Thanks to a great offer online, I was able to attend Joey Yap‘s Face & Destiny seminar on Sunday at Suntec City for free (thanks, Caleb!), provided I blog about it. Sounded like a fair trade to me, so I grabbed 3 tickets and 2 friends to see what I could see from the latest Feng Shui master in town.

What Does Your Face Have To Do With Your Destiny?

The Chinese believe that you can tell what kind of person you are and what your future will be like not only from your palm and birthdate, but also from the features of your face. According to Joey that day, face reading was originally created by physicians as a diagnosis tool, and only later evolved to fortune telling.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

I Take My Hat Off to All Early Risers

On a Sunday morning no less! We arrived a little groggy, regretting a little our late coffee session the previous night. After grabbing our much needed caffeine fix, and getting our seats, our eyes popped out when we saw the schedule: the event was going to last from 10am to 5pm! No afternoon naps! Nooooooo!

But Hang On To Those Hats For The Lame Introduction

Whoops! Event’s starting…time to pop those eyes back in. While Joey would turn out to be quite the opposite, the emcee was dead in the water the moment he appeared. During the whole day, he never bothered to introduce himself once, and got us to do this super lame exercise: use one finger to tap the palm, then two, then 3, then 4, then 5, and asked us to continue clapping this way for Joey. Lame!

Worse when he went off his lame introduction into a canned speech blurb about Joey Yap and his company; it was so obvious he was reading off a script and it was as wooden as the Amazon (badda bing!). Sorry to rip on you dude, but not introducing yourself to a estimated 400-500 strong crowd before speaking to them is just rude.

I was getting worried. Was Joey going to be as lame as this guy was too?

What I Didn’t Know About Joey Yap

The emcee introduced Joey, and soft inspirational music began to play. Joey didn’t appear! Did something happen? Was the delay meant to increase the suspense? Was he going to rappel down from the roof like The Cruise in MI1? Had he been kidnapped by rival Chinese Feng Shui masters with deadly ninja squirrels?

But the moment Joey appeared and started speaking, all my fears evaporated like my fantasies of deadly ninja squirrels. Guess what? I like Joey as a speaker. He’s personal, friendly, funny and informative all at the same time. I can see why he’s so famous, this cat is good.

He reminded me of another famous speaker I know, Adam Khoo. While both are very successful people in their own right, on stage they’re able to appear very personable and very real, and build an immediate connection with the audience. Within minutes, I was laughing and enjoying myself, relaxing into my seat and getting curious about what he had to say.

If You Wonder About The Future, Look Into The Mirror

Joey shared with us in a funny and engaging manner the basics of mian xiang, or the art of reading your destiny from the various features on your face, like where on your face determines your intelligence, wealth, career success, relationships, health, children.

(I discovered that if your forehead is four fingers high, it’s a sign of high intelligence. Mine is five. Yippee! Eat your heart out, Stephen Hawking)

Not only did he touch on the topic of the day, he also shared with us a little bit of palm reading and bazi, or birthdate astrology. It was all pretty fun and interesting. To close off, he also shared with us the significance of having moles, marks and pimples at certain locations on your face, apparently a pimple on my forehead was telling me not to travel in the next 14 days. I’ve never felt so grateful towards a pimple my entire life.

Cashing In The Feng Shui

Before I saw Joey Yap, I’d heard about Joey, from his many books and DVDs in the bookstores, and one trip to his website. And one thing I admire about the man: I love his marketing. It is rock solid gold.

Not to mention the man has a blog (even though it reads like nothing more than a travelogue now), and by tithing his tickets amongst the blogosphere he or his team seems to get that good word of mouth is more than worth the price of admission.

One thing I gotta give him props for though, the man kept insisting throughout his talk that real feng shui is never, ever about selling you products. Hey, that actually makes sense…why would a couple of mandarin ducks in my ‘love corner’ make me hotter to women?

I did notice during the short introductory talk during lunch break about his avaliable courses that the man didn’t seem too hot at selling though. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s a good instructor, but perhaps not such a hot salesman? If he could focus on selling unique solutions to problems and pushing benefits with time-limited offers, I’m convinced the man could explode his profits (more than he already did that day!).

The Bottom Line

So what did I discover about Joey Yap at my first seminar with him?

1) He’s funny, interesting, engaging, immediately charismatic, and seems to know his stuff very well.

2) While the seminar offered fun techniques on how to read the features on your face, it was pretty surface and didn’t offer any ideas on what to do with that info to create a greater life. I guess that’s information saved for the more intensive (and expensive) courses, books and DVDs. Hey, I have no beef with up-selling, if what you’re selling is of value, so no complains there.

3) Would I pay the price of SGD$128 to go? No. While i enjoyed Joey’s presentation, for that amount of money you could get a few of his books and DVDs with (possibly) more info (I say possibly because I haven’t read any of his books, but it’s a good estimate a few books would cover more than he did in one day).