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Throughout the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey raises a critical point: everyday directives to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, studies, cultural critique and conversations – seeks to unmask how companies co-opt identity, shifting the burden of organizational transformation on to staff members who are frequently at risk.

Personal Journey and Wider Environment

The driving force for the book originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her experience as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a tension between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the engine of the book.

It emerges at a moment of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and many organizations are reducing the very frameworks that previously offered transformation and improvement. The author steps into that arena to assert that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a grouping of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers concerned with controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; we must instead reframe it on our own terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Persona

By means of detailed stories and interviews, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, employees with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which identity will “pass”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The act of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: affective duties, disclosure and ongoing display of thankfulness. As the author states, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the trust to withstand what comes out.

As Burey explains, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to endure what arises.’

Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience

The author shows this dynamic through the account of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to educate his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His readiness to discuss his background – an act of transparency the organization often commends as “authenticity” – for a short time made routine exchanges more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was unstable. When staff turnover erased the casual awareness Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. From the author’s perspective, this demonstrates to be asked to reveal oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a structure that praises your honesty but refuses to formalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when companies depend on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

The author’s prose is both lucid and poetic. She marries scholarly depth with a tone of kinship: an offer for readers to engage, to challenge, to oppose. For Burey, professional resistance is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the practice of opposing uniformity in workplaces that require appreciation for mere inclusion. To dissent, according to her view, is to challenge the accounts organizations describe about equity and inclusion, and to refuse participation in practices that maintain unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of uncompensated “equity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is made available to the organization. Opposition, Burey indicates, is an assertion of individual worth in environments that frequently encourage compliance. It constitutes a practice of principle rather than defiance, a method of asserting that one’s humanity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Authentic does not merely eliminate “sincerity” completely: instead, she calls for its redefinition. According to the author, sincerity is far from the unfiltered performance of individuality that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more deliberate harmony between one’s values and individual deeds – a principle that rejects alteration by organizational requirements. As opposed to treating genuineness as a directive to disclose excessively or adapt to cleansed standards of candor, Burey urges audience to keep the aspects of it based on honesty, personal insight and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the objective is not to give up on authenticity but to relocate it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to interactions and organizations where trust, justice and responsibility make {