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In the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: typical directives to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for individuality – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and discussions – seeks to unmask how businesses take over individual identity, shifting the weight of institutional change on to employees who are often marginalized.

Personal Journey and Wider Environment

The motivation for the work stems partly in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across corporate retail, startups and in international development, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The conflicting stance that the author encounters – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of the book.

It arrives at a time of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across America and other regions, as backlash to DEI initiatives mount, and numerous companies are scaling back the very structures that previously offered transformation and improvement. Burey enters that arena to argue that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – namely, the corporate language that minimizes personal identity as a collection of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, leaving workers concerned with controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are treated – is not the answer; we must instead redefine it on our personal terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Self

By means of colorful examples and discussions, Burey illustrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ individuals, women workers, people with disabilities – soon understand to calibrate which self will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people try too hard by striving to seem agreeable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are cast: emotional work, revealing details and continuous act of gratitude. As the author states, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but absent the defenses or the reliance to survive what arises.

‘In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the trust to withstand what comes out.’

Case Study: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this phenomenon through the narrative of Jason, a deaf employee who took it upon himself to teach his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His eagerness to discuss his background – a gesture of openness the organization often praises as “sincerity” – briefly made everyday communications easier. Yet, the author reveals, that progress was unstable. Once staff turnover eliminated the casual awareness Jason had built, the culture of access dissolved with it. “All the information left with them,” he comments exhaustedly. What remained was the weariness of having to start over, of having to take charge for an company’s developmental journey. According to Burey, this illustrates to be told to share personally absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a structure that celebrates your openness but refuses to codify it into policy. Genuineness becomes a pitfall when companies depend on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

The author’s prose is simultaneously lucid and poetic. She combines scholarly depth with a tone of solidarity: an invitation for readers to participate, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, dissent at work is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the act of rejecting sameness in settings that demand gratitude for basic acceptance. To oppose, from her perspective, is to interrogate the stories organizations tell about fairness and belonging, and to refuse engagement in customs that sustain injustice. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a meeting, opting out of unpaid “diversity” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the organization. Dissent, she suggests, is an affirmation of personal dignity in settings that typically encourage obedience. It constitutes a discipline of principle rather than opposition, a approach of asserting that one’s humanity is not based on corporate endorsement.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. Authentic does not merely toss out “sincerity” entirely: on the contrary, she urges its reclamation. According to the author, authenticity is not simply the raw display of character that business environment typically applauds, but a more thoughtful harmony between individual principles and individual deeds – a principle that opposes alteration by corporate expectations. As opposed to considering sincerity as a directive to disclose excessively or adapt to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey advises audience to keep the aspects of it grounded in sincerity, individual consciousness and principled vision. In her view, the goal is not to discard genuineness but to shift it – to remove it from the boardroom’s performative rituals and into relationships and workplaces where trust, justice and accountability make {