Many students that I work with have a hard time embracing their own creativity. Many claim to not be creative at all.

In a time when our educational system cuts arts programs and throws most of its resources into math and sciences, it’s easy to develop some misunderstandings around creativity and what it means to be creative. When I talk to my clients and their families about identifying and harnessing their creativity, I am continually surprised by the number of folks who think creativity and academics are mutually exclusive.

Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo, Aristotle, Einstein, Elon Musk—inventors, mathematicians, engineers, scientists, and some of the most incredibly creative thinkers who have ever lived. Creativity simply means to think outside the box. It means to see the world through your individual lens and share perspectives that are unique to you alone. It means imagining a new and better way for things to be done, shared or expressed and bringing it to life.

Through my work with students and my educational seminars, my goal is to shed a better light on our understanding of creativity. Embracing music, art, and movement help us to utilize logic and linear thinking in innovative ways. It means turning the canvas or the problems of our world upside down and finding a new approach that will improve the world.

So the next time you’re tempted to claim that you’re not creative or to look down upon creativity, I invite you to reconsider. The advanced age that we live in is all owed to the creative people who lived before us who imagined a new and better way of life and created it themselves.