The person Dr. Lincoln trusted to teach this.
Fifteen years at his side. One promise to keep.
Dr. Michael J. Lincoln read faces for almost fifty years and taught the method to very few people. He was particular about who got it, because in the wrong hands a tool this sharp could cut the person it is aimed at. He prepared me to carry on his work, and I took that seriously. I am the only student to write the books and build the training course.
What fifteen years earns.
An apprenticeship is not a certificate. I did not take a weekend course and print a card. I sat beside Dr. Lincoln through hundreds of readings, watched him work, and then did my own while he corrected them, one face at a time, for the better part of two decades. He taught the way he learned, by staring at the thing until it gives up its pattern.
What he handed me was not a technique. It was an eye trained the slow way, and the insights that come with it.
Six years at the University of Minnesota.
Graduate work in educational and cognitive psychology: the Western science of how a mind learns and how it goes wrong.
Nine years as a monk.
An ascetic life: translating Sanskrit texts and meditating on mantras for hours a day. Attention as a discipline, not a technique.
Television kept calling me the expert.
In 2011 the Style Network built an episode of its series Ruby around me giving her a face reading. The credit reads Face Reading Expert, and the camera treated it as exactly that, not a gag, a genuine attempt to understand the person in the chair.
It was not the only time. Producers have introduced me on camera as a Sanskrit expert, an authority on Eastern philosophy, the person you bring in when a show wants someone who can actually read what is in front of him.
This work has taken me around the world.
The clearest proof that this works is not anything I can say about it. It is what people did without being asked. Students who had been through my courses gathered their own groups and ran their own introductory classes. Some flew me across the world to train and read faces in person. Others filled calendars with Zoom session after Zoom session. Nobody crosses an ocean twice, or fills a calendar with a stranger’s video calls, for a parlor trick.
Beijing
Former students convened their own groups and brought me in to teach.
Taipei
Introductory courses run by graduates, then in-person readings on invitation.
Hong Kong
Workshops and personal readings booked back to back over video.
Why I won’t use this to catch people.
Los Angeles, some years ago. A situation I will not detail here brought me in to read a face in a context where the stakes were real and legal. I did the reading. I also watched what happens when this work gets pointed at a person to corner them rather than to understand them, and I understood why Dr. Lincoln spent his life insisting it stay out of courtrooms.
A private investigator asked me to do similar work later. I declined, and I have declined every version of it since. The method sees people all the way down, and that kind of sight belongs to helping them, not to winning against them.
Sight this deep belongs to helping people, never to beating them.
If this is the person you’d like to read your face.
Book a Reading ›One photograph, 75 minutes, a recording and a written report.