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In the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker the author poses a challenge: typical advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a blend of recollections, studies, societal analysis and interviews – aims to reveal how businesses take over individual identity, shifting the responsibility of organizational transformation on to staff members who are frequently at risk.

Professional Experience and Larger Setting

The motivation for the publication lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: multiple jobs across business retail, emerging businesses and in global development, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that Burey faces – a push and pull between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the core of her work.

It arrives at a period of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs mount, and various institutions are scaling back the very structures that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that arena to argue that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the corporate language that trivializes identity as a grouping of appearances, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, keeping workers focused on controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; rather, we should reframe it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Persona

Through colorful examples and conversations, the author demonstrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women, disabled individuals – learn early on to calibrate which self will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a liability and people overcompensate by attempting to look palatable. The effort of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of expectations are cast: affective duties, sharing personal information and constant performance of appreciation. According to Burey, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the reliance to withstand what comes out.

As Burey explains, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the trust to withstand what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey

The author shows this dynamic through the narrative of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to teach his team members about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His eagerness to discuss his background – a gesture of transparency the organization often applauds as “genuineness” – briefly made routine exchanges smoother. However, Burey points out, that improvement was unstable. When personnel shifts eliminated the unofficial understanding he had established, the environment of accessibility vanished. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be told to reveal oneself lacking safeguards: to risk vulnerability in a structure that celebrates your honesty but refuses to formalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a snare when institutions rely on individual self-disclosure rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Idea of Resistance

Burey’s writing is simultaneously lucid and expressive. She blends intellectual rigor with a manner of connection: an offer for followers to participate, to challenge, to dissent. According to the author, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the act of resisting conformity in settings that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To resist, according to her view, is to interrogate the narratives institutions describe about justice and belonging, and to reject participation in practices that maintain unfairness. It could involve calling out discrimination in a meeting, choosing not to participate of uncompensated “inclusion” work, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s personal life is offered to the organization. Resistance, she suggests, is an assertion of self-respect in environments that frequently praise obedience. It represents a discipline of integrity rather than rebellion, a way of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Redefining Genuineness

The author also avoids brittle binaries. Her work does not simply toss out “genuineness” completely: on the contrary, she calls for its redefinition. According to the author, sincerity is not the unfiltered performance of character that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more thoughtful alignment between individual principles and one’s actions – a principle that resists manipulation by organizational requirements. Rather than considering genuineness as a requirement to overshare or adapt to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey urges audience to keep the parts of it based on sincerity, individual consciousness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and into relationships and organizations where trust, equity and accountability make {