🔗 Share this article

Throughout the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, author Jodi-Ann Burey poses a challenge: commonplace directives to “be yourself” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not benevolent calls for personal expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a blend of personal stories, studies, cultural critique and conversations – attempts to expose how businesses appropriate personal identity, transferring the weight of institutional change on to employees who are frequently at risk.

Career Path and Larger Setting

The impetus for the work originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across corporate retail, new companies and in worldwide progress, interpreted via her background as a woman of color with a disability. The dual posture that the author encounters – a back-and-forth between expressing one’s identity and looking for safety – is the driving force of Authentic.

It emerges at a time of general weariness with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and many organizations are scaling back the very systems that earlier assured change and reform. Burey enters that landscape to assert that backing away from authenticity rhetoric – specifically, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a grouping of aesthetics, 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 personal terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Self

Via vivid anecdotes and interviews, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, people with disabilities – soon understand to calibrate which persona will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people try too hard by working to appear agreeable. The effort of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which various types of anticipations are projected: emotional labor, revealing details and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the defenses or the trust to endure what emerges.

According to the author, we are asked to reveal ourselves – but without the protections or the confidence to survive what arises.’

Real-Life Example: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this situation through the account of an employee, a deaf employee who decided to educate his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His eagerness to discuss his background – a behavior of transparency the organization often applauds as “genuineness” – briefly made routine exchanges easier. However, Burey points out, that progress was fragile. After staff turnover eliminated the casual awareness Jason had built, the culture of access disappeared. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he states tiredly. What was left was the fatigue of having to start over, of being made responsible for an company’s developmental journey. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be requested to share personally without protection: to face exposure in a structure that praises your honesty but refuses to formalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a pitfall when institutions depend on employee revelation rather than structural accountability.

Writing Style and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is simultaneously clear and expressive. She marries intellectual rigor with a manner of connection: an offer for followers to participate, to interrogate, to oppose. For Burey, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but ethical rejection – the act of rejecting sameness in environments that require thankfulness for basic acceptance. To oppose, from her perspective, is to question the accounts organizations describe about justice and inclusion, and to reject involvement in practices that maintain inequity. It could involve identifying prejudice in a gathering, opting out of voluntary “diversity” work, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is made available to the company. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of personal dignity in environments that typically praise conformity. It constitutes a discipline of integrity rather than rebellion, a way of asserting that a person’s dignity is not dependent on institutional approval.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. The book does not simply discard “sincerity” completely: instead, she calls for its reclamation. In Burey’s view, sincerity is far from the unrestricted expression of personality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more thoughtful alignment between one’s values and individual deeds – an integrity that rejects alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of viewing genuineness as a requirement to overshare or adapt to sterilized models of candor, Burey advises audience to preserve the aspects of it rooted in sincerity, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the aim is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and to relationships and workplaces where reliance, justice and accountability make {