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Within the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey poses a challenge: commonplace injunctions to “bring your true self” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a combination of recollections, investigation, cultural critique and interviews – aims to reveal how organizations take over individual identity, transferring the weight of institutional change on to staff members who are often marginalized.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The driving force for the publication originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across corporate retail, emerging businesses and in international development, viewed through her background as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a push and pull between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of the book.

It emerges at a moment of widespread exhaustion with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and many organizations are scaling back the very systems that previously offered transformation and improvement. Burey enters that terrain to assert that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – namely, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a set of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, keeping workers focused on controlling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; rather, we should reframe it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Performance of Self

By means of vivid anecdotes and interviews, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, employees with disabilities – soon understand to adjust which persona will “pass”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by striving to seem acceptable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which all manner of assumptions are cast: affective duties, sharing personal information and ongoing display of appreciation. In Burey’s words, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the trust to endure what emerges.

‘In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the reliance to withstand what comes out.’

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the story of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who took it upon himself to educate his co-workers about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His readiness to talk about his life – an act of transparency the organization often applauds as “authenticity” – briefly made daily interactions easier. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was unstable. When personnel shifts erased the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All the information departed with those employees,” he comments exhaustedly. What was left was the weariness of having to start over, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this is what it means to be asked to share personally lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a structure that celebrates your honesty but declines to formalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when institutions depend on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.

Literary Method and Concept of Dissent

Her literary style is simultaneously clear and poetic. She blends intellectual rigor with a style of connection: an offer for readers to participate, to challenge, to oppose. According to the author, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the act of rejecting sameness in environments that require gratitude for basic acceptance. To resist, according to her view, is to interrogate the stories companies tell about equity and acceptance, and to reject participation in practices that perpetuate unfairness. It might look like identifying prejudice in a meeting, opting out of voluntary “equity” labor, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is made available to the company. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of personal dignity in environments that typically encourage obedience. It represents a practice of honesty rather than rebellion, a way of insisting that one’s humanity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. Her work does not merely eliminate “authenticity” completely: instead, she urges its reclamation. According to the author, sincerity is far from the unrestricted expression of personality that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more deliberate alignment between personal beliefs and one’s actions – an integrity that resists alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of considering genuineness as a directive to disclose excessively or adjust to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey urges followers to keep the aspects of it based on honesty, self-awareness and moral understanding. In her view, the objective is not to abandon sincerity but to shift it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to connections and workplaces where confidence, justice and responsibility make {