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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: typical injunctions to “come as you are” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not benevolent calls for self-expression – they’re traps. This initial publication – a combination of recollections, investigation, cultural commentary and discussions – aims to reveal how businesses take over individual identity, shifting the burden of organizational transformation on to staff members who are often marginalized.

Career Path and Wider Environment

The impetus for the book originates in part in the author’s professional path: various roles across business retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her experience as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of her work.

It emerges at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, and various institutions are cutting back the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. The author steps into that landscape to contend that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – that is, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a set of appearances, peculiarities and hobbies, leaving workers preoccupied with handling how they are seen rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; we must instead reframe it on our own terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Self

Via colorful examples and interviews, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, disabled individuals – soon understand to calibrate which identity will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by attempting to look acceptable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of expectations are projected: emotional labor, disclosure and continuous act of thankfulness. As the author states, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to survive what emerges.

As Burey explains, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the trust to withstand what comes out.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this situation through the story of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who took it upon himself to inform his co-workers about deaf culture and communication norms. His readiness to discuss his background – a behavior of candor the organization often praises as “genuineness” – temporarily made routine exchanges more manageable. But as Burey shows, that improvement was fragile. When staff turnover wiped out the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the atmosphere of inclusion disappeared. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he notes wearily. What was left was the fatigue of having to start over, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be asked to share personally absent defenses: to face exposure in a system that praises your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into regulation. Sincerity becomes a trap when companies rely on personal sharing rather than organizational responsibility.

Writing Style and Concept of Dissent

Burey’s writing is at once clear and poetic. She marries intellectual rigor with a manner of connection: an offer for followers to engage, to challenge, to oppose. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the act of opposing uniformity in settings that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To resist, in her framing, is to question the stories organizations tell about equity and inclusion, and to reject engagement in practices that perpetuate inequity. It could involve identifying prejudice in a meeting, choosing not to participate of voluntary “equity” labor, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is made available to the institution. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an declaration of individual worth in spaces that typically reward conformity. It constitutes a discipline of principle rather than defiance, a approach of insisting that a person’s dignity is not based on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. The book does not simply eliminate “genuineness” completely: on the contrary, she advocates for its redefinition. In Burey’s view, sincerity is not the unfiltered performance of individuality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more deliberate correspondence between one’s values and one’s actions – an integrity that opposes distortion by institutional demands. Instead of considering sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or adjust to cleansed standards of transparency, Burey advises followers to preserve the parts of it based on honesty, individual consciousness and moral understanding. From her perspective, the aim is not to discard genuineness but to shift it – to transfer it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and to relationships and offices where trust, fairness and responsibility make {