Anne: Welcome to Dental Entrepreneur, the Future of Dentistry podcast. I'm so excited that you're here today, um, because I have a, a really good new friend, uh, with me that I wanna introduce you to. Karan Nijhawan is the founder of The Expansion Project, a movement that focuses on helping dentists design their dream life while overcoming self-doubt.
Imposter syndrome and the feeling of not being good enough. He's an expansive life's coach, podcaster actor that helps people create their dream life in months instead of years. Since starting the company five years ago, he's hosted over 200 plus dinners, events, workshops, and retreats, helping people worldwide create a better life that they don't need a vacation from.
He's also worked with major companies like Forbes, staples, and Providence Healthcare hosting workshops around happiness and fulfillment. He is on a mission to help dental professionals across the world ever overcome self-doubt, worry, and social isolation, all while maximizing their not so promised 4,000 weeks.
Please help me welcome Karan Nijhawan. Hi, Karan.
Karan: And so grateful to, and not just to meet you as a friend. Just so grateful for you in all that you do in dentistry. You're just a breath of fresh air, your absolute sunlight to anybody who comes into your presence, and you make a total stranger like me when we first met.
A friend almost instant in instantaneously. So you've got, you've got this gift and I just wanted to start today's episode by acknowledging you.
Anne: Well, thank you. Hey, it takes one to no one, you know? I mean, I, again, my, my mantra is like, good people find good people, and as soon as we met. I was like, I gotta get to know you better.
And it was just so easy. We had so much fun. Shout out to Elijah Desmond at Dentistry, the Dentistry Festival in Nashville. Where we met, we were on the, the panel, the judging panel for dentistry's got talent and um, it was so excited to meet you. But then also next time around, which I missed that, the next, uh, smiles at Sea.
You won. Speaking award. So you won the master belt, and, um, and tell us about that. How, how did you get started? Tell me how you got started in the, in, in this role of, um, and seeing this niche in dentistry that you wanted to, to, uh, be a part of.
Karan: Yeah, this is, uh, it's super fascinating because I was at a networking event back in 2016 and I heard the dreaded question, what do you do?
And I told the person what I did and you know, it was a business card exchange. And you ever feel like, and you ever feel like you give somebody a business card and they kind of look at you and already they're kind of wondering who else might be in the room? Because it's like what your business card said had no value to this person.
Or at least they had no perception of the value you could bring to a table. And they base your entire character, your judgment, essentially base your entire. Presence on your title. So when I gave my business card to a gentleman in 2016, he immediately started evaluating who else was in the room. And it made me feel so less than, it made me feel like my presence didn't matter.
It made me feel like I had nothing to offer. And it set me on this path of hosting these, what I would call like anti networking events where I would invite people to a group dinner. I said, there's only one rule to this entire group dinner is you just, you cannot bring your business card. And I would handpick entrepreneurs in my community that I wanted to go deeper with and I wanted to get to know better, and I would invite them to these two, three, sometimes six hour dinners that felt like cultural therapy.
They, they felt like they. Real meaningful, purposeful, deep connection conversations. People would talk about depression, suicide, wanting to shut down their business, uh, relationship issues, money issues, worthiness, worthiness issues. And it was real conversations that I think all of us were starving for, but felt like in this perfect world we couldn't talk about publicly.
So dinner. By dinner, I started to grow this tribe of humans who started knowing me as this dinner guy. And I started doing dinners for companies and company culture. Started doing dinners as a way of lead generation, and I was always bringing business owners and entrepreneurs together because entrepreneurship is by default, a very incredibly lonely journey.
It, no one knows what it's like to be a business owner unless you're a business owner. The doubts, the, the fears, the worries, all of that, which, you know, I'm sure pretty well, and I, I decided to niche into dentistry in. February of 2022. 'cause not only did I, I I already knew mental health rates were on the, on the rise in dental.
In, in the, in the industry. The suicide rates were high, anxiety rates were high, offices were shutting down, dentists were committing suicide. All of these real problems. And I thought, Hey, what if I just, I. I decided to take what I already do in the world of business and bring it over to the world of dentistry.
