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Throughout the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey poses a challenge: typical advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a blend of memoir, investigation, cultural critique and conversations – seeks to unmask how organizations take over individual identity, shifting the burden of corporate reform on to employees who are frequently at risk.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The driving force for the publication lies partially in the author’s professional path: different positions across business retail, new companies and in international development, filtered through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.

It emerges at a moment of general weariness with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and many organizations are cutting back the very frameworks that earlier assured change and reform. Burey enters that terrain to assert that backing away from the language of authenticity – that is, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a collection of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, leaving workers preoccupied with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; rather, we should reinterpret it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Self

Through colorful examples and conversations, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ people, female employees, employees with disabilities – soon understand to modulate which persona will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people compensate excessively by attempting to look acceptable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of expectations are projected: emotional labor, disclosure and ongoing display of appreciation. As the author states, we are asked to expose ourselves – but without the safeguards or the trust to survive what emerges.

‘In Burey’s words, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the protections or the confidence to withstand what comes out.’

Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the account of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to inform his co-workers about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His willingness to talk about his life – a behavior of candor the workplace often applauds as “genuineness” – briefly made daily interactions smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was unstable. After personnel shifts erased the casual awareness Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All the information departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a structure that celebrates your transparency but fails to formalize it into policy. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when organizations rely on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent

Her literary style is at once understandable and poetic. She combines intellectual rigor with a manner of kinship: an invitation for audience to lean in, to question, to dissent. According to the author, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the act of rejecting sameness in settings that require appreciation for simple belonging. To resist, according to her view, is to interrogate the narratives organizations describe about equity and belonging, and to decline engagement in rituals that perpetuate unfairness. It may appear as naming bias in a discussion, withdrawing of voluntary “diversity” labor, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the institution. Dissent, she suggests, is an affirmation of personal dignity in settings that frequently praise compliance. It represents a practice of integrity rather than opposition, a method of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. Her work does not merely toss out “authenticity” entirely: rather, she calls for its restoration. According to the author, sincerity is not the unrestricted expression of personality that business environment frequently praises, but a more intentional alignment between individual principles and individual deeds – a principle that rejects distortion by organizational requirements. As opposed to considering genuineness as a directive to reveal too much or adjust to cleansed standards of openness, Burey urges readers to keep the elements of it grounded in truth-telling, personal insight and principled vision. According to Burey, the aim is not to abandon authenticity but to relocate it – to remove it from the corporate display practices and into interactions and workplaces where trust, fairness and accountability make {