Why did I create ESTE Leverage?
Terrisa Duenas, Founder and CEO
The Duenas Family: Terrisa, Cecilia, Carmen, Jose, Mom
As the youngest child of a single widowed mother, the part about needing to be good at a subject in order to pursue it was lost on me or lost in the commotion of 3 other siblings. Maybe my mother didn’t know about the fixed versus growth mindset or she wholehearted believed in the American dream so much - believing that her kids could and would become whoever they wanted and end up wherever their dreams led them. What mattered most is that we developed our interests in various topics. My mother subscribed to what was known back then as Science Year. Every year we were shipped a new beautiful book and I got to sit with an adult and flip through every thick page. This is when I learned the power of my own interest over what others would dictate. While I was told as a child I wouldn’t be good at it, I dreamed of being a scientist and an engineer who would work on spacecraft.
So it was in 2017 after decades in aerospace as both an engineer and scientist–and after explaining the meaning of Technology in the context of Engineering, Science and Entrepreneurship to K12 Teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District, when I knew I had uncovered a basic framework of thinking. Had I known about this framework as a child, it would have cleared the path of this one growth-minded child (me) against a sea of fixed-minded thinkers. It wasn’t until I was at a dinner two years later at a family gathering and my brother, a middle-school teacher, pulled me aside and asked me a question I’ll never forget. He prefaced it with acknowledging how much time my two sisters and I spent mentoring others to pursue “STEM” careers. He asked, “Don’t you think if we just loved kids for who they are they would discover it anyway?”
At that dinner or soon after, the initial purpose and application of the ESTE™ framework crystalized for me. Is it true that kids would pursue STEM and Entrepreneurship without intervention? Is our intervention part of the problem? Are we intervening too late? In 2019 I started collecting as much data as I could find on STEM and Entrepreneurship personalities and how we connect interests to careers. And then I saw it. There was a connection in the four basic ways we were thinking and the Entrepreneur, Scientist, Technologist, Engineer or ESTE™ Framework described them:
Entrepreneurs enjoy working with questions for those who value answers and they create innovation.
Scientists enjoy working with questions for those who value questions and they create discovery.
Technologists enjoy working with answers for those who value questions and they create utility.
Engineers enjoy working with answers for those who value answers and they create function.
The surprising additional discovery was that interest assessments weren’t connecting these basic ways of thinking. There was another test called the Holland Code (or RIASEC) Test that was connecting interests directly to occupations and skipping the approach to relational thinking all together. Moreover, the connection to interests carried with it the weight of all our traditional thinking and that’s when I discovered the 2020 paper by Wyndolyn Ludwikoski, “Are Interests Assessments Propagating Gender Differences?” And this is why I created ESTE™ Leverage - to help give others the chance to start with their natural curiosity of interests, nurture them and protect them from stereotypes, gender and any other bias and fixed mindset.
ESTE® Leverage - founded in the belief that Entrepreneurship, Science, Technology, and Engineering are innate in each of us - grounded in the science of learning & assessment – dedicated to the realized potential in every individual.