And you wouldn't believe how many people I told me. You're never gonna have a dentist client because you're not a dentist. You're never gonna have a team listen to you because you're new to dentistry. You have no dental education, you're not gonna be successful. Well, here we are, 12 months later. It's been my best financial year, my most fulfilling year.
I've been on so many amazing dental stages. I've built so many incredible dental relationships like yours. I'm just on this quest of showing people that if you're lucky, you have 4,000 weeks to live, which is if you make it to 80 and what you want to do in that 4,000 weeks, never give that power to someone else because I've been doubted so many times in my entire life.
I've had the odds stacked against me, and I'm not special in any regard. I just have this unwavering belief that, hey, if I just take the attention of the things I don't want and put it towards the things I do want. Maybe life will be super beautiful and unfold itself. So that's how I got into dentistry.
And now I'm blessed to be in this lovely field with so many amazing humans who are so talented. They work their butts off, they want more out of life, but they have pigeonholed themselves into a box almost as if their entire identities tied into dentistry, and they think that they have nothing else to give others.
And I just don't believe that to be true.
Anne: Wow, that's pretty cool. A couple of things. First of all, now I understand what the 4,000 weeks are, so I, I hope I get there too. I I love that. That's very cool. And the second thing, Kern, the dentists are people too, right? Absolutely. And, and you know, I do love our, our, our dental profession because they're smart and they're smart, they're talented.
They, they love caring for people and they love beauty. I mean, a lot of things that are important to me and they're important to the world, it's, it's, um, it's a lovely thing. And they need our help, you know, 'cause we see that too. You and I kind of are on the inside scoop of a lot of, uh, issues that aren't clinically.
Um. Based, I mean, it's basically, uh, you know, the burnout, all of the things that you just talked about, um, and the loneliness of being an entrepreneur. And I think most often when you go into dentistry, you think of it as a profession, as owning a practice or being an entrepreneur. And yet you, you don't really have time to think about what that entails.
Karan: Yeah, you're kind of thrown into the deep end, right? Yeah. All of a sudden, you graduate school, you're really good clinically, but you're not really taught the business side of the operations. You're not taught, taught about overhead profitability. You're not taught about marketing, human resources, how to manage a team.
I mean, as as a dentist, you are. Entrepreneur, entrepreneur, you are the person who's in charge of the ship. You are also playing human resources. You're also playing a therapist to your team and to your patients. You're also playing, you know, a therapist to yourself, and then you gotta go home and box up, essentially all of your days worth of stress, and then you go home.
And now you have to put on a different mask of a husband or a wife or a father or a mother or a son or a daughter. And then you go back to work and then you put on your, your dentistry mask. And it's just this, it's this like mask on, mask off, mask on mask off, mask on mask off, which is only sustainable for such a short period of time.
And then you get to a point where all of that compounded stress adds up, adds up, adds up, and then that's when you get into conversations about drug and alcohol abuse and embezzlement and suicide and all of these things that. Don't happen overnight. They're just, you know, you know that term death by a thousand cuts?
Mm. It's like these little things happening in the run of the day that sometimes we don't give enough credit to. A patient walks in and complains about how crappy your practice is, and six months later you find yourself still thinking about that one comment, regardless of how many five star reviews you have.
Your eyes go to the one that's done here that doesn't support you, and all of a sudden you, six months later, you get into an an, an argument with your partner at home. You don't realize that it's not because of the relationship, it's because of something that happened six months ago. And because we don't know how to deal with our emotions and we don't know how to process things, we let things just slip inside.
It's like, it's like your check engine light comes on and you choose to ignore it, thinking the problem will go away. Well, your check engine light is coming on in life every single day. I'm saying check this, check your oil, check your tire pressure. And the worst thing you can do is just be like. Yeah, I see the light, but let me just keep driving and see what happens.
It's like, no, no, no. You need to stop your vehicle. You need to identify exactly where the problem is. Diagnose it, put a plan in place. Only then will your car actually be functional? Only then can you be more, uh, only then can you actually move forward. I've just learned that a lot of dentists, because they're, I hate this term, but.
I've often heard dentists call themselves like at the top of the food chain, and what I, what I mean by that is what, what they mean by that is they're at the top of their business. So everybody looks to them for guidance and support. That's what they mean by top of the food chain. But they have a very tough time showing, showing off any sort of weaknesses or showing off that, hey, maybe things aren't okay.
