deeply human — the kind of instructor who pushes you hard and then reminds you why.
She’s also far more than that. A first-generation American of Nigerian descent, she began her career as a professional makeup artist and brand educator before finding her way to Peloton, Nike (where she became a Nike Athlete in 2021), and Revlon (where she became a face of the brand). She’s been named to InStyle’s “The Badass 50” list and featured in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Good Morning America, and the Today show.
She is also the founder of SPEAK — the movement, the Instagram series, and now this book — which began as a platform for amplifying voices that had been quieted by adversity. It is, in other words, something she has been living out loud for years before she ever put it on paper.
So, What’s It Actually About?
Speak is equal parts memoir and manifesto, organized around the five-word acronym that gives the book its title: Surrender, Power, Empathy, Authenticity, and Knowledge. Each section draws on a chapter of Tunde’s own story — her early struggles with body image, the losses she has navigated, the unlikely path that took her from makeup counters to a global fitness platform — and connects it to a broader truth about what it means to live fully and intentionally.
Surrender comes first, and it’s deliberately counterintuitive: she isn’t asking you to give up. She’s asking you to release the grip on what you thought your life was supposed to look like, so you can actually see what it could be. Power follows — not the performative kind, but the real kind that comes from knowing yourself clearly enough to act from that knowledge rather than from fear or expectation. Empathy, Authenticity, and Knowledge round out the framework, with Tunde weaving her own experiences through each with a transparency that is, frankly, rare.
What makes Speak distinctive in a crowded self-help landscape is that it doesn’t give you a system to follow. It gives you a mirror to look into. Tunde isn’t telling you what to want — she’s telling you what happened when she stopped pretending she wanted something different, and inviting you to do the same.
What You’ll Take Away
- Surrender is not weakness; it’s strategy. The book’s most counterintuitive and most memorable reframe. Letting go of a rigid picture of what your life is supposed to look like isn’t giving up. It’s making room for what’s actually possible. Tunde’s own story makes this concrete rather than abstract.
- Your power comes from self-knowledge, not performance. So much of what professional women are asked to project — confidence, certainty, composure — is surface-level. Speak points consistently toward a deeper source of strength: knowing who you are, what you value, and what you’re actually willing to do about it.
- Authenticity is where trust begins. Tunde writes about this with the precision of someone who has spent years in front of thousands of people and figured out exactly what creates real connection versus the appearance of it. “When you show yourself as who you are, your people find you” is one of the book’s signature lines — and it applies as much in a boardroom as on a Peloton bike.
- Grief and growth are not opposites. Tunde has navigated significant loss throughout her life, and she doesn’t soften that. She also doesn’t let it be the whole story. The way she holds both — the grief and the moving forward — is one of the most honest and useful things about this book for anyone who has had to do the same.
- You don’t need permission to take up space. This is the subtext running through every chapter of Speak: the quieting of women’s voices is both cultural and internalized, and finding your voice again is an act that benefits everyone around you, not just yourself.
Why We’re Recommending It
The CFW community has been in the business of amplifying women’s voices for years. Speak is the book that works from the inside out — helping women reconnect with the voice they already have before they step onto any stage, into any negotiation, or through any door that once seemed closed to them.
It’s warm, honest, occasionally funny, and consistently moving. Read it yourself. Then hand it to someone who’s been a little too quiet lately.
Get the Book
Speak: Find Your Voice, Trust Your Gut, and Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be is available now wherever books are sold, including Amazon, BookPeople, and Bookshop.org.
Learn more about Tunde Oyeneyin and the SPEAK movement at speaktunde.com.
