🔗 Share this article

Within the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker the author issues a provocation: everyday directives to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they often become snares. Her first book – a combination of memoir, research, cultural commentary and discussions – aims to reveal how businesses take over individual identity, moving the burden of organizational transformation on to employees who are frequently at risk.

Professional Experience and Larger Setting

The driving force for the work originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across corporate retail, startups and in international development, viewed through her background as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that the author encounters – a tension between asserting oneself and aiming for security – is the core of the book.

It emerges at a time of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and numerous companies are reducing the very systems that earlier assured transformation and improvement. The author steps into that arena to contend that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a set of aesthetics, peculiarities and interests, keeping workers preoccupied with managing how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; we must instead reinterpret it on our own terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Self

Through colorful examples and discussions, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, people with disabilities – learn early on to calibrate which persona will “be acceptable”. A sensitive point becomes a disadvantage and people overcompensate by attempting to look palatable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of expectations are placed: emotional work, sharing personal information and ongoing display of thankfulness. As the author states, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the defenses or the trust to endure what emerges.

As Burey explains, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the protections or the reliance to survive what emerges.’

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the narrative of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to educate his team members about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His readiness to discuss his background – an act of transparency the workplace often commends as “sincerity” – for a short time made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was unstable. When employee changes wiped out the informal knowledge he had established, the culture of access disappeared. “Everything he taught departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the fatigue 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 without protection: to face exposure in a system that celebrates your honesty but fails to codify it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a trap when institutions depend on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is at once lucid and poetic. She blends intellectual rigor with a tone of solidarity: an invitation for readers to participate, to question, to dissent. According to the author, dissent at work is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the effort of opposing uniformity in settings that require gratitude for basic acceptance. To resist, from her perspective, is to challenge the narratives organizations tell about justice and belonging, and to reject engagement in practices that sustain injustice. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a gathering, withdrawing of uncompensated “inclusion” effort, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Resistance, the author proposes, is an declaration of personal dignity in spaces that frequently encourage obedience. It constitutes a discipline of integrity rather than defiance, a way of maintaining that an individual’s worth is not dependent on institutional approval.

Reclaiming Authenticity

Burey also rejects brittle binaries. The book avoids just discard “sincerity” wholesale: rather, she advocates for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, genuineness is not simply the raw display of personality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more thoughtful correspondence between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a honesty that resists distortion by corporate expectations. As opposed to treating sincerity as a directive to reveal too much or adjust to sterilized models of candor, Burey urges readers to keep the elements of it based on sincerity, self-awareness and principled vision. From her perspective, the objective is not to abandon authenticity but to move it – to transfer it from the executive theatrical customs and toward relationships and workplaces where reliance, justice and accountability make {