Because again, it's like how can a leader be weak? It's like, who's gonna want to learn from a weak leader is the conversations I hear. I don't believe in that one bit, but what I hear from my clients is that everybody's looking at them for the solution and who's gonna come to them if they have problems, who's gonna come to them if their life's not in order, who's gonna come to them?
It's like, what kind of dentist doesn't have their life in order? And I would argue the the majority.
Anne: Well, I, I think that lends itself to the profession as far as it, it is a profession that's based on perfectionism, right? And then also word of mouth. So I, I love the idea of your dinners because it, it reminds me of like a closed door dinner.
That's a fault. And so you, a dentist, unless he has that vault of people that he can count on and someone like you and the people that you surround yourself with. They can't really tell anybody else. They can't tell their neighbor, I am really burnt out. I mean, who's gonna go to a dentist that can actually say that out loud?
I'm burnt out. I, I don't like my team, I don't like my staff. I don't like what I do. Doesn't mean he is not really good. It just means he's having some issues or she's having some issues, I should say. He and she, 'cause you know, women are, yeah, as I like to say, women are taking over Dentist Street corn, but.
But it, it's so true. You, you have to, you know, I think that's a great niche for someone like you that really gets in the emotional intelligence and what really. Matters. 'cause I think they learn all that. They learn all the clinical in, in dental school, but they don't learn anything else because they say the schools say they don't have time to teach anything else.
The, the soft skills, if you will, or the emotional skills it takes to, you know, be there for your patients and your team. You're affecting so many people and it all rests on your shoulders.
Karan: Yeah. And to that point of perfectionism, I think not only in school but just the world in, in, in itself, glamorizes like duality, like black and white, good and bad, up and down, wrong and right.
And we're taught that things have to fit into one of these two categories. You're either wrong or you're right. It doesn't leave a lot of room for that messiness in the middle, that that gray area, so. You know, is a, is a cupcake bad for your health or is it good for your health? We're always taught, well, it's bad for your health.
Well. Too much of a chicken breast is also probably very bad for your health also, but we, we tend to bucket things and com, compartmentalize things to fit our world. Worldview of what we've been taught is good and bad. So a dentist who grew up in the eighties or nineties or even the early two thousands might see the topic of mental health and immediately put in the bad.
Category of their brain thinking, well, only people that are weak suffer from these types of problems. You hear, like when I heard the word therapy growing up, I just assumed that the person had something wrong with them. It's like, who would go to therapy unless something is broken? So dentists in dentistry is still in, in many ways, I'm learning is such an old school industry, is that they have compartmentalize some of these topics into like good and bad topics.
Hey, we don't talk about mental health because that means weakness. We don't talk about relationship issues at home because that means weakness. We don't talk about. Burnout because that signifies weakness. So we're all wearing these masks of what we think other people are expecting of us, or how we think we might measure up when we meet somebody at an event.
When truthfully, it's like the, the, the, the quicker you can put your mask down and just be real, the more fulfilled you'll be. The more. Easy. You'll be on yourself. The less you'll beat yourself up, the more love and abundance you'll have in your life, and you'll start to realize you'll actually connect more with people because of your realness and your authenticity.
It's like, would you rather go to the dentist who never takes vacations and prides themselves on being a workaholic, or do you want to go to the dentist? Who does take vacations? Like who do you think is gonna be more at the top of their game?
Anne: Well, that kind of lends itself to a question I have for you about, you know, what is the new rich lifestyle and how is it a horrible idea to wait until retirement to live your life?
Because that just speaks to that don't stop working. You can't stop working. And you know, especially a dentist because if they're not working, they're not getting paid. So what is the new rich lifestyle?
Karan: The new rich is a term that signifies. Different levels of wealth and different definitions of the world of the word wealth.
When I think of the word wealth, I think about time freedom. Think about location freedom. I think about work freedom, like things that family freedom, like all encompassing. Whereas when I was growing up, and maybe it was the same for you, it was definitely the case for my parents. It was like you were working 40 to 60 hours a week.
You had your couple weeks vacation a year where you were, you were asked to, okay, go live for in, in these three weeks, and in the other 49 weeks you have to suffer and grind and pay your bills and take care of responsibilities. And then next year, if you're lucky, if you did good, you might get a couple percentage points of a raise.
