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Within the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: everyday directives to “bring your true self” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they often become snares. Her first book – a mix of recollections, research, cultural commentary and interviews – aims to reveal how companies take over individual identity, shifting the weight of corporate reform on to employees who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Larger Setting

The motivation for the book stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across retail corporations, new companies and in international development, viewed through her background as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey experiences – a tension between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the engine of the book.

It arrives at a period of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that previously offered transformation and improvement. Burey enters that landscape to contend that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – namely, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a collection of surface traits, peculiarities and hobbies, leaving workers concerned with handling how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not a solution; rather, we should reframe it on our personal terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Performance of Identity

Via detailed stories and conversations, Burey illustrates how underrepresented staff – employees from diverse backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, people with disabilities – learn early on to adjust which self will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a drawback and people compensate excessively by attempting to look acceptable. The practice of “showing your complete identity” becomes a reflective surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: emotional labor, revealing details and constant performance of thankfulness. As the author states, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to survive what arises.

As Burey explains, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the trust to survive what emerges.’

Illustrative Story: The Story of Jason

The author shows this dynamic through the story of an employee, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to teach his team members about deaf community norms and communication practices. His eagerness to talk about his life – a behavior of openness the workplace often applauds as “authenticity” – temporarily made everyday communications easier. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was precarious. Once staff turnover eliminated the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the culture of access vanished. “All of that knowledge departed with those employees,” he comments exhaustedly. What stayed was the weariness of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an institution’s learning curve. According to Burey, this illustrates to be asked to share personally absent defenses: to face exposure in a structure that applauds your honesty but declines to codify it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a snare when companies depend on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is at once understandable and poetic. She blends academic thoroughness with a manner of connection: a call for readers to participate, to interrogate, to dissent. In Burey’s opinion, professional resistance is not overt defiance but ethical rejection – the act of resisting conformity in environments that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To resist, according to her view, is to interrogate the narratives institutions narrate about fairness and belonging, and to reject engagement in practices that maintain inequity. It might look like naming bias in a gathering, opting out of unpaid “inclusion” work, or establishing limits around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the institution. Resistance, she suggests, is an declaration of self-respect in settings that often praise conformity. It represents a habit of honesty rather than opposition, a approach of insisting that one’s humanity is not dependent on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. The book avoids just toss out “authenticity” completely: instead, she calls for its redefinition. In Burey’s view, authenticity is not simply the unrestricted expression of individuality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more intentional correspondence between one’s values and individual deeds – a principle that rejects alteration by institutional demands. As opposed to considering authenticity as a mandate to overshare or conform to cleansed standards of transparency, the author encourages audience to preserve the elements of it grounded in truth-telling, individual consciousness and principled vision. From her perspective, the goal is not to abandon sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and into connections and organizations where trust, fairness and accountability make {