Hear How This Woman Coached Herself Through a Near-Death Experience to Become a One-Person Fitness Brand You can coach yourself to success. Just listen to your inner mantra.

How Success Happens is a podcast featuring polar explorers, authors, ultra marathoners, artists and more to better understand what connects dreaming and doing. Linda Lacina, Entrepreneur.com's managing editor, guides these chats so anyone can understand the traits that underpin achievement and what fuels the decisions to push us forward. Listen below or click here to read more shownotes.

Watching Robin Arzon talking through one of her hard-driving (and explicit) spin classes for Peloton, it's hard to imagine her doing anything else. But just a few years ago, her workday meant sitting in an office, not on a bike, clocking nearly 90 hours a week as a corporate litigator.

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After hours and hours of delving into everything from SEC rules to intellectual property law, she lived to run. She got so much enjoyment out of exercising, she realized she'd much rather run for a living. Slowly, she transformed herself into an ultra marathoner, cycler and bestselling author. Today she's also the vice president of fitness programming at the cycling company Peloton, doing everything from shaping content to getting on a bike herself to motivate students who livestream her class from across the country.

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She made this transformation, in part, thanks to her ability to use words to coach herself -- and others. During a horrifying near-death experience in her 20s, her use of words to coach and connect helped her defuse a gunman, a connection that saved her life and the lives of others.

Today, inner mantras help her run ultra marathons, with words acting as a sort of drum beat through every step. An understanding of words and story also helps her check in with not just herself, but the students in her classes, providing them with the small adjustments that make big impacts.

Learn more about how Arzon used storytelling and words to transform her life and become a one-woman fitness brand in our latest episode of How Success Happens.

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