Review of The Unfakeable Code®
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Nyabika Gesare
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Review of The Unfakeable Code®
[Following is a volunteer review of "The Unfakeable Code®" by Tony Jeton Selimi.]
There’s a line in The Unfakeable Code® that hit me harder than I expected: we don’t wear masks just to hide — we wear them because, at some point, they kept us safe. I’ve thought about that a lot since reading this book. Tony Jeton Selimi doesn’t just call out the masks we wear; he traces where they came from, why they worked for a while, and—most importantly—why they’re costing us more than they’re protecting. What starts off as a book about emotional identity quickly deepens into something much more layered: a personal excavation of selfhood in a world that keeps rewarding performance over presence.
For me, it was the way he linked societal conditioning to emotional masking that made the book feel eerily personal. It made me pause and ask, “When was the last time I said something just because I believed it… not because it was expected of me?” I think that’s why I found the Behavioral Change Principles (BCP®) so useful. They weren’t abstract or idealistic. They were grounded in real-life emotional architecture — small daily shifts that could help someone like me, who’s sometimes unsure where the performance ends and the real person begins, dismantle old behaviors with clarity. The ten-step framework didn’t feel like a gimmick. Instead, it offered a quiet kind of confidence: follow this, do the hard work, and you might actually reclaim something essential about yourself.
One thing that stood out — and honestly made me trust the book from the start — was how Tony speaks to the reader with gentleness. I liked how he immediately humanizes our emotional armor. Instead of shaming us for hiding, he acknowledges that those masks were a kind of necessary invention. For someone like me who’s used to self-help books that swing between tough love and relentless optimism, that tone of emotional understanding felt deeply reassuring. It made me want to keep reading, even when the reflections got uncomfortable.
That being said, I did feel like the opening chapters labored the metaphor of the mask a little longer than needed. I understood it early on, and while I appreciate the care he took to drive it home, I personally started to wish the book would move faster into the solutions. I’m not sure if this would bother every reader — maybe some people need that longer emotional runway to really sit with the concept — but for me, a slightly quicker pace would’ve kept the momentum stronger.
Still, that critique barely dents my appreciation. I can say without hesitation that this is one of those books that doesn’t just inform — it lingers. It makes you second-guess which parts of your personality are truly you and which parts were stitched together to please, to succeed, or to survive. I found myself thinking about it while walking the dog, while waiting for emails to load, while looking at old photos and wondering when certain masks first took shape. There’s an intimacy in how Tony writes — a kind of steady insistence that you are more than the roles you play — and it stays with you.
******
The Unfakeable Code®
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon | on iTunes
There’s a line in The Unfakeable Code® that hit me harder than I expected: we don’t wear masks just to hide — we wear them because, at some point, they kept us safe. I’ve thought about that a lot since reading this book. Tony Jeton Selimi doesn’t just call out the masks we wear; he traces where they came from, why they worked for a while, and—most importantly—why they’re costing us more than they’re protecting. What starts off as a book about emotional identity quickly deepens into something much more layered: a personal excavation of selfhood in a world that keeps rewarding performance over presence.
For me, it was the way he linked societal conditioning to emotional masking that made the book feel eerily personal. It made me pause and ask, “When was the last time I said something just because I believed it… not because it was expected of me?” I think that’s why I found the Behavioral Change Principles (BCP®) so useful. They weren’t abstract or idealistic. They were grounded in real-life emotional architecture — small daily shifts that could help someone like me, who’s sometimes unsure where the performance ends and the real person begins, dismantle old behaviors with clarity. The ten-step framework didn’t feel like a gimmick. Instead, it offered a quiet kind of confidence: follow this, do the hard work, and you might actually reclaim something essential about yourself.
One thing that stood out — and honestly made me trust the book from the start — was how Tony speaks to the reader with gentleness. I liked how he immediately humanizes our emotional armor. Instead of shaming us for hiding, he acknowledges that those masks were a kind of necessary invention. For someone like me who’s used to self-help books that swing between tough love and relentless optimism, that tone of emotional understanding felt deeply reassuring. It made me want to keep reading, even when the reflections got uncomfortable.
That being said, I did feel like the opening chapters labored the metaphor of the mask a little longer than needed. I understood it early on, and while I appreciate the care he took to drive it home, I personally started to wish the book would move faster into the solutions. I’m not sure if this would bother every reader — maybe some people need that longer emotional runway to really sit with the concept — but for me, a slightly quicker pace would’ve kept the momentum stronger.
Still, that critique barely dents my appreciation. I can say without hesitation that this is one of those books that doesn’t just inform — it lingers. It makes you second-guess which parts of your personality are truly you and which parts were stitched together to please, to succeed, or to survive. I found myself thinking about it while walking the dog, while waiting for emails to load, while looking at old photos and wondering when certain masks first took shape. There’s an intimacy in how Tony writes — a kind of steady insistence that you are more than the roles you play — and it stays with you.
******
The Unfakeable Code®
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon | on iTunes
