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Throughout the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author the author poses a challenge: everyday injunctions to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and discussions – attempts to expose how companies take over individual identity, moving the burden of corporate reform on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Personal Journey and Larger Setting

The driving force for the book stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.

It arrives at a time of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the United States and internationally, as opposition to DEI initiatives grow, and many organizations are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured progress and development. The author steps into that terrain to assert that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and interests, keeping workers focused on handling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; instead, we need to redefine it on our own terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Persona

By means of colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, disabled individuals – quickly realize to adjust which persona will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which numerous kinds of assumptions are cast: affective duties, revealing details and continuous act of appreciation. According to Burey, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to endure what emerges.

According to the author, employees are requested to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the trust to withstand what arises.’

Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this situation through the account of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who decided to teach his team members about deaf culture and communication practices. His eagerness to share his experience – a gesture of candor the workplace often praises as “sincerity” – for a short time made daily interactions smoother. But as Burey shows, that advancement was precarious. After staff turnover wiped out the casual awareness Jason had built, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “All the information left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this is what it means to be asked to reveal oneself without protection: to face exposure in a structure that praises your openness but refuses to codify it into policy. Sincerity becomes a trap when organizations count on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Idea of Resistance

The author’s prose is both understandable and poetic. She combines scholarly depth with a style of connection: an invitation for readers to lean in, to challenge, to oppose. For Burey, workplace opposition is not loud rebellion but ethical rejection – the practice of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect appreciation for simple belonging. To dissent, in her framing, is to interrogate the stories organizations describe about justice and acceptance, and to reject engagement in rituals that sustain injustice. It might look like calling out discrimination in a gathering, choosing not to participate of unpaid “diversity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is provided to the company. Opposition, she suggests, is an affirmation of self-respect in spaces that typically praise obedience. It is a habit of principle rather than rebellion, a approach of insisting that one’s humanity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.

Reclaiming Authenticity

She also refuses inflexible opposites. The book does not simply discard “sincerity” completely: rather, she calls for its restoration. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not simply the unrestricted expression of individuality that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more thoughtful correspondence between one’s values and personal behaviors – a honesty that rejects distortion by corporate expectations. Instead of treating authenticity as a directive to overshare or adapt to cleansed standards of openness, Burey urges audience to preserve the parts of it rooted in sincerity, self-awareness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the objective is not to abandon genuineness but to shift it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and into connections and organizations where reliance, fairness and answerability make {