Today the diamond in my engagement ring captured my attention. After nearly 50 years, it is still brilliant in its simple twisted tiffany style setting. As I stared at it, I thought how its beauty comes from how all the facets reflect the light.

Then I thought, ‘It is the facets that make it beautiful and just as we humans have many facets that make us beautiful and brilliant.’

And then I thought, ‘What makes a diamond a diamond? It is the capacity to have all these facets revealed.’ That is what is at the core of diamond brilliance.

Sometimes, we have our lovely brilliance hidden and not yet revealed. Our ‘facets’ need to be made visible and available. That is one reason we humans have such a fascination with personality tests and models. They help us reveal our facets. Some of these help us discover the core—that capacity for having all these many facets revealed. That is one reason I’m calling the approach I teach, the Berens CORE™ Approach. It helps us get at the core of who we are, gives us lenses to understand own innate brilliance, yet accounts for some of the aspects of our brilliance that come from our responses to internal driving forces in relationship to life conditions.