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Throughout the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer Burey issues a provocation: everyday advice to “be yourself” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they’re traps. This initial publication – a mix of recollections, studies, cultural commentary and conversations – seeks to unmask how companies appropriate personal identity, shifting the burden of corporate reform on to staff members who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Larger Setting

The motivation for the book stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across business retail, new companies and in international development, viewed through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a push and pull between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the engine of Authentic.

It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and many organizations are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured progress and development. The author steps into that arena to contend that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a collection of surface traits, quirks and interests, leaving workers focused on managing how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; rather, we should redefine it on our individual conditions.

Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Persona

Through colorful examples and discussions, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, people with disabilities – soon understand to adjust which persona will “be acceptable”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: emotional labor, revealing details and continuous act of appreciation. According to Burey, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but without the safeguards or the confidence to endure what arises.

‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to survive what arises.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

The author shows this dynamic through the account of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to teach his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His readiness to discuss his background – a behavior of openness the organization often praises as “genuineness” – temporarily made everyday communications smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was precarious. After employee changes wiped out the casual awareness he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “Everything he taught left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the weariness of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this is what it means to be told to share personally absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a framework that celebrates your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a trap when institutions depend on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

Burey’s writing is at once lucid and expressive. She marries academic thoroughness with a manner of connection: an invitation for followers to engage, to challenge, to dissent. According to the author, professional resistance is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the practice of opposing uniformity in environments that require gratitude for simple belonging. To oppose, according to her view, is to question the accounts organizations narrate about justice and belonging, and to reject participation in rituals that perpetuate unfairness. It might look like calling out discrimination in a meeting, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “inclusion” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is made available to the company. Opposition, she suggests, is an affirmation of personal dignity in environments that often praise compliance. It represents a discipline of integrity rather than opposition, a method of asserting that an individual’s worth is not based on organizational acceptance.

Reclaiming Authenticity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not simply discard “sincerity” wholesale: instead, she urges its reclamation. According to the author, sincerity is far from the unfiltered performance of individuality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more deliberate alignment between individual principles and individual deeds – a honesty that opposes distortion by institutional demands. Instead of treating sincerity as a mandate to reveal too much or adjust to sterilized models of openness, Burey urges readers to maintain the elements of it based on truth-telling, self-awareness and principled vision. In her view, the goal is not to abandon authenticity but to move it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and to interactions and offices where reliance, fairness and accountability make {