IAM1542 – Reverend and Author Makes Impact by Leading People to Christ

Rev. Isaac Hayes is the president of Healing of the Soul Ministries and author of “Men After God’s Heart:10 Principles of Brotherly Love.” He is also an Assistant Pastor at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, Illinois, and a doctoral student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Follow Rev. Hayes on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at @RevIsaacHayes.

• CEO Story: Isaac was a college gangster rapper producing music with his friends – the sold tapes as his first venture of entrepreneurship. Upon graduating, he discovered he wanted to do more, so he switched to Christian rap. Selling them as well and doing ministry and preaching as well. It started taking off over the years, doing social media, YouTube, and speaking engagements including television. Then authored a book about 10 principles of brotherly love.
• Business Service: Transformation business – life in Jesus. Using whatever medium to connect people to Christ. Making an impact on other people’s lives.
• Secret Sauce: Make connections and correlations. Communicating and translating the Bible to people for them to grasp it.
• CEO Hack: Devotion – quiet time with God, reading the Bible, and reflecting.
• CEO Nugget: Making rest because you’re human. Perseverance pays off, and conviction with self. Keep grinding.
• CEO Defined: Making tough decisions. Make sure you are rested, refreshed, and centered because a huge amount of money is at stake in making your decisions.

Website:  www.hotsministries.com , www.hotsministries.com/book

Facebook: @RevIsaacHayes

Twitter: @revisaachayes

Instagram: @revisaachayes

Youtube: revisaachayes

LinkedIn: @isaachayes

Pinterest: revisaachayes

Tiktok: revisaachayes

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Transcription

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00:23 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:50 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Reverend Isaac Hayes of Healing of the Soul Ministries. Reverend Isaac, super excited to have you on the show.

01:01 – Isaac Hayes

Gresham. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

01:04 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, excited to have you on and talk about all the awesome things that you're doing. And of course, before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Reverend Isaac Hayes so you can hear about some of those awesome things. Reverend Isaac is the president of Healing of the Soul Ministries and author of Men after God's 10 Principles of Brotherly Love. He is also an assistant pastor at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, Illinois, and is a doctoral student at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Reverend Isaac, super excited to have you on the show again. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:37 – Isaac Hayes

Let's go for it.

01:39 – Gresham Harkless

Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I want to hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I like to call your CEO story.

01:45 – Isaac Hayes

I guess I go back to college because during my time in college, I was part of a rap group, believe it or not, called Law and Order. And we began to record tapes and sell them on campus. And so that was sort of my first venture at entrepreneurship because we made the music, we recorded the music, we duplicated the music and sold them on campus, performed in shows and all those kinds of things. So that was a wonderful time. But upon graduating and getting involved in ministry, I discovered that I wanted to do more.

So I kind of switched from, let's call it gangster rap to Christian rap. And so I started doing music in terms of Christian rap, selling that music as well. I actually won a grant from the city of Chicago for a thousand bucks to produce some CDs of one of the songs, I recorded and gave those out for free. When I go to prisons and audi homes and different locations to kind of help our young men and women on the streets, you know, off of the streets to Christ. And so as I grew in ministry, I began to teach more, preach more.

And so I started what was at first Heat on the Streets ministries because my heart was really for the brothers and sisters again, who are in a life of crime and trying to get them out of those streets. But then it evolved into the Healing of the Soul ministry. So as I matured, I thought that would have a more corporate brand. It's still HOTS Ministries, but we just went from Heat on the Streets to Healing of the Soul, so we have a broader appeal.

And so I've been working on that since about 2015, and it's really started to take off over the years, obviously, through social media, including YouTube, getting more speaking engagements, being seen and heard on television, because my church does broadcast here in the Chicagoland area. And then finally arriving at the book you just mentioned, a man after God's ten Principles of Brotherly Love. So that's kind of the framework of our journey so far.

04:09 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that. And especially to hear how, you know, I think so many ways you could probably speak to this more than you know, anybody else just in terms of, like, how you do that. I almost feel like that transformation can happen and manifest itself in maybe different ways the way that that connection actually happens. So it seems like, whether it be your book or the ministry, all the work that you're doing, it seems like it provides that, for lack of a better term, that bridge, that avenue, that opportunity to, you know, be aware of Jesus and be aware to have that connection and that transformation.

