There's a moment in many coaching engagements where I ask a leader a simple question.

"What's your impact in this role?"

And they go quiet.

Not the thoughtful kind of quiet. The blank kind. The kind where someone who runs a team of thirty, who makes decisions that ripple through an entire org, suddenly can't locate a single sentence about their own impact.

They'll tell me about their team's wins. Their direct report's promotion. The fire they put out for someone else last Tuesday. Ask them what THEY did? Silence. Or worse, "I mean, I just... did my job."

This isn't false modesty. And it's not a confidence problem, no matter how many leadership books tell you it is. It's a gap between how capable you are and how much you actually track it. Nobody taught you to notice your own footprint while you were making it.

So I'll have you build a brag document. Not as homework you'll forget about, but as a weekly reminder - 15 minutes, scheduled in your calendar, usually a Friday. A pause to reflect and capture what you enjoy doing, and what you might not. Awareness is always the first step. Choice is the second.

Here's what it's not: a highlight reel you dust off once a year when someone tells you to fill out a self-assessment.

Here's what it is: a running record. What moved. What you said no to, and why. What quietly worked that no one - including you - stopped to name.

I ask clients three questions to start:

• What did you do this week that only you could have done?

• Where did you say no — to a project, a meeting, a version of yourself — and what did that protect?

• What's one thing that worked that you almost didn't mention, because it felt too small to count?

That third question is usually where it breaks open. The "small" thing is never small. It's just the thing you've been doing so long you stopped seeing it as a skill.

Your brain is wired to scan for what's missing, not what's working — that's survival, not a character flaw. Which means unless you deliberately track your own impact, you will lose sight of it. Every time. Not because you're bad at your job. Because your job is to see everyone else's.

And once you're in the habit, it stops being just yours. It becomes a bridge - a way to communicate to your own direct reports what you're actually working on, and a way to invite them to start naming their own wins before you have to ask.

This is the piece I keep coming back to with leaders: you can't advocate for a version of yourself you haven't written down. You can't ask for the promotion, the raise, the next thing, off a memory that conveniently keeps discounting itself. (And when that self-review rolls around? You'll already have the receipts.)

So we write it down. Not to brag. To remember.

Want the template I use with clients? Just fill out the form above and a fillable pdf will be sent to you.