According to multiple press accounts, English rugby star Mike Tindall recently announced that he was ready to get a rhinoplasty procedure in order to correct various injuries to his nose. It appears that Mr. Tindall first broke his nose as a child, but suffered many additional blows during his years of competitive rugby. One especially interesting aspect of this story is the pressure that was put on Mr. Tindall to have the rhinoplasty for years prior to this decision.

Being married to the granddaughter of the Queen of New Zealand, Mr. Tindall and his very noticeably crooked nose appeared constantly in the public spotlight, and he was even asked by members of the royal family to have a rhinoplasty procedure prior to his 2011 wedding to Zara Phillips. Instead, he reportedly resisted outside pressures to look different, and is only making the decision to have the procedure because he is now having difficulty breathing. We think that Mr. Tindall’s resistance to others’ opinions of his appearance should be admired. After all, the decision to have a procedure is personal in nature.

While it is certainly hard for most of us to shut out all of the other voices and opinions about our appearance, the decision to have plastic surgery should come from the desire to be seen on the outside as one perceives oneself on the inside. This is to say that, if a person is fully confident with their own appearance, there is no reason to change that appearance based only on what other people say.

In fact, Mr. Tindall was in no way in denial with how his nose looked; before the birth of his first child, he quipped that he hoped the child did not have his nose. This type of clear outward acceptance takes tremendous courage, and is also derived from the same place that people need to reach to find the courage to move forward with a procedure.