🔗 Share this article

Within the opening pages of Authentic: The Myth of Bringing Your Full Self to Work, writer Jodi-Ann Burey raises a critical point: everyday directives to “be yourself” or “present your real identity in the workplace” are far from well-meaning invitations for personal expression – they often become snares. This initial publication – a combination of recollections, research, cultural critique and conversations – attempts to expose how organizations take over individual identity, moving the burden of corporate reform on to employees who are already vulnerable.

Professional Experience and Broader Context

The motivation for the work lies partially in the author’s professional path: different positions across retail corporations, startups and in international development, filtered through her background as a Black disabled woman. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a push and pull between standing up for oneself and looking for safety – is the engine of Authentic.

It arrives at a moment of widespread exhaustion with organizational empty phrases across the United States and internationally, as opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs increase, and various institutions are cutting back the very frameworks that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that landscape to contend that retreating from the language of authenticity – that is, the organizational speech that reduces individuality as a collection of aesthetics, peculiarities and hobbies, leaving workers focused on managing how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; rather, we should reinterpret it on our own terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Act of Identity

By means of detailed stories and conversations, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – 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 compensate excessively by working to appear agreeable. The act of “bringing your full self” becomes a display surface on which numerous kinds of expectations are placed: affective duties, sharing personal information and ongoing display of gratitude. In Burey’s words, workers are told to reveal ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the trust to withstand what comes out.

As Burey explains, we are asked to share our identities – but without the protections or the reliance to endure what comes out.’

Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this situation through the narrative of an employee, a hearing-impaired staff member who chose to educate his team members about deaf community norms and interaction standards. His eagerness to discuss his background – a gesture of candor the organization often praises as “authenticity” – temporarily made daily interactions more manageable. However, Burey points out, that improvement was precarious. Once employee changes eliminated the informal knowledge he had established, the environment of accessibility disappeared. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he states tiredly. What was left was the fatigue of needing to begin again, of being held accountable for an organization’s educational process. In Burey’s view, this demonstrates to be requested to reveal oneself without protection: to endanger oneself in a framework that applauds your transparency but refuses to codify it into policy. Genuineness becomes a trap when companies depend on employee revelation rather than institutional answerability.

Author’s Approach and Idea of Resistance

Her literary style is simultaneously lucid and lyrical. She combines scholarly depth with a style of kinship: an invitation for readers to lean in, to question, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not overt defiance but moral resistance – the act of resisting conformity in settings that expect thankfulness for basic acceptance. To resist, from her perspective, is to question the accounts companies narrate about justice and belonging, and to decline involvement in practices that maintain unfairness. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a gathering, opting out of unpaid “equity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of one’s identity is provided to the organization. Opposition, she suggests, is an declaration of individual worth in spaces that often reward conformity. It represents a discipline of honesty rather than opposition, a way of maintaining that one’s humanity is not based on institutional approval.

Reclaiming Authenticity

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. The book does not simply discard “authenticity” wholesale: on the contrary, she calls for its reclamation. According to the author, sincerity is far from the raw display of individuality that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more intentional harmony between one’s values and one’s actions – a principle that rejects distortion by organizational requirements. Rather than viewing sincerity as a requirement to reveal too much or adjust to sanitized ideals of transparency, Burey advises audience to keep the aspects of it based on truth-telling, personal insight and principled vision. From her perspective, the aim is not to give up on authenticity but to move it – to transfer it from the corporate display practices and to connections and organizations where reliance, fairness and accountability make {