🔗 Share this article

Within the initial chapters of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author the author raises a critical point: commonplace injunctions to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they can be pitfalls. Burey’s debut book – a combination of memoir, research, societal analysis and discussions – seeks to unmask how organizations appropriate personal identity, shifting the burden of organizational transformation on to employees who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Larger Setting

The impetus for the work stems partly in the author’s professional path: multiple jobs across retail corporations, startups and in global development, filtered through her background as a Black disabled woman. The dual posture that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of her work.

It arrives at a period of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs grow, 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 – that is, the organizational speech that trivializes identity as a collection of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and hobbies, forcing workers focused on managing how they are seen rather than how they are regarded – is not an effective response; we must instead reframe it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Persona

Through colorful examples and discussions, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, disabled individuals – quickly realize to modulate which identity will “fit in”. A weakness becomes a liability and people overcompensate by working to appear palatable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which various types of anticipations are projected: affective duties, disclosure and continuous act of appreciation. According to Burey, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the safeguards or the trust to endure what arises.

According to the author, we are asked to expose ourselves – but absent the defenses or the trust to survive what arises.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

Burey demonstrates this phenomenon through the narrative of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who chose to educate his team members about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His eagerness to talk about his life – a behavior of candor the office often commends as “genuineness” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. However, Burey points out, that improvement was fragile. After employee changes wiped out the informal knowledge he had established, the environment of accessibility dissolved with it. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he states tiredly. What remained was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of being made responsible for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be asked to reveal oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a system that celebrates your openness but declines to formalize it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when organizations rely on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is both understandable and expressive. She blends academic thoroughness with a tone of connection: a call for followers to participate, to interrogate, to dissent. For Burey, professional resistance is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the practice of resisting conformity in environments that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To dissent, according to her view, is to interrogate the stories organizations narrate about fairness and belonging, and to reject involvement in rituals that maintain unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a meeting, choosing not to participate of unpaid “diversity” work, or establishing limits around how much of oneself is offered to the organization. Dissent, the author proposes, is an affirmation of self-respect in spaces that frequently encourage obedience. It represents a discipline of honesty rather than defiance, a way of asserting that a person’s dignity is not conditional on organizational acceptance.

Restoring Sincerity

She also refuses rigid dichotomies. Her work avoids just eliminate “genuineness” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its reclamation. For Burey, authenticity is not the unfiltered performance of individuality that business environment typically applauds, but a more deliberate correspondence between one’s values and personal behaviors – an integrity that rejects distortion by organizational requirements. Instead of viewing genuineness as a mandate to reveal too much or adapt to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey urges followers to keep the parts of it rooted in honesty, personal insight and principled vision. In her view, the goal is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and into connections and workplaces where reliance, justice and responsibility make {