04:41 – Isaac Hayes

Yeah, well, you said the keyword connection. Everything is about connection, whether it's business to business or business to consumer. Without a connection, your product or service cannot get to your client or customer. And so we use whatever medium we have available to us to make the connection. You know, Jesus would take somebody's boat, if you will, and leverage that and preach to the multitudes. He'd find resources and multiply those resources.

Two fish, five loaves of bread. He will recruit, recruit people to his team and say, hey, follow me. I want to train you. I want to mentor you, I want to develop you, and then send you out to create franchises, if you will, in order to expand his influence and to expand his reach. And so the same principles that we find in business apply just to life in general. Right. Whether you're in Education, whether you're in sales, whether you're in technology, it's all the same fundamental principles of life that help us try to find some level of success.

05:44 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I've always believed that, you know, really strong and great and true leaders are those that inspire other leaders. And as you were talking about the example, you know, Jesus and being able to kind of see that, that helps us to kind of understand how best to be able to kind of take those principles and use our talents and our gifts in life as we are able to do it, as we can kind of see fit. So absolutely appreciate that. So I wanted to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more about how you're making that impact, and hear more about your book. Could you take a little bit more on how you're serving and making that impact and transforming lives there?

06:18 – Isaac Hayes

Yeah. Well, again, it starts in college the fact that I was one of the leading voices on campus at our state college on behalf of African American students. That's sort of where I found my genesis, my awakening for purpose, right? I don't care what business you are in, because we are talking to leaders and CEOs and entrepreneurs. There has to be a purpose that drives you. And that purpose is not necessarily to make money, to be famous. It may be what draws us in. But then we discover it's not about being in the newspaper, it's not about being on television, it's not about driving a nice car or living in a nice home. But it's really about impact, right?

And so as I talk about transformation, and that's my life's purpose, is to transform people's lives. I learned in college that I'm here to make an impact. And so I would write to the school newspapers, I led a protest on campus, and I became part of the Black Writers Forum. We put on a big old production under that banner. We published a poetry book that we did. So even in those early stages, I was always thinking, how do we reach people? How do we be creative and find ways to maximize the skills, talents, the abilities that we have gathered together in that instance on a college campus?

And so what I do is examine Jesus's final moments with 12 men who were the closest to him. Whether through the words he says or deeds that he does, shows how he tries to break down that barrier. When he leaves, he says that the primary mark for people to know that they are his followers is that men love other men. And again, I'm saying platonically nonsexual love. And so if we can get past the sexuality piece, I think we'll be able to have more meaningful relationships and change the number of lonely men in our society.

08:23 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love that. And I really appreciate, you know, your ability to. And I almost wonder if this is part of your secret sauce, the thing you feel kind of set your part. It makes you unique. It seems like you have this ability. I'm going to use the word translate, for lack of a better term, to translate. I believe what I'm hearing is about understanding the various connections and how they have manifested during the disruption of the pandemic.

It’s important to recognize how things have changed and the tension between conviction and convenience that we have experienced. Do you feel like you have an ability to kind of be able to translate that, understand that, and be able to kind of help people, help arm people with the ability to be able to strengthen their connections, those relationships as?

09:05 – Isaac Hayes

As a result of that, I certainly have been gifted by God to make correlations. You know, I've taken exams and assessments and all those things. Leadership things, spiritual gift things. And they say that I have the ability to make connections and correlations. And so that that's a gift. I can't take credit for it. It's something given to me by God. But one of the things I try to do, again, is about transformation, the Bible is a spiritual book, no question about it, but it's a spiritual book given to human beings.

And so I tell Christians, people in general, we are human beings having a human experience. And the Bible tries to tell us how to live human God's way. And so the Bible talks about finances, it talks about marriage, it talks about business, it talks about saving, it talks about labor and hard work. Like any subject matter you want, if you look at it through a different lens, you can benefit from what the Bible talks about and advocates for. And I just try to translate that, to use your word and communicate that to people in a way that they can grasp it. And so far it's been working out.

