I myself, have been a people-pleaser. I fixed things nobody asked them to fix. I even carried loads that were never mine to carry.
Why? Because I was afraid if I stopped proving myself, I wouldn’t matter anymore.
Travis Mahoney spent twenty years trying to answer that with performance. By his mid twenties, he had enough success to look impressive, and enough emptiness on the inside to know the success didn’t fix anything. Then, on a train platform in Portland, the striving ceased to work. He didn’t have anything left in him.
This books takes you on his personal journey — Valuable by Design
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Mahoney likes to call this Performance-Based Identity. Achievement, perfectionism, people-pleasing, being useful, getting approval — all of it standing in for an answer to “am I enough?”
Who Picks This Book Up
Inside, Mahoney walks through:
The hidden rules keeping your worth on trial
Why proving yourself once felt necessary — and where that started
The line between healthy excellence and fear-driven performance
How to interrupt shame, comparison, and approval-seeking before they take over
Living from the worth God gives instead of chasing the verdict the world keeps handing down
This is part memoir, part biblical grounding, and part working toolkit.
You Were Meant to Live From Your Value, Not For It
That’s pretty much the whole motto for this book and people get it backwards without knowing it, because proving yourself feels responsible. Mahoney’s case is that it’s exhausting instead, and there’s another way to live.
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This book, Valuable by Design, is for anyone who…
That’s it. Anyone and everyone. Honestly. It is the book that I know will help so many of us as we stop striving and start resting in our value by design as God’s masterpieces.
Well done, Travis!!
I was honored to be an advanced reader for this book. Travis shared his struggles with childhood trauma and a performance based identity, and how Jesus rescued him and gives us all a new identity to live from in Christ.
As a former perfectionist, I could relate and highly recommend it! But it is also for anyone tired of living for the world’s so-called identities and needs the pivot of operating out of Jesus’ grace-given identity as a child of God. 😉