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Within the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer the author poses a challenge: everyday directives to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a mix of recollections, research, societal analysis and interviews – aims to reveal how organizations co-opt identity, moving the responsibility of corporate reform on to staff members who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Larger Setting

The impetus for the book lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across business retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, filtered through her perspective as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a tension between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the core of the book.

It emerges at a moment of widespread exhaustion with corporate clichés across America and other regions, as opposition to DEI initiatives increase, and many organizations are reducing the very frameworks that previously offered progress and development. Burey delves into that arena to argue that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a grouping of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, forcing workers preoccupied with managing how they are seen rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; rather, we should reinterpret it on our personal terms.

Minority Staff and the Act of Self

Through detailed stories and conversations, the author demonstrates how employees from minority groups – employees from diverse backgrounds, LGBTQ+ individuals, female employees, people with disabilities – quickly realize to adjust which persona will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people try too hard by working to appear palatable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which various types of anticipations are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. In Burey’s words, workers are told to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the confidence to survive what comes out.

According to the author, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but lacking the protections or the reliance to survive what comes out.’

Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey

The author shows this situation through the narrative of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to inform his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His willingness to share his experience – a behavior of openness the office often praises as “authenticity” – briefly made daily interactions more manageable. But as Burey shows, that advancement was precarious. After staff turnover eliminated the unofficial understanding the employee had developed, the culture of access disappeared. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What was left was the exhaustion of having to start over, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this illustrates to be asked to share personally without protection: to endanger oneself in a system that praises your honesty but fails to formalize it into regulation. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when institutions count on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Literary Method and Concept of Dissent

Her literary style is simultaneously clear and poetic. She combines scholarly depth with a manner of kinship: an offer for audience to engage, to challenge, to dissent. According to the author, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the act of rejecting sameness in settings that expect appreciation for basic acceptance. To resist, in her framing, is to challenge the accounts institutions describe about justice and belonging, and to decline participation in customs that maintain injustice. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a discussion, opting out of unpaid “equity” work, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the organization. Resistance, she suggests, is an affirmation of personal dignity in spaces that often encourage conformity. It represents a habit of integrity rather than defiance, a method of insisting that one’s humanity is not based on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Her work does not merely eliminate “authenticity” entirely: on the contrary, she advocates for its restoration. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not simply the unfiltered performance of individuality that organizational atmosphere typically applauds, but a more deliberate correspondence between one’s values and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects alteration by corporate expectations. Instead of treating sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or conform to cleansed standards of candor, Burey urges followers to keep the elements of it rooted in truth-telling, self-awareness and moral understanding. From her perspective, the goal is not to abandon genuineness but to move it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and to interactions and offices where confidence, fairness and answerability make {