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In the beginning sections of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: commonplace advice to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a combination of recollections, research, societal analysis and discussions – aims to reveal how organizations co-opt identity, transferring the responsibility of organizational transformation on to employees who are already vulnerable.

Personal Journey and Larger Setting

The motivation for the publication lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: different positions across corporate retail, new companies and in global development, viewed through her background as a disabled Black female. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a push and pull between expressing one’s identity and aiming for security – is the driving force of her work.

It emerges at a moment of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and many organizations are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured change and reform. Burey delves into that terrain to assert that backing away from the language of authenticity – namely, the organizational speech that minimizes personal identity as a set of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, leaving workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are treated – is not an effective response; rather, we should reframe it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Act of Identity

Via detailed stories and conversations, the author demonstrates how marginalized workers – people of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, disabled individuals – learn early on to modulate which persona will “pass”. A weakness becomes a liability and people try too hard by attempting to look agreeable. The effort of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which various types of anticipations are placed: affective duties, disclosure and constant performance of thankfulness. As the author states, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the reliance to survive what comes out.

According to the author, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the protections or the confidence to withstand what arises.’

Case Study: An Employee’s Journey

She illustrates this dynamic through the story of an employee, a employee with hearing loss who decided to inform his colleagues about the culture of the deaf community and communication practices. His readiness to share his experience – an act of candor the organization often praises as “authenticity” – for a short time made routine exchanges smoother. Yet, the author reveals, that advancement was precarious. When employee changes erased the unofficial understanding he had established, the culture of access vanished. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What remained was the exhaustion of needing to begin again, of having to take charge for an institution’s learning curve. In Burey’s view, this illustrates to be told to expose oneself lacking safeguards: to endanger oneself in a framework that applauds your openness but declines to formalize it into policy. Sincerity becomes a pitfall when institutions depend on individual self-disclosure rather than organizational responsibility.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

Burey’s writing is simultaneously lucid and expressive. She blends academic thoroughness with a tone of kinship: a call for readers to lean in, to challenge, to disagree. For Burey, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the effort of resisting conformity in settings that expect gratitude for basic acceptance. To resist, from her perspective, is to interrogate the accounts institutions narrate about justice and acceptance, and to decline engagement in rituals that sustain inequity. It might look like naming bias in a meeting, choosing not to participate of unpaid “inclusion” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is provided to the company. Resistance, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in spaces that frequently praise conformity. It represents a practice of principle rather than opposition, a method of insisting that an individual’s worth is not based on organizational acceptance.

Redefining Genuineness

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. Her work does not simply discard “sincerity” completely: rather, she advocates for its redefinition. For Burey, authenticity is not the unrestricted expression of character that business environment typically applauds, but a more deliberate correspondence between personal beliefs and individual deeds – a honesty that resists alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of viewing genuineness as a requirement to reveal too much or conform to sanitized ideals of candor, the author encourages readers to keep the aspects of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the goal is not to give up on sincerity but to shift it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and into relationships and organizations where trust, equity and accountability make {