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Throughout the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey raises a critical point: commonplace directives to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they’re traps. Her first book – a mix of personal stories, research, cultural critique and discussions – attempts to expose how companies appropriate personal identity, shifting the burden of organizational transformation on to employees who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Broader Context

The motivation for the publication stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her perspective as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the core of her work.

It lands at a period of general weariness with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and various institutions are cutting back the very systems that earlier assured transformation and improvement. The author steps into that landscape to argue that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a collection of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with managing how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; we must instead redefine it on our personal terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Persona

Via detailed stories and discussions, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, people with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which self will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by striving to seem acceptable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which various types of expectations are projected: affective duties, revealing details and continuous act of gratitude. According to Burey, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the confidence to endure what emerges.

As Burey explains, we are asked to expose ourselves – but without the protections or the reliance to endure what arises.’

Case Study: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this situation through the account of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to teach his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His willingness to talk about his life – a gesture of openness the workplace often applauds as “sincerity” – briefly made everyday communications easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was precarious. After employee changes wiped out the informal knowledge Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All the information left with them,” he notes wearily. What was left was the fatigue of being forced to restart, of being held accountable for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be asked to share personally without protection: to face exposure in a system that celebrates your honesty but declines to codify it into policy. Authenticity becomes a trap when companies count on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.

Writing Style and Idea of Resistance

The author’s prose is simultaneously lucid and expressive. She marries scholarly depth with a manner of solidarity: an offer for followers to lean in, to interrogate, to oppose. For Burey, professional resistance is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the effort of opposing uniformity in workplaces that expect appreciation for mere inclusion. To oppose, according to her view, is to question the narratives institutions describe about equity and acceptance, and to decline engagement in practices that perpetuate inequity. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “equity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the organization. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of self-respect in environments that often praise obedience. It is a habit of honesty rather than opposition, a method of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

She also refuses brittle binaries. Authentic does not simply eliminate “authenticity” entirely: instead, she advocates for its restoration. According to the author, sincerity is not simply the unrestricted expression of personality that organizational atmosphere often celebrates, but a more thoughtful alignment between personal beliefs and individual deeds – an integrity that rejects distortion by corporate expectations. As opposed to treating genuineness as a requirement to reveal too much or conform to sterilized models of openness, Burey urges audience to keep the elements of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and principled vision. In her view, the objective is not to abandon sincerity but to shift it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and into interactions and offices where reliance, justice and answerability make {