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Throughout the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Burey issues a provocation: commonplace injunctions to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. This initial publication – a blend of personal stories, studies, cultural commentary and discussions – seeks to unmask how companies take over individual identity, transferring the weight of institutional change on to employees who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Broader Context

The driving force for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across business retail, startups and in global development, viewed through her background as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of the book.

It arrives at a moment of general weariness with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very systems that earlier assured transformation and improvement. The author steps into that terrain to contend that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a collection of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, keeping workers focused on handling how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; rather, we should reframe it on our individual conditions.

Minority Staff and the Act of Identity

Via detailed stories and conversations, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, employees with disabilities – soon understand to calibrate which persona will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of anticipations are projected: emotional work, revealing details and continuous act of thankfulness. According to Burey, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the protections or the trust to endure what emerges.

‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the trust to withstand what arises.’

Case Study: An Employee’s Journey

She illustrates this situation through the narrative of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to educate his colleagues about deaf culture and communication practices. His eagerness to talk about his life – an act of transparency the workplace often commends as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions more manageable. But as Burey shows, that improvement was precarious. Once employee changes eliminated the unofficial understanding he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All the information departed with those employees,” he states tiredly. What stayed was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this illustrates to be asked to share personally without protection: to endanger oneself in a framework that praises your transparency but fails to formalize it into policy. 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 simultaneously clear and poetic. She combines intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: an offer for followers to participate, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the effort of rejecting sameness in workplaces that require gratitude for basic acceptance. To oppose, in her framing, is to challenge the accounts companies describe about justice and belonging, and to reject participation in rituals that perpetuate unfairness. It might look like naming bias in a meeting, choosing not to participate of voluntary “equity” effort, or defining borders around how much of oneself is provided to the company. Dissent, she suggests, is an affirmation of individual worth in spaces that often encourage compliance. It constitutes a habit of integrity rather than defiance, a approach of maintaining that one’s humanity is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Reclaiming Authenticity

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. Authentic avoids just toss out “genuineness” entirely: rather, she advocates for its reclamation. For Burey, authenticity is far from the raw display of individuality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more thoughtful correspondence between personal beliefs and one’s actions – a principle that rejects alteration by institutional demands. Rather than viewing sincerity as a directive to overshare or adjust to sanitized ideals of transparency, the author encourages readers to maintain the parts of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and moral understanding. In her view, the goal is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and into interactions and workplaces where reliance, justice and accountability make {