🔗 Share this article

Within the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author the author poses a challenge: commonplace advice to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, studies, cultural critique and discussions – seeks to unmask how businesses appropriate personal identity, transferring the responsibility of institutional change on to employees who are already vulnerable.

Career Path and Larger Setting

The impetus for the publication originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across corporate retail, startups and in global development, viewed through her experience as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey experiences – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the engine of the book.

It lands at a time of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that earlier assured transformation and improvement. Burey enters that terrain to assert that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of appearances, quirks and hobbies, forcing workers focused on handling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; instead, we need to redefine it on our own terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Self

By means of colorful examples and discussions, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women workers, people with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which persona will “fit in”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by attempting to look acceptable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of expectations are placed: affective duties, disclosure and continuous act of thankfulness. In Burey’s words, workers are told to expose ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the confidence to withstand what arises.

As Burey explains, employees are requested to share our identities – but absent the safeguards or the trust to withstand what arises.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

The author shows this dynamic through the story of Jason, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to educate his co-workers about deaf community norms and communication practices. His eagerness to talk about his life – an act of openness the workplace often praises as “authenticity” – briefly made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was fragile. After personnel shifts eliminated the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the culture of access disappeared. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the weariness of being forced to restart, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be requested to expose oneself absent defenses: to risk vulnerability in a system that praises your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into procedure. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when companies count on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.

Writing Style and Idea of Resistance

Her literary style is at once lucid and expressive. She blends academic thoroughness with a tone of kinship: an offer for readers to engage, to interrogate, to disagree. For Burey, workplace opposition is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the effort of rejecting sameness in workplaces that expect gratitude for simple belonging. To oppose, from her perspective, is to question the stories institutions narrate about equity and inclusion, and to reject engagement in customs that perpetuate unfairness. It could involve naming bias in a gathering, withdrawing of unpaid “equity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is provided to the institution. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an declaration of personal dignity in spaces that frequently encourage conformity. It constitutes a practice of integrity rather than opposition, a approach of maintaining that one’s humanity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. The book does not simply discard “authenticity” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not simply the raw display of character that business environment often celebrates, but a more intentional harmony between one’s values and personal behaviors – a honesty that resists distortion by organizational requirements. As opposed to treating sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or adjust to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey urges audience to keep the elements of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and moral understanding. According to Burey, the aim is not to give up on sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and to interactions and workplaces where confidence, justice and accountability make {