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Throughout the opening pages of the publication Authentic, speaker Jodi-Ann Burey issues a provocation: everyday injunctions to “come as you are” or “show up completely genuine at work” are not harmless encouragements for self-expression – they often become snares. Burey’s debut book – a combination of personal stories, studies, cultural commentary and discussions – seeks to unmask how organizations take over individual identity, moving the responsibility of organizational transformation on to staff members who are already vulnerable.

Personal Journey and Broader Context

The impetus for the publication originates in part in Burey’s own career trajectory: different positions across business retail, emerging businesses and in global development, viewed through her experience as a woman of color with a disability. The two-fold position that Burey faces – a back-and-forth between standing up for oneself and aiming for security – is the engine of the book.

It lands at a moment of collective fatigue with corporate clichés across the United States and internationally, as backlash to diversity and inclusion efforts mount, and numerous companies are reducing the very systems that previously offered change and reform. Burey enters that terrain to assert that withdrawing from the language of authenticity – specifically, the corporate language that reduces individuality as a grouping of surface traits, idiosyncrasies and pastimes, keeping workers concerned with managing how they are perceived rather than how they are handled – is not the answer; instead, we need to reframe it on our individual conditions.

Marginalized Workers and the Performance of Self

Through vivid anecdotes and conversations, Burey shows how employees from minority groups – individuals of color, LGBTQ+ people, women, employees with disabilities – quickly realize to calibrate which identity will “fit in”. A sensitive point becomes a liability and people overcompensate by attempting to look palatable. The practice of “presenting your true self” becomes a projection screen on which various types of expectations are cast: emotional labor, sharing personal information and constant performance of thankfulness. As the author states, employees are requested to expose ourselves – but lacking the defenses or the reliance to survive what comes out.

As Burey explains, workers are told to share our identities – but absent the protections or the confidence to withstand what comes out.’

Illustrative Story: Jason’s Experience

She illustrates this phenomenon through the narrative of a worker, a hearing-impaired staff member who decided to teach his co-workers about deaf culture and interaction standards. His eagerness to talk about his life – an act of openness the workplace often commends as “sincerity” – for a short time made everyday communications smoother. But as Burey shows, that improvement was precarious. When employee changes wiped out the casual awareness the employee had developed, the culture of access vanished. “All of that knowledge went away with the staff,” he notes wearily. What stayed was the weariness of having to start over, of having to take charge for an organization’s educational process. From the author’s perspective, this is what it means to be requested to reveal oneself without protection: to face exposure in a framework that celebrates your transparency but declines to codify it into procedure. Sincerity becomes a trap when companies depend on employee revelation rather than organizational responsibility.

Literary Method and Notion of Opposition

Her literary style is simultaneously clear and lyrical. She combines intellectual rigor with a style of kinship: an invitation for followers to lean in, to question, to dissent. For Burey, dissent at work is not noisy protest but moral resistance – the act of rejecting sameness in workplaces that require gratitude for basic acceptance. To oppose, according to her view, is to challenge the stories organizations narrate about equity and belonging, and to refuse participation in rituals that maintain inequity. It may appear as identifying prejudice in a meeting, choosing not to participate of voluntary “equity” effort, or setting boundaries around how much of oneself is offered to the institution. Dissent, Burey indicates, is an affirmation of individual worth in spaces that frequently praise compliance. It constitutes a practice of honesty rather than opposition, a approach of insisting that an individual’s worth is not conditional on corporate endorsement.

Restoring Sincerity

Burey also rejects inflexible opposites. The book does not simply eliminate “sincerity” wholesale: on the contrary, she advocates for its redefinition. According to the author, genuineness is not simply the raw display of personality that corporate culture typically applauds, but a more thoughtful harmony between individual principles and personal behaviors – a principle that resists manipulation by organizational requirements. As opposed to viewing sincerity as a directive to overshare or adapt to sterilized models of transparency, Burey urges readers to preserve the elements of it grounded in sincerity, personal insight and moral understanding. According to Burey, the goal is not to abandon sincerity but to shift it – to remove it from the executive theatrical customs and to relationships and organizations where reliance, fairness and answerability make {