How to Build Real Self-Confidence & What To Do When Others Comment on Your Appearance
- Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A.
- Jul 10
- 5 min read
MBC1 — SABAH AL KHAIR YA ARAB · May 30, 2021
Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A., DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist, joined MBC1's Sabah Al Khair Ya Arab to discuss a question that had just played out on air moments earlier — an adult guest, a doctor, visibly affected by comments made about his appearance. The host wanted to know: how do we deal with comments on our external appearance in a healthy way, and why do they hurt as much as they do?
Why These Comments Can Cut So Deep
The host's first question was direct: if a grown adult — a doctor, no less — could be visibly distressed by comments on his appearance, why do these words carry so much weight?
I explained that the effect depends heavily on who is receiving the comment. For someone already struggling with depression, these remarks land very differently. Depression is far more common than people assume — CDC survey data puts the share of US adults who have ever been diagnosed with depression at close to one in five, and global estimates from the World Health Organization put the current burden at roughly 5% of the adult population. Rates vary by region and by how the question is asked, but the underlying point holds everywhere I practice: a meaningful share of the people around us are carrying depression silently. For someone in that position, a comment on their appearance doesn't land as a passing remark — it reinforces an already negative self-image, damages self-esteem, and can deepen emotional distress.
The host pushed further: what if the person isn't already depressed — could comments like this cause depression on their own? My answer was no, not necessarily. A person with a strong, independent sense of their own worth can hear an unkind comment and let it pass through them. But that resilience isn't automatic. It's a skill, and it has to be built.
A Middle Eastern Habit Worth Naming
I was direct with the host about something I see constantly in practice: commenting on other people's appearance — often uninvited, often about weight, skin, or looks — is genuinely common across the Middle East. It's rarely intended as cruelty. But intent doesn't change the effect. At its core, it's a form of objectification: reducing a person, even briefly, to how they look rather than who they are or what they've done. Naming that habit clearly is the first step toward changing it.
What This Does to Children — and What to Praise Instead
The host then asked about children specifically, and this is where I was most emphatic. Comments on a child's appearance can have a strongly negative impact, precisely because children are still forming the internal sense of what makes them valuable.
The research on this is well established. In Carol Dweck's studies on praise, children praised for an innate quality — "you're so smart," and by extension "you're so pretty" — became more likely to avoid challenges and to fold under difficulty, because their sense of worth was tied to something fixed and outside their control. Children praised for effort and process, by contrast, sought out harder challenges and persisted through setbacks, because their sense of worth was tied to something they controlled directly.
The practical implication for parents: praise what a child worked for, not what they were simply born with. If a child brings home a good grade, praise the effort that produced it, not the grade itself. The same logic applies to appearance — the less it's emphasized as a source of attention and love, the less a child comes to depend on it for their sense of self-worth.
When Your Child Comes Home Hurt
The host raised a scenario every parent recognizes: a child comes home from school having been told by a classmate that they're ugly, or worse. What do you actually say?
My advice: sit with the child and validate without escalating. "Yes, my dear, I know she said that. That's her own personal opinion — we don't need to carry it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion." The host laughed and pushed back hard here — she said she'd tell her own daughter to confront the other girl. I understood the instinct, but my position was that trying to control what other people think or say is a losing game. It's more protective, long-term, to teach a child to be comfortable in who they are than to teach them to fight for control over other people's opinions. That comfort — the ability to hold your own sense of self steady regardless of what's said around you — is a core building block of genuine self-confidence, and like any skill, it strengthens with practice, especially when practice starts young.
Point of View Is Not Fact
The host pressed on this, understandably — she said it's genuinely hard not to care what people think. My response: everyone sees the world through a lens shaped by their own life experience, and trying to argue someone out of their lens rarely works. The useful shift is realizing that an opinion is not the same thing as a fact.
I use a simple exercise with couples and families who are stuck in a disagreement: draw a single digit on the ground between two people facing each other, and ask each what they see. From one side it reads as a 6. From the other, a 9. Nobody is lying, and nobody is wrong — they're just standing in different places. Most disagreements about someone's worth or appearance are the same shape: a difference of vantage point, not a verdict of fact. The energy spent trying to control someone else's vantage point is almost always better spent developing your own clarity and critical thinking, and surrounding yourself with people who make you feel at home in yourself.
Assertive, Not Passive, Not Aggressive
The host offered a personal story — that she used to tell her sisters to confront people who bullied them, even jokingly suggesting they "slap" the other girl. I told her that instinct isn't wrong, it's just missing calibration. Assertiveness researchers Robert Alberti and Michael Emmons, whose work established the modern framework for assertiveness training, describe behavior as sitting along a continuum: passive at one end (failing to stand up for yourself, or doing so too weakly to matter), aggressive at the other (standing up for yourself in a way that violates someone else's rights), and assertive in the middle — direct, honest, and firm, without tipping into aggression.
This matters especially in this part of the world, where girls are frequently raised toward the passive end of that continuum by default. The goal isn't to swing all the way to aggression — it's to build a healthy assertiveness that protects your own well-being without trampling someone else's. And when someone else is the one behaving with negativity or aggression, the discipline that protects you is holding your own standard: making sure your response is something you chose, not a reaction you got trapped into, so that how you show up still represents who you actually are.
About Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi
Ms. Sarah El Nabulsi, M.Sc., M.A., M.A. is a DHA Licensed Clinical Psychologist (License No. DHA-75083705) based in Dubai, and UAE Director of the Transcendental Meditation Organization. She has been featured on MBC, MBC1, Sky News Arabia, Dubai TV, and BBC Arabic, and is the founder of the online courses Anxiety 101 (Level 1) and Master Yourself (Level 2).
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