10:19 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I could definitely say that, and I could definitely hear it just in kind of seeing, you know, how things have manifested themselves and how, you know, we have that opportunity to kind of build those, you know, connections, relationships, friendships, just how all that manifests itself in so many different ways. So truly appreciate that, Reverend. And I wanted to switch gears a little bit. Okay. And I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book a habit that you have or even something from your book. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:47 – Isaac Hayes

It's simple. In the secular world, we call it mindfulness. In the church world, we call it devotion. And that is every morning before I get started, before I check my text messages before I check my emails, I have an hour of quiet time with God. So that's, you know, half an hour of reading the scriptures, and then the other half hour is not necessarily quiet in the sense there's no noise. But I play worship music and I kind of meditate and reflect and pray.

And I believe that is the key to me being able to navigate my day because I've not given God his time, but I've made him my most important priority. And so the rest of the day I'm running off the fuel of having reset myself, having gathered myself, having been downloaded into, if you will, by God in order to take on the challenges of that day.

And so it is something that I strongly recommend and I would hate to think what my life would be like if I did not have that moment every morning to just start my day in mindfulness, to use that language or to just, you know, center yourself, whatever term or phrase you want to use. But for me, it's just having that devotional time with the Lord.

12:17 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, I, I love that. So you might consider that to be what I like to call a CEO nugget, which is kind of like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I often say it might be something you would tell your, favorite client or if you dropped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self. But is it that making time for rest, is one of the other kinds of CEO nuggets you would kind of point to?

12:37 – Isaac Hayes

Yeah, I would. That certainly would be one because again, you're a human being, right? We want to be superhuman, we want to work 16-hour days. But you're human. So it's not a matter how much money you have or how successful you are. It's a human principle for self-care. But I would say as you were talking, perseverance pays off. You know it, no, it sounds rudimentary, but the one thing about perseverance is it endures. It's about that conviction I talked about now with myself.

Because they're going to be ups and downs, they're going to be setbacks, they're going to be negative quarters, negative reports, they're going to be troubled. It's going to look like somebody's about to get that position that you were eyeing. But what I've Learned in my 48 years of life is that if you just keep grinding at it, it pays off. It's a biblical principle, but. But it's a natural human principle, if you grind this stuff out because there are always challenges, and the people who win are not the people who quit, but the people who press ahead, even in the midst of adversity. So perseverance pays off.

13:46 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely Appreciate that. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different, quote, unquote CEOs on the show. So, Reverend Isaac, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:59 – Isaac Hayes

As the CEO, your responsibility is to make the tough decisions. And so that's why when we go into work, we want to be rested, we want to be refreshed, we want to have centered ourselves. Depending on what scale you have, tens of millions of billions of dollars are at stake off on one person's decision, even though you have a team. But the buck starts with you. And I'll say this, and I'll end on this point.

I also joked one time we talked about the organization being flat now that everything's supposed to be flat, I said, but let something go wrong and see how flat the organization is, right? You discover real soon that they're still in the hierarchy in our flat organizations. And so because of that, we have to be people who are willing to make those tough decisions and not run from decision-making. And so for me, that's, you know, often initial consideration of your question would be is about decision making.

15:00 – Gresham Harkless

Reverend Isaac, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best people can get all of you get a copy of your book, and find out all the awesome things that you're working on.

15:16 – Isaac Hayes

Yeah. Thanks again, Gresham, for having me. I appreciate you having me on CB Nation. I want to invite everyone to go to my website, hots ministries.com hots ministries.com you can learn more about the ministry, about me, me about the book. If you are on social media, you can find me any and everywhere at Rev Isaac Hayes and Rev Isaac Hayes. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tick Tock, all of them, YouTube. If I didn't encourage everyone to live life as Jesus would have them live it because in him you will find everything you need.

15:54 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. I appreciate that, Reverend. And what we're going to do is have the links and information in the show notes as well too, so that everybody can get a copy of the book, connect with you, and do all the awesome things that you're able to offer to us. And I hope you have a phenomenal day.

16:06 – Isaac Hayes

Great. Thank you for having me.

16:07 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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