Beyond Perfect: Bodies, Barbie, and Boardrooms
In business, we don’t talk much about bodies — except in terms of warm bodies or bodies of work. Yet many industries that business leaders have built and manage, ranging from beauty and fashion to social media, create standards of beauty and morality, and enable us to trade on those standards.
For influencers and many social media celebrities, their bodies have become their business. For athletes, musicians, and actors, their bodies have always been.
In an increasingly visual world, how we present physically matters particularly in how we feel about ourselves.
Even if we don’t talk about bodies explicitly in business, we compete with and through them. They are the vehicles that carry our minds through life. And yet many very successful people skew towards the more accepted beauty standards. The directionality is unclear — do they get rewarded for looking the part, or do they work hard to look the part to get rewarded as a result?
Our bodies gives us credibility, choices, and often act as gatekeepers for many of life’s opportunities.
The so-called beauty premium, the notion that employees with high physical attractiveness will earn more than those below-average, seems to be a winning strategy for success at work. Executives with a BMI under 25 tend to be viewed more favorably by peers and rate higher on task performance and interpersonal skills.
This “worthiness” also translates into economic terms. “Myriad studies find that overweight or obese women are paid less,” reported an Economist piece on “The Economics of Thinness.” The wage premium for getting a master’s degree is around 18%, only 1.8 times the premium a woman could, in theory, earn by losing around 30kg.
The “business dress code” is also a “business body code.”
We typically pretend to judge character from ideas and actions, but the body serves quite literally as the embodiment of values that others might assume we have— an extremely fit person is more likely to be considered and celebrated as disciplined (even if their addiction to exercise costs them connection), while a smoker’s character must be weak.
Indeed, we live in a society that admires people who show commitment or restrain pleasure or embrace pain (“no pain, no gain”). We are quick to make judgments about others based on our observations of their exercising and eating behaviors: “Oh, you look so healthy. Oh, you’re such a healthy eater. Oh, you look fit. Oh, you’re slender.” There’s this association between what we observe on the surface and broader judgments about who the person is and how healthy their lifestyle is.
In a nutshell, how “worthy” of attention or love or respect a person is might be based on physical appearance. How we look also enables us to belong or exposes us to the risk of being rejected from our respective tribes.
Seeking perfection can be costly. In this race, many of us forget that we have a body and a mind. We just think we can keep running without gas and on flat tires. To fulfill our need for control, we sacrifice ourselves at the altars of academic, aesthetic, and professional perfection. For the sake of social existence, we cease to exist.
For some of us, our bodies start shrinking and then slowly disappearing — and our minds, which have been along for the ride the whole time, have also taken damage, damage from which it often takes very skilled intervention, resources, and support to recover. (We share a personal perspective at the end of this piece).
The personal toll is enormous, but so are the social and economic costs (please see this report by STRIPED and Deloitte for data and context), for the 28.8 million or so individuals in the U.S. alone who suffer from eating disorders over their lifetimes. About 6.6 million are men. One person in the US dies ever 52 minutes as a result of an eating disorder — about 10, 200 individuals.
Estimated economic costs from lost productivity, healthcare expenses, and related impacts on health and well-being, were estimated at nearly $400 billion in FY19 — before the shock of the pandemic and attendant mental health crisis.
In this post we explore the reality of competing for perfection in a increasingly visual world and what we can do as individuals, consumers, parents, employers, and leaders to help combat an accelerating rise in eating disorders across all sectors of society.
Our Body as Ourselves
Our awareness of and importance of our body not just as an object of performance but as a receptacle for judgment — positive, negative, or neutral — comes much earlier in life than most of us would suspect.
We spend the first few months of our lives meeting our bodies — exploring and pushing them. Slowly, we understand that through them, we can feel pain, relief, fear, and joy. By the second year, we become conscious of our bodies. We look at ourselves in the mirror. We see our expressions mirrored in the faces of parents and caregivers. If we are lucky, for the most part, what we see reflected there is love.
We are no longer surprised to see young kids tap books to “turn” a page nor strike a (sometimes provocative and often hyperbolic) pose as soon as they realize they are being photographed. Immediately, they ask to see themselves in the selfie or picture and demand do overs.
A few years later they do they their own do overs, and edit and filter photos until they are “just so” — a version of themselves they find acceptable or that is at least transmittable to friends and social media. Contrast with prior generations who might have had to wait days or weeks to get the photographic prints.
