IAM1831 – Reverend and Author Makes Impact by Leading People to Christ

Transcription:

The full transcription is only available to CBNation Library Members. Sign up today!

Isaac Hayes Teaser 00:00

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 center yourself, whatever term or phrase you want to use.

But for me, it's having that devotional time with the Lord.

Intro 00:21

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 are in search of.

This is the I AM CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:49

Hello, this is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know that we've hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them, business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners, just like you, what I like to call the CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organizations.

This month, we are focusing on CEO Hacks and CEO Nuggets. This is by far one of my favorite questions I asked on the show. In other words, I asked, what are the apps, books, and habits that make you more effective and efficient. Those were the CEO hacks. Then I asked for a word of wisdom or a piece of advice or something that you might tell your younger business self if you were to hop into a time machine. Those were the CEO nuggets. That's what we'll focus on this month and some of this top ones that can instantly impact your business.

I love all the questions, but with every episode I felt I would walk away with something I could look at and implement, right there to save the precious resources, time and money, or I would also learn about the advice, tips and tidbits or tools of the trade on how to level up our organization. So you'll hear some of these this month. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I AM CEO podcast.

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.

Isaac Hayes 02:26

Gresham, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Gresham Harkless 02:29

Yes, excited to have you on and talk about all the awesome things that you're doing. 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 Heart, Ten 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?

Isaac Hayes 03:02

Let's go for it.

[restrict paid=”true”]

Gresham Harkless 03:03

Let's make it happen then. So to kick everything off, I want to hear a little bit more on how you guys started. What I like to call your CEO story.

Isaac Hayes 03:09

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. So that was my 1st 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 switched from, let's call it gangster route to the Christian route. Yeah, so I started doing music in terms of Christian rap, selling that music as well to actually want a grant from the city of Chicago for 1000 bucks to produce some CDs of one of the songs I recorded and gave those out for free when I go to prisons and homes and different locations to help our young men and women on the streets, off of the streets to Christ.

And so, as I grew in ministry, I began to teach more, and preach more. 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 the 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 more corporate brand. It's still hot ministries, but we just went from heat on the streets to healing of the soul. So we have a broader appeal.

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 Man After God's Heart, 10 Principles of Brotherly Love. So that's the framework of our journey so far.

Gresham Harkless 05:26

Nice. I love that. So it seems like whether it be your book or 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 be aware of Jesus and be aware to have that connection and that transformation.

Isaac Hayes 05:42

Yeah, you said the keyword connection. Everything's 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. Jesus will take somebody's boat, if you will, and leverage that and preach to the multitude to find resources and multiply those resources to fish, five loaves of bread.

He will 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. 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.

Gresham Harkless 06:45

Yeah, absolutely. I've always believed that really strong and great and true leaders are those that inspire other leaders. And as you were talking about the example Jesus and being able to see that helps us to understand how best to be able to take those principles and use our talents and our gifts and like that as we are able to do it as we can see fit. So absolutely appreciate that.

I wanted to drill down a little bit more here a little bit more on how you're making that impact, hear more about your book. Could you take us a little bit more on how you are serving and making that impact and transforming lives there?

Isaac Hayes 07:16

Yeah again, it starts in college in the fact that I was 1 of the leading voices on campus at our state college on behalf of African American students. That's where I found my genesis, my awakening for purpose. I don't care what business you 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.

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. So I would write to the school newspapers. I led a protest on campus. I became part of the black writer's 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?

So what I do is examine Jesus's final moments with 12 men who were the closest to him and whether through words, he says, or deeds that he does show how he tries to break down that barrier because 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 non-sexual 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.

Gresham Harkless 09:19

Nice, I love that and I really appreciate your ability to. I almost wonder if this is part of your secret sauce thing. Do you feel like you have the ability to be able to translate that, understand that, to be able to help people with the ability to be able to strengthen their connections and those relationships as a result of that.

Isaac Hayes 09:36

I certainly have been gifted by God to make correlations. 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'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 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. If you look at it through a different lens, you can benefit from what the Bible talks about and advocates for. 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.

Gresham Harkless 10:49

Yeah, I could definitely say that. Truly appreciate that reverend. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book or a habit that you have, or even something from your book, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

Isaac Hayes 11:03

It's simple. In a 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 a half hour of reading 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 meditate and reflect and pray.

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. 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.

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 center yourself, whatever term or phrase you want to use. But for me, it's having a devotional time with the Lord.

Gresham Harkless 12:32

I love that. So you might consider that to be what I like to call a CEO nugget, which is like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. I'll often say it might be something you would tell your favorite client, or if you dropped into a time machine, you might tell your business self.

Isaac Hayes 12:45

Yeah, 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 of 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. It sounds rudimentary, but the one thing about perseverance is it endures. It's about that conviction I talked about now with self, 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 troubles. 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 it's a natural human principle is 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.

Gresham Harkless 13:53

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. We're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show. So, Reverend Isaac, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Isaac Hayes 14:06

As the CEO, your responsibility is to make the tough decisions and so that's why we go into work. We want to be rested. We want to be refreshed. You want to have centered ourselves because depending on what scale you have, tens of millions of billions of dollars are at stake off of 1 person's decision, even though you have a team, but the buck starts with you and I'll say this about this point. I also joked one time we talked about the organization is flat now 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. So, because of that, we have to be people who are willing to make those tough decisions and not run from decision-making. So, for me, that's often an issue consideration of your question would be about decision making.

Gresham Harkless 15:06

Reverend Isaac, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want 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 ahold of you, get a copy of your book, and find about all the awesome things that you're working on.

Isaac Hayes 15:22

Yeah, thanks again, Gresham for having me. I appreciate you having me on CB Nation and I want to invite everyone to go to my website. hotsministries.com.

You can learn more about the ministry, about me in the book. If you are on social media, you can find me any and everywhere @RevisaacHayes and Rev. Isaac Hayes, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

I then encourage everyone to live life as Jesus would have them to live it because in Him, you will find everything you need.

Gresham Harkless 15:59

Absolutely. I appreciate that Reverend and what we're gonna 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 rest of the day.

Isaac Hayes 16:12

Great. Thank you for having me.

Outro 16:13

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CB Nation and 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 Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and everywhere you listen to podcasts.

Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast Jr. Thank you for listening.

[/restrict]