brag book – The winged time traveller

In May 2020, I wrote a blog post on brag books.

That post was, for me, a reminder of how I started and where I was. I was dealing with a lot of imposter syndrome, and it felt comforting, albeit sad, to know I was not alone. Several people resonated with the post, wishing they had known about the concept earlier. I did not feel comforted that there was a community of people struggling with the same internal critic; rather, it was that I felt held by them.

However, this post is not about imposter syndrome.

It is about how something began to stir in me since that day. Yes, I had been using a brag book. In fact, let me take a little step back and give a big shoutout to my husband Shalvah Adebayo, who introduced me to brag books in 2019. At the time, we were dating and he had shared his brag book which was a document hosted on Dropbox. I replicated his template to guide me into my performance appraisals.

My brag book helped me walk into performance reviews feeling more confident. My manager at the time, Sarah Stanford, had commended me for always coming prepared and remembering, because according to her, ‘people forget.‘

The moment that changed things

Since that post in 2020, people started reaching out asking me to share my brag book template with them. I was using a spreadsheet for my brags then, so I duplicated and passed along.

From Dropbox to Google Docs to spreadsheets, to creating a folder in my iCloud to add screenshots of wins, feedback I had received, moments I was quietly proud of, to thinking: how do I make this more fluid? It felt all over the place. There was no structure to the entries. It became too tiresome to keep filling in a spreadsheet, and sometimes I did not have the capacity to record against the full STAR framework. What if I just wanted a quick entry?

The screenshots of recognition I received – the Slack messages, the emails, the shout-outs – were getting buried. I found myself trawling through old chats just to save them to my iCloud. I realised I was still doing most of the work manually.

I was happy to hear from friends who had started their own version of a brag book. I started looking for something better than a spreadsheet and a folder, but I could not find anything.

Then the idea began to form. Why don’t you build a proper something?

What I actually wanted

I wanted something that would:

Give me a proper framework for writing entries so they would be useful later
Let me capture screenshots of recognition without losing them
Organise everything in one place, without effort
Still be personal.

I could not find quite the right thing. So I built it.

What my BragBook is

my BragBook is a personal journaling app for capturing your professional wins and achievements.

It has three main parts.

The Brag Book is your journal. You can log entries quickly or use the STAR framework – Situation, Task, Action, Result, and Reflection to give your wins structure that holds up in a performance review or interview. Entries are organised by date, tagged by category, and searchable. You can star the ones that matter most.

The Capture screen is for recognition. Screenshots of compliments, shout-outs on Slack, kind emails from colleagues and clients. You upload the image, the app reads the text automatically, and you can add a brief reflection before saving it.

The Brag Board is where everything comes together. A curated view of your achievements – projects, recognition, skills – that you can export as a PDF or share via a private link. Think of it as a living CV. It’s always up to date. It’s always ready.

my BragBook is built on a simple belief: self-documentation is self-advocacy. If you do not record it, you cannot tell the story. And who is better at telling your story than you?

The Agama lizard

‘Ngwere si n’elu daa, legharia añya si ebe onweghi onye toro ya o kwe n’isi, si ka ya too onwe ya.’
Igbo Proverb

There is an Igbo adage that became the philosophical anchor for this whole thing.

‘The Agama lizard fell from an Iroko tree, looked around, and saw that nobody said a thing. Nobody was watching. It nodded its head and said, “If nobody praises me, I will.“‘

I have discovered that there is a real discomfort around the word ‘brag,’ because it can feel boastful. The point of the app is to reclaim it. You should not be ashamed of the work you have done. This is not about arrogance or performance. my BragBook is rooted in the quiet acknowledgment of self until you are ready to share it. What this means is that the act of acknowledging your progress is necessary, because you were there, you did the work, and you deserve to remember it. You only share when you are ready to share, and there is no way that is shameful. You can share with a recruiter, your manager, or anyone else.

Because we’ve come this far

Building this was not easy.

There were months where it felt too complicated, too ambitious for a side project, too far outside what I thought I was capable of. There were decisions I second-guessed. There were things I built and then rebuilt.