Children growing up today become conscious of their own physical presentations much earlier as they are the object of visual adoration and objectivization. They get exposed to a carousel of bodies when they get their first phone, creating unnecessary cross-comparisons. Indeed, about 75% of children have a smartphone by the time they are 12, and nearly all of them by the time they are 15.
So historically, most people “saw themselves” only a few times a day: in the morning in front of the mirror, once or twice on bathroom breaks during the day, and once at night brushing their teeth. Very few people carried around mirrors looking at themselves all the time, and yet we seem to have fallen into an Age of Narcissus — where that is ALL we do. And we can see the consequences all around us.
In other words, the question: “is my body good enough to complete all of the tasks that I want and need to?” quickly becomes “does my body look beautiful enough to complete all these tasks?”
Maximizing our “Perfect Score”
What happens when the game of perfection becomes the game from hell?
At school, university or academy, most of us were forced into or attempted to play the game of academic success, spending our days at the library or studying to maximize our grades. Years later, we find ourselves playing a very similar game. This time, our score is based on salary, cash bonus, job title, promotions, as well as perceived lifestyle and status online.
At the same time, we are also playing another game. The “perfect body” game further maximize the output from the “game of work,” find a mate worthy of our standing (which will in turn further increase our standing), and win points (both actual and at work) by maximizing our workouts and minimizing calorie intake.
“Clean eating” — eating only biologically natural pure food — has exploded in the last couple of decades. Focusing on our health is very important, but sometimes such food choices become rigidities that take over people’s lives, making them fear social events where they won’t be able to find the “right” foods. When a healthful eating pattern goes too far, it may turn into an eating disorder — orthorexia.
The problem with these “games of perfection” is that they never end. We never win, but we can certainly lose — from burnout at work and persistent health problems that affect all aspects of our lives.
In most games we “lose” when a competitor gets with a higher score. Yet, how can we pretend to win a game where the goal itself is to attain a concept, an abstract idea conceived in the human imagination?
From “Doing Perfect” to “Being Perfect”
But now, what does “perfection” even mean? Let’s get back to basics:
- Definition: “Quality of being as good as it is possible for something of a particular kind to be,” “State of being complete and correct in every way”
- Etymology[v]:The word perfection comes from the Latin perfèctus, from perficĕre, which means to finish or fulfil. While the preposition per adds the idea of fulfilment, the verb fèctus, which comes from fàcere, refers to doing something.
We see that originally, the word perfect meant a work carried out completely — a concrete achievement.
Little by little, a concrete concept became more abstract — so that the idea of perfection stopped being limited to a finished work (“what we do”) and extended to a more abstract concept about people (“who we are”).
Perfection started to be increasingly associated with the concept of self- sacrifice, so many monastic orders began to search for perfection by withdrawing into asceticism. This vision gradually spread throughout society.
In some ways, we elevate people who can follow more extreme approaches to exercising and eating — much like people throughout history elevated Yogis, Mystics, and Saints who arrived as some sort of “mystical realization” not through self-indulgence and self-compassion, but rather through consistent and often extreme self-privation.
So perfection (the task) became perfection (reaching a higher level of spiritual/human perfection). For a person suffering with an eating disorder, whenever you exercise and don´t eat, you perfèctus and fectus in the sense that you finish doing something that make sense for you: avoid eating, completing your workout, working out when ill or injured, etc. These metrics represent success according to arbitrary ideals, perfecting things that would be very hard for others (working out 10 hours a day having reached 30 kg of body weight by eating only an apple a day, being an athlete while smoking like 40% of dancers, etc.).
As a result, today, we believe that perfection implies reaching a level of personal excellence, both in terms of performance and qualities, that cannot be easily surpassed by others and requires personal sacrifice. “Perfection” describes a morality without stain or defect — thus becoming a judgment of worth. Eating disorders are very high in professions that demand perfection, such as musicians.
As judgment of worth, perfection comes with a high cost. The proportion of people exhibiting traits of perfectionism rose more than 30% in the past few decades. ‘Destructive perfectionism’ or ‘maladaptive perfectionism’ leads to higher levels of depression, anxiety, stress, and in particular, suicide and eating disorders, while studies found that more than 70% of young people who died by suicide were in the habit of creating “exceedingly high” expectations of themselves, measures of excessive performance-based perfectionism are considerably higher in people with anorexia.
The Temptation of Control
The expansion of our digital life made us more self-conscious about our body and image as we became even more fully immersed in our screens. Covid 19 fueled a dramatic rise in cosmetic surgery [vi], especially in women under 45,with some surgeons reporting that their business doubled. There was also a focus on health and the Peloton craze, in world that felt completely out of control.
