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Throughout the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Burey poses a challenge: commonplace advice to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for individuality – they’re traps. This initial publication – a blend of recollections, studies, societal analysis and discussions – aims to reveal how organizations appropriate personal identity, transferring the weight of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Wider Environment

The motivation for the publication lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across retail corporations, new companies and in worldwide progress, viewed through her experience as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the core of the book.

It emerges at a period of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as resistance to DEI initiatives increase, and many organizations are reducing the very frameworks that previously offered progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to argue that retreating from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the business jargon that minimizes personal identity as a collection of aesthetics, quirks and pastimes, forcing workers concerned with managing how they are viewed rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our individual conditions.

Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Self

By means of detailed stories and interviews, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, people with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which persona will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people try too hard by working to appear acceptable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a reflective surface on which various types of assumptions are cast: emotional work, sharing personal information and ongoing display of gratitude. According to Burey, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the protections or the trust to withstand what emerges.

According to the author, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the reliance to survive what comes out.’

Real-Life Example: Jason’s Experience

The author shows this phenomenon through the account of a worker, a deaf employee who decided to educate his colleagues about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His willingness to discuss his background – an act of candor the office often applauds as “authenticity” – briefly made routine exchanges smoother. But as Burey shows, that advancement was fragile. When personnel shifts erased the unofficial understanding he had established, the atmosphere of inclusion dissolved with it. “All the information left with them,” he notes wearily. What remained was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this demonstrates to be requested to share personally without protection: to risk vulnerability in a structure that celebrates your honesty but refuses to institutionalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a snare when companies count on individual self-disclosure rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Concept of Dissent

Burey’s writing is both understandable and poetic. She blends academic thoroughness with a style of kinship: a call for readers to lean in, to interrogate, to disagree. For Burey, professional resistance is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the act of rejecting sameness in environments that expect thankfulness for mere inclusion. To dissent, in her framing, is to challenge the stories institutions describe about equity and acceptance, and to decline participation in customs that maintain unfairness. It might look like calling out discrimination in a gathering, opting out of voluntary “diversity” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s identity is provided to the institution. Opposition, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in environments that typically reward conformity. It constitutes a practice of principle rather than opposition, a method of asserting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

The author also avoids inflexible opposites. Authentic does not merely discard “sincerity” wholesale: rather, she advocates for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, sincerity is far from the unrestricted expression of personality that corporate culture often celebrates, but a more deliberate alignment between one’s values and individual deeds – a honesty that opposes manipulation by institutional demands. Rather than treating genuineness as a directive to reveal too much or adjust to cleansed standards of candor, Burey advises followers to keep the parts of it grounded in truth-telling, self-awareness and ethical clarity. According to Burey, the goal is not to discard sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the corporate display practices and into relationships and offices where trust, justice and responsibility make {