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Within the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: commonplace injunctions to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for individuality – they’re traps. Burey’s debut book – a mix of personal stories, research, cultural commentary and interviews – seeks to unmask how companies appropriate personal identity, moving the weight of corporate reform on to staff members who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Wider Environment

The motivation for the work lies partially in Burey’s personal work history: various roles across retail corporations, startups and in global development, viewed through her experience as a disabled Black female. The conflicting stance that Burey faces – a tension between expressing one’s identity and seeking protection – is the driving force of her work.

It arrives at a time of general weariness with corporate clichés across the US and beyond, as resistance to DEI initiatives mount, and various institutions are reducing the very structures that once promised transformation and improvement. Burey delves into that terrain to argue that retreating from corporate authenticity talk – namely, the business jargon that reduces individuality as a set of appearances, quirks and hobbies, leaving workers preoccupied with controlling how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; we must instead redefine it on our own terms.

Minority Staff and the Performance of Persona

Via detailed stories and conversations, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, female employees, disabled individuals – learn early on to calibrate which identity will “pass”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people try too hard by attempting to look palatable. The act of “showing your complete identity” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of anticipations are projected: emotional labor, sharing personal information and ongoing display of appreciation. As the author states, we are asked to expose ourselves – but lacking the protections or the confidence to endure what comes out.

As Burey explains, employees are requested to share our identities – but without the safeguards or the trust to endure what arises.’

Illustrative Story: An Employee’s Journey

She illustrates this dynamic through the account of Jason, a employee with hearing loss who decided to inform his co-workers about the culture of the deaf community and interaction standards. His readiness to talk about his life – an act of openness the organization often commends as “genuineness” – for a short time made routine exchanges more manageable. But as Burey shows, that advancement was unstable. After personnel shifts erased the unofficial understanding Jason had built, the atmosphere of inclusion vanished. “All of that knowledge left with them,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the fatigue of having to start over, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. According to Burey, this is what it means to be requested to reveal oneself absent defenses: to endanger oneself in a structure that praises your transparency but fails to formalize it into regulation. Authenticity becomes a trap when institutions rely on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.

Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance

Burey’s writing is simultaneously understandable and poetic. She blends intellectual rigor with a manner of kinship: an invitation for readers to participate, to challenge, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not loud rebellion but principled refusal – the practice of opposing uniformity in workplaces that expect gratitude for basic acceptance. To resist, in her framing, is to interrogate the accounts companies narrate about justice and belonging, and to refuse participation in rituals that perpetuate unfairness. It might look like identifying prejudice in a meeting, opting out of voluntary “diversity” effort, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is provided to the institution. Resistance, Burey indicates, is an assertion of personal dignity in settings that typically encourage obedience. It constitutes a discipline of integrity rather than defiance, a way of asserting that one’s humanity is not dependent on institutional approval.

Redefining Genuineness

Burey also rejects rigid dichotomies. Her work does not simply toss out “authenticity” completely: rather, she urges its redefinition. For Burey, sincerity is far from the raw display of character that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more thoughtful harmony between personal beliefs and personal behaviors – an integrity that resists distortion by corporate expectations. Rather than considering genuineness as a requirement to disclose excessively or adapt to sanitized ideals of candor, Burey advises audience to keep the elements of it rooted in sincerity, individual consciousness and ethical clarity. In her view, the objective is not to give up on sincerity but to move it – to move it out of the boardroom’s performative rituals and toward interactions and workplaces where reliance, equity and answerability make {