But I kept coming back to that post. I had even added a note in 2023 saying I would be writing another post on how to create a brag book. To everyone who commented, thank you. You gave me a reason to keep going with this.

Who my BragBook is for

my BragBook is for women, men, people of colour, new career starters, and immigrants in professional spaces. People who are statistically more likely to understate their achievements, more likely to face the double bind of self-promotion, and less likely to have advocates in the room doing it for them.

It is for anyone who has ever:

Sat in a performance review struggling to remember what they did all year
Received a compliment they immediately dismissed or forgot
Updated their CV and realised they had no specifics, just vague descriptions of responsibilities
Felt like they had nothing to show, despite knowing, deep down, that they had done a great deal

You have to be your own Agama lizard. my BragBook is the tool that helps you do that consistently.

Where to find it

my BragBook is available on iOS and Android, and on the web at mybragbook.app.

If you start using it, I would genuinely love to know. Please drop a comment below, or find me wherever you find me. You know where I am.

And if you have been keeping a brag book since 2020, however messily, however inconsistently, I hope this gives it a proper home.

Your wins deserve to be remembered.

🤍 Ifunanya

I haven’t always been my biggest cheerleader. I suffer from impostor syndrome, which I’m beginning to learn happens to the best of us. My colleagues would be quick to tell me how much of a hard worker I am.

But the thing is, I don’t give myself enough credit. I hear the voices of the internal critic in my head loud and clear every time I strive to do my best at a job.

The thoughts that run through my mind whenever I’m working on a project with a team make me doubt the effort I give, and often when they need my contribution to an idea, the critic who lives within me guffaws. The only thing that’s helped bolster my confidence before giving a presentation or during my performance review is having my brag book with me.

It doesn’t help, especially during this COVID-19 period when there’s no clue about what the future will look like, or if there’s still anything like tomorrow. I mean, what use is a plan when you’re not sure if you’re going to survive Coronavirus?

Here are some of the things I’ve learnt from using my brag book

I’ve learnt that if the thought runs through your head about whether you deserve a position or a responsibility, then you truly do. Nobody deserves this position better than you, and if there was such a person better than you for that job, why isn’t this person in the seat?
I’ve learnt that it’s okay to toot our own horn. If you don’t, nobody might, and it’d remain like that until somebody does, which might take forever to happen. People forget things, and who’s better at telling your stories than you do?
I’ve learnt to walk into a performance appraisal meeting with my brag book. It’s okay to reach for the note when you’re not feeling worthy of being in the room. More than twice, I looked through my brag book, and it helped me remember something that helped me with getting my confidence back.
I’ve learnt not to wait until I complete a project or until a boss pats me on the back before adding my little wins to my brag book, after all, that’s why we call them ‘Little wins’.

My brag book is a place where I enter every little detail of what made me happy at the moment with my job or something that I thought I couldn’t do, but I did. One could call it a little memoir of wins. Like, the time I wanted to go for a run, but my body was pulling me back. Running for seven minutes made me feel happy with myself, and that’s something for a brag. Once, I took it upon myself to work on developing a tool that would make the project management swifter for the team. Having that initiative and starting was a win for me. I added it to my brag book.

Sometimes, I go through my brag book and marvel at the things I let myself do. I’ve dabbled in a lot of things quite alright, but the truth is, I took the step, and I covered the grounds. Looking back, there’s only so much I could do, and I did those things.

Having a brag book would help so much in a time like this. COVID-19 has made it very easy for the mind to fall into thinking traps that make us doubt ourselves even more. During this period, reading our brag books would go a long way in uplifting our spirits and helping us see why we were chosen for a particular role, and why we deserve every good thing in life.

Do you have a brag book? Could you share what you’ve included in it and how it’s helped you?

Update as of April 2026: Since writing this post, I built an app for it. my BragBook is a personal journaling app for capturing your professional wins, saving recognition, and building a Brag Board that is always ready. Available now on iOS and Android. Read the full story here.