Okay, so now your salary went up 3, 5, 10 grand, and now you have another three weeks. So now go live your three weeks. And then incrementally you just make these incremental gains and then all of a sudden, 40 years goes by, you've paid your dues, so you've been taught. And now once you're 65 or 70, now you get to go live life and now you get to go hike Machu Picchu and now you get to go visit the Eiffel Tower, and now you get to go on all these walking tours.
But you can't go on these walking tours because now your knees are bad. And now you can't go to Machu Picchu because you feel bad sitting in an airplane for 12 hours. 'cause your back hurts of all of these years of putting yourself in front of other people. So the new rich is just simply a term. It's like, why are we, why are we letting this promised version of some distant future in the, when we're older?
To live our best life when we don't even know what our life may look like. We don't know what our health condition may look like. We don't know what our bodies will be capable of or not capable of. So the new rich is simply what if you're able to just do all of that now by redefining your definition of success by asking yourself, let me just put me and my family.
First, lemme just focus on me. Let me turn on the blinders to everybody else around me. I don't care about other dentists or other practices or other entrepreneurs. What is best for me today in this moment? Because I'm hearing so many people leave this earth way too early. I'm saying, you know, 80 was that 4,000 weeks comment I made earlier.
The life expectancy in North America for a, for a male is 77. For a female, it's 81. I can argue that number's always getting bigger or smaller depending on science. So I don't wanna argue with you on that one, but let's round that to 80. That's 4,000 weeks. I've lost so many friends who didn't make it to 50.
Mm-hmm. I hear of the healthiest people sometimes just waking up in the morning feeling like they've got some chest pain and they're gone. Within a couple days. It's, we get cancer diagnosis, we get this diagnosis, we get that diagnosis. It's like 80 days if we're lucky. And even if you make it to 80, I mean your health as a 30-year-old or a 40-year-old is, I would argue, is better than it will be when you're at 80.
So the new rich is you being incredibly honest with yourself and saying, what do I want? When do I want it? And who do I wanna put first?
Anne: Yeah, I love that. I mean, it well lends itself. Certainly to an entrepreneur because I think, you know, find the lifestyle you want and then fit in the work that it's gonna take to, to give that to you.
And you know, I think it's interesting, Corin, Corin is that dentists think they've gotta work five days a week and on the weekends. And, and you're right at the end of the year, it's like, it's a grind and at the end of your life it's a grind. And do you wanna have a grind? And then all of a sudden, when you're 65 and you know, a lot of dentists can't even retire because they haven't figured that out yet either.
I, I think the sweet spot now even for the young dentists that are listening to us, is to grab onto this concept and find a coach, a life coach. Like you or find their, the community that you're building to be able to show how you can do it. And I do think, you know, I'm sorry, I, I'm, I'm very positive, but I do think you can have it all if you set yourself up for it.
Mm-hmm. Because you know, you, you never know how long you're gonna be here. And you certainly, I have, I have, you know, I've got some brothers that. Gosh, they worked and they retired and they did very well in the corporate, um, atmosphere, but it was a grind. And then, you know, uh, they ended up getting some, um, serious illnesses.
Serious. Uh, um. Prognosis. And it's like, what's it all worth? What's it all for? You know, start early on, on setting it up. And, and we used to say that, and when we were doing, when de when, um, dental Entrepreneur started out, it was business beyond the classroom. So it went to all the dental schools, right? So one of, we had a, I remember an article, it was like, don't graduate from dental school and then by the BMW, the big house, you know, um, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Because. That's gonna set you up for having to get into that grind and the hamster wheel, and you'll never get off of it with the debt that you have and all that. So let's start a different way. Let's start, let's start thinking about what you really want on a, on a weekly basis, um, a monthly basis, and then plug in how you're gonna get that.
Um, and I do think you can, I think you can achieve it, but you need help. We need someone like you that's gonna give you the, uh, the, the blueprint or the roadmap or the, maybe it's the permission. You give the people that you're working with, tell, tell me about that. Tell me about what, what you've seen with your retreats and especially in the dental world now, you've, you've, you know, do you have like 10 dentists that come?
Do you have their teams come? What's going on with your retreats? I'm very curious about that.
Karan: Yeah. So lemme talk to you about the retreats, but lemme lemme talk about you about the, the core idea behind every expansion retreat. Is about challenging your narrative of what you believe is possible for your life.
Question everything. Question your beliefs. Question. Health question. Good or bad? Question. Success. There's this amazing story. It's a, it's a Christmas story about the ham in the oven. So a mom is cooking ham around Christmas, and her daughter looks at her and notices, mom, why are, why are you cutting off the edges of the hand?
And mom says, well, well, that's what my mother did. So then they called grandma, say, Hey grandma, why did you cut off the corners of the ham before you put it into the oven? And she said, well, that's, that's what my mother did. So they call their great grandmama and say, Hey, great grandma. Why did you cut off the corners of the ham before you put it in the oven?
What, what? What's the secret? And the great grandma says, because my oven wasn't big enough. No. So we do these things just because we're like, well, that's what, that's how it's always been done. That's what our father or mother did, or that's how our profession has taught us how to do things. We never question things.
We just take them for face value. And I think there's, there's truth in looking for what is in that face value. Imagine if now this daughter never questioned her mom. Well, for the next six generations it would've been the same idea. So the power of bringing people together over retreats is really this idea, you said this beautifully earlier, it's a vault.
It's a vault of us normalizing conversations that are dying to come out of us. Conversations that we wish we could just speak freely with somebody without any fear of judgment, conversations that sometimes we can't even have with our loved, our, our loved ones. Like I've had so many conversations with strangers that in the past I had a very hard time speaking to my wife about, or conversations that I've had with a complete stranger about my issues growing up, which I could happily tell a stranger.
I would never dare to tell my best friend. So what's so fascinating about these and the, the commonality, let's just say, is that these, these humans just so happen to be in dentistry. That's the only commonality is that we've labeled them in a profession. But like you said, they're all entrepreneurs.
They're all human beings. So my events now, although they're targeted to the industry of dentistry, I have so many non-dental human beings come because if I was now to. Critique somebody based on their title or profession will, and I'm just as, as bad as that guy in 2016 who looked at me at my business card and said, Hey, I don't see any value here.
Let me, let me see who else is in the room. So these retreats are, are two and a half day events where we come together, we break bread, there's content, there's workshops. It's a lot about life transformation and growth. We map out everybody's 4,000 weeks. They know exactly where they are. It's kind of scary, but it's also motivating, depending on how you look at it.
We give you an 80 year grid and you x out every year that you've already lived in the hopes that now you see, okay, well I only have 20 blocks left, or I only have 30 blocks left, or I only have 45 blocks left, and it's just this really cool visual which anyone can do at home. Just create a grid of eight by 10.
Map out your, your, your, your years that you've lived and just around that grid. Ask yourself, well, hey, if I only had X amount of time left, who would I want to become? What would I wanna be doing with my time? Who do I want hang out with? Who do I no longer want to hang out with? Where have I given energy?
Maybe that doesn't deserve it anymore. Where can I question beliefs now? Kind of like the hand idea earlier, and it's just a really powerful, I mean, in-person events. I know you do amazing do retreats. I always hear from your attendees just how transformer transformational your events are and just the community and the connection that comes out of it.
Your events and our catalyst moments for people, right? A stranger comes to your event whether they know you or not. They come to your event. They have one conversation that fundamentally shifts. Their entire thinking of what's possible in their life. All because of one conversation. One connection. Not to mention that at at your events, they're probably talking to hundreds of people and having thousands of conversations.
So I believe one idea can change your entire life. One conversation, one new relationship can completely change where you thought you were going because it's happened to me so many times where I thought I was supposed to go this way in life. And I have one conversation and immediately I go 90 degrees the other way, or 60 degrees the other way.
And you never know when you're in the moment what it might lead to, but you're able to reflect back a year ago, be like, oh, well I met Ann in July. Well, if we met at the festival, well look at what's happened since July. Well, wow, if I didn't meet Ann, I wouldn't have met Mona Patel. Well, if I didn't meet Mona Patel, I wouldn't have met so-and-so.
And you just start to connect all these beautiful dots, and you realize it's a byproduct of you continuously pushing yourself. You continuously pushing yourself into uncomfortable situations, pushing yourself into new territory, continuously questioning your own beliefs of what you thought or thought was not possible in your life, and all of a sudden you look back and think, wow, I've gotten more done.
In the last 12 months than most people have in a decade.
Anne: Yeah, I love that. Because you know what you're, what it is, is you're, you're saying yes to yourself. Like, you know, so often I think people just are afraid and you are give again, it, it was kind of back to permission of self, say yes. And then, you know, I, and also what you were saying current is that I'm working with women in dentistry, but it's all about being a woman.
And they happen to be in dentistry, and it's a great niche to be in because of word of mouth and, and there's a commonality there. But with you, it's like you're working with humans and, and the idea of expansion pretty much says it all. Expand your mind. Expand, because I think, you know, honestly, I've said this many times.
I was 42 years old, current when I even realized that I had a choice. That I just didn't need to keep putting one foot in front of the other that I actually could have a vision, could like, look at my life. 4,000 weeks I, this, that's all new concept to me. I'm very excited about that. But you know, that I would have a choice of like, what do I really want?
I think so often our head is down. We're doing, you know, what we think we should do. We never step back. Um, just to look and see what. We really want and what we, who we really are. Um, so that at the end of your 4,000 weeks, you don't look at that and you say, dang, man, I didn't do anything I wanted, I didn't live the life I wanted.
And now it's kind of like, you know, you don't even have the, the physicality or the mental aptitude to be able to, to do the things that, you know, you should have maybe realized that you could do.
Karan: It, it made me think about something that you, you mentioned earlier, and I, I meant to say it then, but oftentimes we get so lost in just the day-to-day grind as, as you put it, the day-to-day work.
And we look back at the end of the calendar year and we're like, okay, well this year we made this much money. We had this many number of new patients, this much new revenue, this many new events. So let's just, let's now increase our targets for next year. I mean, we never question it. We just know we want more.
We just know we want more money for something because more money, again, signifies good and bad success and failure. And at the end of your life there was this, uh, there's this beautiful article in a book. It's called The Top Five Regress of the Dying, where a nurse in palliative care was with people on their last day before they pulled the plug, so to speak.
And she would ask these people, Hey, do you have any regrets? These were people's last day, they had nothing to lose. So of course they were gonna be honest. One of them said, I wish I'd had I, I wish I had had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. That was one of the most common regrets.
Another one was, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Another one was, I wish I had the courage to express my feelings. And the last two were, I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. And the last one was, I wish that I had let myself be happier. We know we're chasing. We know we don't wanna work so hard. We know we want to demonstrate more courage.
We know we want to just beautifully express our feelings to anybody who is in our friend circle. We know community over the course of 80 years is what determines lifetime happiness community, who you hang out with. We know that we want to be happy. When we, when we see like our end line or our finish line, we know we want all of those things.
I think the, the problem we run into is we think that all of these things have to be in some distant future and we can't just have it all today. Right. How many times have you heard business owners grind only to tell you, well, I'm doing it for the family. Well, if you were doing it for the family, they probably want you at the dinner table four nights a week.
Mm-hmm. If you were doing it for the family, you wouldn't be going to every single event that's marketed and maybe you'd take the family on a vacation. If you were doing it for the family, what if you dedicated Saturdays as no phone days? What if Sunday nights you had family dinners, if you were really doing it for the family?
So there's just this, there's this thing that we, we say we want publicly because that's what our network and our community and our environment has stimulated us to think that work, work, work, work, work means money, which means success. Or you can just zoom out, snap yourself back into it and say, what game am I really playing?
Am I playing my game or did I get caught up in someone else's game? And it's okay to get caught up in someone else's game because now you have awareness of it. And when you have awareness of it, well then you can make concrete decisions in the present moment that will have ripple effects for your future.
Anne: Oh my gosh. That really defines the new rich in my mind is like, you know, it's interesting Kern, because I remember when we were going through and Tom was an entrepreneur, and I remember, oh my God, we are broke. And somebody said to me, you'll never be poor. You may be broke. And I remember telling Joey, you know, he as our youngest, he's 34 now.
