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In the opening pages of the publication Authentic, speaker Burey poses a challenge: commonplace directives to “bring your true self” or “bring your full, authentic self to work” are not harmless encouragements for personal expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a blend of personal stories, investigation, cultural commentary and discussions – seeks to unmask how companies take over individual identity, transferring the weight of corporate reform on to individual workers who are often marginalized.

Professional Experience and Broader Context

The motivation for the book lies partially in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across retail corporations, emerging businesses and in worldwide progress, filtered through her perspective as a disabled Black female. The dual posture that Burey faces – a push and pull between asserting oneself and seeking protection – is the engine of Authentic.

It emerges at a period of collective fatigue with organizational empty phrases across the US and beyond, as resistance to diversity and inclusion efforts increase, and various institutions are reducing the very frameworks that earlier assured progress and development. Burey enters that arena to assert that backing away from corporate authenticity talk – specifically, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a grouping of appearances, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, leaving workers preoccupied with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are regarded – is not a solution; we must instead reframe it on our personal terms.

Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Persona

Through colorful examples and conversations, Burey shows how underrepresented staff – individuals of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which self will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a drawback and people overcompensate by attempting to look palatable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of expectations are placed: emotional labor, revealing details and constant performance of gratitude. In Burey’s words, workers are told to expose ourselves – but without the defenses or the trust to survive what arises.

As Burey explains, we are asked to share our identities – but absent the protections or the trust to survive what emerges.’

Case Study: The Story of Jason

Burey demonstrates this dynamic through the account of Jason, a deaf employee who chose to inform his team members about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His readiness to talk about his life – a behavior of openness the organization often applauds as “sincerity” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. But as Burey shows, that progress was unstable. Once employee changes erased the unofficial understanding the employee had developed, the culture of access vanished. “Everything he taught went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What was left was the fatigue of having to start over, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this is what it means to be requested to expose oneself without protection: to risk vulnerability in a structure that applauds your honesty but fails to formalize it into policy. Sincerity becomes a trap when institutions rely on personal sharing rather than structural accountability.

Literary Method and Idea of Resistance

The author’s prose is simultaneously lucid and poetic. She marries intellectual rigor with a style of connection: an offer for audience to engage, to challenge, to disagree. In Burey’s opinion, dissent at work is not overt defiance but principled refusal – the practice of opposing uniformity in workplaces that require gratitude for mere inclusion. To resist, in her framing, is to interrogate the narratives organizations tell about equity and acceptance, and to decline engagement in rituals that sustain injustice. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a gathering, opting out of uncompensated “diversity” work, or defining borders around how much of one’s personal life is made available to the organization. Dissent, the author proposes, is an assertion of individual worth in settings that frequently reward compliance. It constitutes a practice of honesty rather than rebellion, a way of maintaining that a person’s dignity is not conditional on institutional approval.

Reclaiming Authenticity

She also refuses inflexible opposites. Her work does not simply discard “genuineness” completely: on the contrary, she urges its redefinition. According to the author, authenticity is not simply the unfiltered performance of personality that corporate culture frequently praises, but a more intentional alignment between individual principles and personal behaviors – a principle that resists distortion by organizational requirements. Instead of considering authenticity as a mandate to disclose excessively or adjust to sterilized models of openness, Burey advises readers to maintain the elements of it based on truth-telling, self-awareness and ethical clarity. In her view, the goal is not to discard sincerity but to shift it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and toward relationships and offices where trust, equity and answerability make {