This phenomenon did not come without consequences: eating disorders are the second fastest-growing behavioral health disorder after anxiety disorder (41% vs 45% in the period of 2019–2023).
Disorders seem to also be starting younger: a 2022 report by JAMA on data from 12,000 children warned that 5% of them — both girls and boys — engaged in binge eating, a form of disordered eating behavior. These behaviors can lead to eating disorders.
While many attribute eating disorders and body dysmorphia to cultural expectations and unrealistic ideals surrounding weight and size, they can also be triggered by anxiety, depression, food insecurity, a difficult life event or trauma, or as might be in the case in anorexia nervosa, genetics. With increasing levels of diagnosed depression and anxiety, especially in young cohorts, we can expect to see rising rates of eating disorders. See chart below for rates of eating disorders and co-occurring mental illness.
More recently, researchers found that social media might have a significant impact on individual body perception by fostering a constant cycle of comparison (and feedback) and often making people feel inadequate: within 30 minutes of joining TikTok, a 13-year-old user can easily encounter content related to eating disorders and self-harm according to a New York Times investigation. Eating disorders often begin in adolescence but rarely end there.
Despite common beliefs, eating disorders and body dysmorphia are not limited to body-conscious teenage girls. Eating disorders also affect high achiever Type-A women. Indeed, according to research, female high-achievers tend to meet their need for perfection and compensate for the negative emotions from stress and failure with the positive feelings they experienced by controlling their diet.
But women aren’t the only ones experiencing negative body image: about one in three people struggling with an eating disorder is a man. The sexes are nearly equally affected by disordered eating behaviors (including binge eating, purging, laxative abuse, and fasting for weight loss).
Our food and body are such easy targets for control in a life where there is so little that we can control. There are endless exercise programs and human performance podcasts, tips, and it is all so quantifiable: we can measure “success” in calories, fat grams, carbohydrates, or reps … as well as pounds and grams and/or chase our personal and actual metric for “perfection” (weight, BMI, muscle tone, body fat percentage). Body control is a way to gain control in a world that feels chaotic and unsafe — be it at home and from COVID-19.
With discipline, we can create any kind of manipulation we like to satisfy our interests and metrics of perfection. This is something more difficult to do in work, families, and with other aspects of our lives, which may feel, on occasion, completely out of our control.
Aiming Towards Balance and Picking the Right Mirror
“Escape games,” behavioral disorders, and mental health issues will be part of life as long as perfectionism continues to be perceived as a positive trait which leads to success and performance.
It is perhaps time to open our eyes to confront the reality: rather than higher esteem or life fulfillment, sacrificing ourselves to the altars of an idealized self-perfection most often lead to depression, burnout, stress, inefficiency, exhaustion, and cynicism, all of which hampers our mental well-being — in our real and digital lives, and as well as workplaces, boardrooms, and bedrooms.
Perfect titles and bodies might just be tricky life loans for unattainable “perfect lives” —that we will eventually have to pay back. It is not surprising that leaders who work within a culture obsessed with appearance and performance often fall into perfectionism, especially among women pursuing corporate success. But the reality is that this causes unnecessary stress, anxiety and could result in low self-esteem and imposter syndrome.
In the long run, perfectionism becomes more of a liability rather than an asset, negatively impacting teams’ engagement, business performance, and workplace culture. Creativity from both individuals and teams is the biggest loss — if you don’t feel good about yourself, how could you possibly feel good about anything you create?
Have we failed to look into the right mirror? Looked to the mirror of an (amorphous and decidedly amoral) perfected self, instead of into the eyes of those who love us — and who love us with all our faults — and for whom our perfection is not a goal, it is already (and always will be) a given.
Instead, take a look around you. Who do you care about? Who cares about you? On the one hand you are a valuable mirror for others — your love and care quite often means the world to another person. By the same token, when you last looked into the eyes of someone who loved you, whether a child, or a spouse, or a significant other, and you saw true love there, didn’t you feel a true moment of relaxation? Where you could truly be yourself? And say anything, and do anything, and look any way (dressed up and ready for the gala or with morning-breath and bed-head) — and it didn’t matter. Because you were loved.
Below are questions that can help us open up these possibilities for ourselves and each other.
First — YOU: Start by asking yourself some reflection questions:
- Would you say that you are a perfectionist?
- What are your criteria for success? Where are they coming from?