Um, honey, we're rich in love. We're rich in love. And that's really what counts. And that's what you're talking about too. It's, it's the, and I love that. I'm, I, I was thinking about the dash in 4,000 weeks 'cause it's, you know, how did you live that? Right. And from birth to the 4,000 weeks, what, where, where did that come together?
Because even when you also said, and, and I had, um, um, you know, a good friend of mine said you'd never saw a funeral with a U-Haul behind the hearse. Right. So. That always said, spoke to me. It's like, it's not about the money. Money does give you good things, but the, there's so many more things that are so much more important and the money will come and the success, all of that will come.
But you've gotta get your head straight and you've also gotta get your values and your culture and, um, straight. And I, and one of the things that also I wanna just shout out to you, you are a. You are a servant leader, Karan. You are a leader, but you are leading in the right way and to make our profession.
I'm so happy that you decided to put your efforts into the dental profession because it is a profession. It's not an industry, you know, we, it's about people and you've found that and, and it's very unusual, um, to hear somebody that is actually becoming so successful in our. Profession without a DDS or a DMD behind their name.
And I shout out to you. 'cause we need you. We need what you're bringing. We need your energy and your positivity and um, your insight on what really is important. What would you like to say is our, we're wrapping this up today as a final remark to all those that are out there working in the trenches. One, one day at a time, one foot in front of the other.
What advice? I love
Karan: this and thank you so much. You've been such an incredible host with such great questions, and here, here's what I'd like to leave with. Okay. You can buy a clock, but you can't buy back time. You can buy a bed, but you can't buy a good night's sleep. You can buy excitement, but you cannot buy bliss.
You can buy luxuries, but you cannot buy satisfaction. So everything you think you need for the opposite feeling to occur is just a story that we've been telling ourselves. You can buy all the books, you cannot buy intelligence. You can buy degrees, you cannot buy wisdom. Everything is a lived experience.
And if you were, if for whatever reason you've got a text message today that said you've got one year to live,
take that for what it's worth. Oftentimes, you know the changes. That need to be made in your life. You know the changes that need to be made in your work, and it's time for you to start working on your life. You're, you're still good at working on your business. Well, now let's work on your life so that you can have the most beautiful 4,000, hopefully more than 4,000 weeks, so that when you're at, you know, your last breath and someone asks you, what did you most regret?
You just look them and look at them and smile.
Anne: Oh my god, I have goosebumps. That's awesome. Oh, Kern, thank you so much. I learned a lot today. Also, I'm. Take this conversation with me, and I hope everyone that's listening will do the same. Kern, how do they reach out to you? How do they find out about your, your retreats and, and the, and the workshops, uh, that you're doing to expand their minds and their
Karan: lives?
I love that. Thank you so much. So my, my website has, has everything on it, all my events. It is my first name and my last name. Com. The com, we have retreats that help people. Identify as, as new people and just leave their old identities back. These are called the expansion project events. We have retreats that want to, uh, that, that teach people how to host their own retreats, uh, to dentists or humans in dentistry who wanna use retreats as part of your business model.
We have, um, an upcoming event to Peru in October of 2023. We have Morocco in 2024, so I'm all about. Giving you experiences that you always thought were not meant for people like you. You know, I always grew up and I was taught, Hey, people like you don't do things like this. I believe that to be true for a long time until I started questioning why?
Why cannot, why can a non-dentist not be successful in dentistry? Why can't, like, before a book becomes a bestseller, you know that person wrote a couple hundred pages. Well before they wrote a couple hundred pages. They wrote one page before. They wrote one page. They wrote a paragraph before that. They wrote one sentence before that they had an idea before that.
Somebody maybe doubted them. So like you just, you could keep looking back to see, okay, well here's what's led me to here, but I am not my past. I am not my future. I am right now in this moment. So all my events are designed to just bring people back into the present moment so that the actions you take today and tomorrow are the most aligned with who you are.
Not a version of you that you think other people expect of you. So all my information is on my website and we always have room for incredible people at every event.
Anne: Oh my gosh, that's, that is beautiful. You know, and, and if you're listening, it's, it's like, you know, this is the time. It's your year, this is the time for you.
And most importantly, um, I just wanna say thank you, Kern, for being here today. And you know what? Keep doing you. Thank you dear. Appreciate it. Take care. And I'll see you on the road.
