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Throughout the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer Burey poses a challenge: typical injunctions to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. Her first book – a combination of recollections, research, cultural commentary and discussions – attempts to expose how businesses appropriate personal identity, moving the burden of institutional change on to individual workers who are already vulnerable.

Career Path and Broader Context

The driving force for the book lies partially in the author’s professional path: various roles across retail corporations, startups and in global development, filtered through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a back-and-forth between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the driving force of her work.

It arrives at a period of general weariness with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured change and reform. Burey enters that terrain to argue that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, keeping workers preoccupied with managing how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not a solution; rather, we should redefine it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Persona

By means of vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, employees with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which identity will “pass”. A weakness becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by working to appear palatable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which all manner of expectations are cast: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of gratitude. According to Burey, we are asked to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the reliance to endure what comes out.

‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to reveal ourselves – but absent the defenses or the confidence to withstand what arises.’

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

She illustrates this phenomenon through the narrative of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who chose to inform his team members about deaf community norms and communication norms. His willingness to talk about his life – an act of transparency the office often commends as “authenticity” – for a short time made everyday communications easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was unstable. When staff turnover eliminated the casual awareness Jason had built, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All the information went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What remained was the weariness of being forced to restart, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be requested to share personally without protection: to face exposure in a structure that applauds your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a trap when companies count on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

Her literary style is both lucid and expressive. She blends academic thoroughness with a manner of solidarity: a call for followers to lean in, to question, to disagree. According to the author, professional resistance is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the act of rejecting sameness in settings that expect gratitude for mere inclusion. To dissent, from her perspective, is to challenge the accounts institutions tell about justice and acceptance, and to decline involvement in customs that perpetuate injustice. It may appear as naming bias in a gathering, withdrawing of voluntary “inclusion” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the organization. Resistance, she suggests, is an declaration of self-respect in spaces that often praise compliance. It constitutes a habit of integrity rather than opposition, a method of asserting that one’s humanity is not based on corporate endorsement.

Reclaiming Authenticity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. The book does not merely discard “sincerity” completely: on the contrary, she urges its restoration. According to the author, sincerity is not the unfiltered performance of individuality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between individual principles and one’s actions – an integrity that opposes alteration by organizational requirements. Rather than considering genuineness as a directive to disclose excessively or adjust to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey urges readers to maintain the elements of it grounded in honesty, self-awareness and principled vision. From her perspective, the goal is not to abandon sincerity but to move it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward interactions and workplaces where confidence, equity and responsibility make {