About the Book
Book: Trekking Toward Tenacity: Your Family’s Roadmap to Stronger Mental Health
Author: Chris Morris
Genre: Parenting / Christian Living / Mental Health
Release date: September 24, 2024
Empower your children with the gift of tenacity through these practical, meaningful tools for their mental and spiritual health.
Trekking toward Tenacity walks through Psalm 139 verse by verse, discovering how we can help our children develop mentally healthy habits. The goal is to coach our kids to be more tenacious because we live in a tumultuous world. It can be hard to stay focused on God and on mentally healthy habits in that tumult, but this book gives concrete ways to help kids to do just that.
By teaching parents practical application steps to implement with kids of all ages, ranging from preschool to adolescent, this book will give them new tools to support their families in the quest for better mental health. It will provide rock-solid encouragement for parents who are stressed out and wondering if they’re making the right choices for their families. It provides counterintelligence against the onslaught of increased risks of mental health challenges for children and young adults today.
Click here to get your copy!
I received a complimentary copy of this book and all opinions given are my own and not an endorsement of all author’s opinions.
Author Interview
My target audience is parents of children from preschool to high school. The biggest thing that I did to align my book with this audience was to identify different application points for each age range. As you might imagine, having a conversation with a five-year-old is drastically different than having a conversation on the same topic with a fifteen-year-old. So every chapter has distinct, age-appropriate activities to help the various age ranges grasp the topics at hand. This was a bit of a challenge to come up with, for the simple fact that I’m not a child development expert. Instead, I had to do a deep dive into all the facts around child development, then apply my learning to the topics at hand. These application activities were definitely theparts of every chapter that took me the longest to write. I don’t mean to say that they were hard necessarily, but it took me using my brain a bit differently than I normally do. Typically, I am a storyteller with a pastoral heart, so I integrate Scripture and stories together for my audience. In this book, there were really two audiences: the parents AND their kids. That required some additional thoughtfulness and time.
This is a weird one, but I learned that if I hole myself up in a room with almost nothing else to do, I can accomplish remarkable things as an author. Trekking Toward Tenacity was drafted over the course of eight days at an Air BnB in Portland, Oregon. I was feeling some stress about finding the time to pen this book for a lot of reasons that I won’t get into, and then my wife pitched the idea of doing a very serious writing retreat. Not the kind of retreat where you eat popcorn, reminisce with friends about the good old days, and get a little bit of writing done every day. No, she suggested that I plan to write a minimum of seven hours a day for about a week and see how much I can get accomplished during that type of compressed schedule. Well, Trekking Toward Tenacity is somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 words. That’s the amount of writing work I can get done in eight days of focused energy. I never would have imagined in a million years that such a thing would be possible for me. I know that I’m a quick writer, but this honestly astonished me.
The nature of Trekking Toward Tenacity is such that it lends itself to a very planned approach to writing. It is a verse-by-verse walk through Psalm 139, drawing from the deep theological wells that are found in this beautiful passage and then applying those truths to raising children of all ages to be resilient in their faith and their mental health. Because of the way this book is laid out, staying organized was pretty easy, to be honest. I also had a short outline in place before I ever started writing the book, where I captured all the key concepts I wished to cover in each chapter. Armed with these two things, I was able to fairly quickly execute the plan that I had already established for the book’s content.
Hahaha, more than I can count. Especially when you include e-books. I did downsize about a year ago when we moved into our new house because we lost two bookshelves. That was incredibly painful. If you can believe it, I have repurchased several of the books I got rid of last year. If I were to put a random guess together of the number of books I own between physical books and e-books, I’d say around 1,200.
I am focused for the next year or so on developing myself as a speaker. I believe that the content I have created and released in 2024 can make me a very appealing speaker for a variety of settings. Once I have established a decent track record there, it will be time to go back to the creative hub and find a new book idea. I have several rumbling around in my head right now, but trying to decide which to move forward with is really tricky. Right now, I have two book ideas related to mental health awareness and one devotional idea that I am toying with seriously. Only time will tell if these are publishable ideas, but I have a good feeling about all of them right now.
About the Author
Chris Morris is a certified mental health coach dedicated to promoting understanding of mental health issues within the church. Because of a lifelong struggle with depression and suicidality, Chris became committed to breaking down the stigma surrounding mental health and encouraging others to seek after holistic health.
As a writer and speaker, Chris has shared his personal story and insights with audiences across the country, inspiring many individuals to take control of their own health, break free from poor theological teaching placed upon them, and seek the support they need. He has published several books on mental health, the most recent being Resilient and Redeemed. His work has been featured in a number of media outlets, including CrossWalk, The Mighty, and Fathom Magazine.
Chris is deeply committed to creating a more compassionate and supportive world and church for individuals living with mental health issues. Through his writing and speaking, he is a powerful voice for change and a beacon of hope for those in need.
More from Chris
I literally wrote the book that I wish I had 20 years ago when I was raising my kids. Being a parent today is tumultuous. Especially in a post-COVID world, mental health is a strong contender for the biggest challenges facing our kids. There are plenty of books out there that give us theories on how to raise our kids, and plenty of books that are full of devotionals to walk through with our kids, but shockingly few books dedicated to coaching our kids to have tenacity.
In my experience, tenacity might be the biggest difference maker between seeing our kids move successfully through life and floundering. It’s a given that challenges will come, whether those struggles look like not making the varsity basketball team or something more serious. We simply have to help our kids know how to walk through the missed opportunities and hard times that will inevitably come into their lives.
Trekking Toward Tenacity does just that. We walk through Psalm 139 verse by verse and pull out practical, meaningful tips, tricks, and conversations to have with our kids to help them develop resilience. News flash: there’s no magic potion we can give our kids that gives them bounce-backability. Instead, this is found through conversation about life and God.
My favorite part of this book was writing the age-appropriate activities in the center of each chapter. Instead of only giving you theology or child psychology data without any practical application, Trekking Toward Tenacity includes specific activities you can try out with your kids. There’s obviously no guarantee that these ideas will work, but I can tell you that they worked for other kids. These are pie-in-the-sky concepts, but activities that have been tried in the real world.
If you’re looking for a book that will arm you with skills to coach your kids on how to develop tenacity in their lives, this is the book for you!
Blog Stops
Its Mama Safe, January 16
Book Reviews From an Avid Reader, January 17
A Reader’s Brain, January 18 (Author Interview)
Guild Master, January 19 (Author Interview)
Debbie’s Dusty Deliberations, January 19
Artistic Nobody, January 20 (Author Interview)
Texas Book-aholic, January 21
Aryn the Libraryan, January 22
Back Porch Reads, January 23 (Author Interview)
Locks, Hooks and Books, January 24
Simple Harvest Reads, January 25 (Author Interview)
Mary Hake, January 25
Truth and Grace Homeschool Academy, January 26
Fiction Book Lover, January 27 (Author Interview)
Happily Managing a Household of Boys, January 28
A Modern Day Fairy Tale, January 29 (Author Interview)
Giveaway
To celebrate his tour, Chris is giving away the grand prize of a $75 Amazon gift card, a copy of Trekking Toward Tenacity, and a free Audible copy of my previous book Whispers in the Pews: Voices on Mental Illness in the Church!!
Be sure to comment on the blog stops for extra entries into the giveaway! Click the link below to enter.
I liked the interview.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the interview
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to reading this book. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDelete