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Within the initial chapters of the book Authentic, author Burey issues a provocation: everyday advice to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are far from well-meaning invitations for self-expression – they can be pitfalls. This initial publication – a combination of personal stories, investigation, societal analysis and discussions – attempts to expose how businesses take over individual identity, moving the weight of institutional change on to staff members who are frequently at risk.

Professional Experience and Broader Context

The impetus for the book stems partly in Burey’s own career trajectory: various roles across retail corporations, new companies and in international development, interpreted via her background as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that the author encounters – a push and pull between asserting oneself and looking for safety – is the engine of Authentic.

It lands at a moment of collective fatigue with institutional platitudes across America and other regions, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts grow, and many organizations are scaling back the very systems that once promised progress and development. Burey enters that arena to contend that withdrawing from authenticity rhetoric – that is, the business jargon that trivializes identity as a set of aesthetics, idiosyncrasies and interests, keeping workers preoccupied with handling how they are viewed rather than how they are regarded – is not the answer; we must instead reinterpret it on our own terms.

Underrepresented Employees and the Display of Identity

Through colorful examples and discussions, Burey illustrates how employees from minority groups – people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, women workers, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to modulate which persona will “be acceptable”. A vulnerability becomes a disadvantage and people compensate excessively by striving to seem acceptable. The practice of “bringing your full self” becomes a projection screen on which all manner of anticipations are projected: emotional work, revealing details and constant performance of appreciation. In Burey’s words, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but absent the safeguards or the reliance to endure what arises.

According to the author, workers are told to share our identities – but lacking the safeguards or the reliance to endure what arises.’

Real-Life Example: An Employee’s Journey

Burey demonstrates this situation through the story of a worker, a employee with hearing loss who chose to inform his team members about the culture of the deaf community and communication norms. His eagerness to share his experience – a gesture of transparency the workplace often commends as “sincerity” – briefly made daily interactions more manageable. Yet, the author reveals, that improvement was fragile. Once staff turnover erased the informal knowledge the employee had developed, the culture of access dissolved with it. “Everything he taught left with them,” he states tiredly. What was left was the fatigue of having to start over, of being held accountable 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 framework that celebrates your honesty but fails to institutionalize it into policy. Genuineness becomes a trap when organizations rely on personal sharing rather than institutional answerability.

Writing Style and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is at once understandable and expressive. She blends intellectual rigor with a style of solidarity: an invitation for audience to engage, to challenge, to oppose. For Burey, workplace opposition is not noisy protest but principled refusal – the act of resisting conformity in workplaces that expect appreciation for simple belonging. To oppose, according to her view, is to challenge the narratives companies describe about justice and acceptance, and to refuse participation in practices that maintain inequity. It could involve naming bias in a gathering, choosing not to participate of voluntary “inclusion” work, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is offered to the institution. Resistance, the author proposes, is an affirmation of individual worth in settings that frequently encourage conformity. It represents a practice of integrity rather than defiance, a approach of asserting that an individual’s worth is not dependent on corporate endorsement.

Reclaiming Authenticity

The author also avoids rigid dichotomies. Her work does not simply toss out “genuineness” entirely: instead, she advocates for its restoration. For Burey, genuineness is not simply the raw display of individuality that organizational atmosphere frequently praises, but a more deliberate correspondence between individual principles and personal behaviors – a honesty that rejects alteration by organizational requirements. Instead of viewing authenticity as a requirement to overshare or adjust to cleansed standards of transparency, Burey urges followers to keep the elements of it grounded in truth-telling, personal insight and ethical clarity. From her perspective, the aim is not to discard sincerity but to relocate it – to move it out of the executive theatrical customs and into relationships and organizations where confidence, equity and responsibility make {