- We have all paid a cost to achieve some kind of perfection (whether it be financial, academic, physical or mental) — and are still willing to do it. How can we make sure the “goals of perfection” we aim for are worth the effort and risk of injury?
- Do you often receive or make any comments related to how you and your peers look? Why do you do it? How does it make you feel? What impact do your words have on others?
- Does your exercising and dieting routine take over your life or require a personal or familiar sacrifice? How do you cope with it?
- Do you perceive your body as a “poker card” helping you to win the game of perfection — and success?
Second — your workplace:
- Make Progress, not Perfect: Instead of focusing on achieving perfection, focus on progress. Celebrate your team’s progress towards their goals and use it to achieve excellence. Not perfection.
- Adopt a “good enough” mindset: In today’s market, flexibility is king, so you need to be willing to just be “good enough” with some projects. Sometimes a bridge that barely stands is the best bridge of all. The most important thing is to keep learning from what can be improved so the next iteration is a step closer to the “desired” (not “perfect”) solution.
- Do a reality check: Self-check your own “perfectionist” expectations and how they affect others: Are you working towards a perfect body shape and expect your recruits to fill your beauty criteria? Do you make any comments regarding what people should look like at work?
- Ensure that “diet culture” does not become your “corporate culture”: Avoid comments that might be typical of diet culture. “Watch out for the biscuits, they go straight to your hips!” Even these remarks come as talking out loud to yourself, you might still offend and (unintentionally) even exclude some fellow workers. · In a managerial position you set the tone: don’t lose good people because they carry extra weight, or haven’t had their teeth straightened or whitened, or missed their most recent Botox appointment.
- Actively address unhelpful conduct: Are you there when others make fun of your colleagues’ body weight or make negative comments about their image or dress style? Those engaging in such behavior should be addressed and alerted to potential impact. In this way, you can help ensure that bullying is not tolerated and promote acceptance of all bodies in the work environment.
- Keep eating disorders in mind in the design of health coverage: Eating disorders take a long time to treat and heal and present with co-morbidities, as discussed above.
Third — your environment:
- Set new industry standards: Get some inspiration from brands such as American Eagle/Aerie, which were among the first intimates brands to emphasize self-love and body inclusivity. In 2020, they launched their campaign #AerieREAL Positivity, a campaign that emphasized taking pride in being your real, authentic self. They strove to change the narrative for the next generation, wanting to empower teens to grow up to be powerful, confident, and real.
- Partner for change: Along with a coalition of strategic partners, the Michael Phelps foundation aims to support kids’ mental health by supporting families with tools and resources to overcome fears, build self-confidence and gain overall wellness through swimming.
- Support your community: The Zurich Foundation has committed itself to transform the global mental well-being system through multiple advocacy campaigns, the design and distribution of tools and resources for underserved youth facing mental health challenges, and steering new partnership model between the public, profit and nonprofit sectors.
- Be a role model: Think about sharing your direct or indirect story with body image and the cost of perfection (if any) as we have here. Your experience might not only help break a taboo, but also help others open up, feel understood, and not alone when facing this issue.
A Personal Perspective
- by Bahia
Most importantly, all this is once again just a perfect idealization if you don’t start by yourself. Don’t be lured — and most importantly, don’t lure yourself into the game of perfection. Because at the end of the day, you can’t ditch you. But you can smother the flame of a sacrificial perfection in yourself and others.
Like me, you might be part of the same story — looking perfect on paper and social media but finding myself as a result of the pursuit of perfection at the edge of death.
After years of trying to fulfill my need for controlled perfectionism by sacrificing myself at the altars of academic, aesthetic, and professional ideals, I decided to stop pretending that I could manage my emotional disorder and surrendered control to experts.
Will you try to aim for a “zero” as your “perfect score-based system”? One where the only metric is: how true you are to yourself?
It might be the most tricky, vertiginous and uncertain game you will never play.
Because the game of the pursuit of yourself, without goals, or expectations, or metrics, and without specific structure or rules, but one based on your own moral standards, well-being, and most importantly, what makes you feel alive and meaningful — it is the most powerful type of perfection you can achieve.
Today, I share my story. I am trying to save myself by stopping to pretend. If you are on my path, will you take the first step to changing course and making a difference in someone’s life who is struggling?
Bahia El Oddi and Carin-Isabel Knoop are Harvard Business School classmates and co-founders of Human Sustainability Inside Out and co-authors of It’s Time We Talk about Mental Health in Business Classrooms. We appreciate the support of Matthew Venon Hanson.
