Create Your Very Own Personal Creds Deck

I have always found working in the marketing and agency world a fantastic choice of occupation.

Endless career options, bags of innovation and creativity, and most of all, some of the most colourful people on the planet to work with.

But it’s not all roses and sunshine. Oftentimes times, it can be stressful, too. Like when a campaign doesn’t do as well as you hoped, or you lose a client at your agency, or you’re struggling to hit payroll.

You might even get fired, which has only ever happened to me once. The news was delivered over the phone while I was on the school run. I was a bit distracted that day, dropping my son off at the school gate.

When the chips are down, it can help to look back at your achievements. At agencies, we have creds decks that show off what we’ve achieved. Why not build your own creds deck or a brag file, as I’ve seen it called?

I’ve had cause to add to my brag file recently with the feedback I received on my delivery of a digital marketing optimisation workshop:

“Andy was professional and fun to spend my two Fridays with. I wish I had him as my tutor for the first module, and I hope to have him for my last module.

He was clear on what needed to be done, ready to respond to any of my questions, gave a clear idea of how much time (on average) any assessor would have to check my work, took the time to go through our assignment brief over and over again until we were happy with it. He also gave some real examples from marketing that I could relate to and tailored his responses to what I was planning to write about.  

I thought I’d mention that to you as he did a great job, and it’s nice to see someone passionate who cares about how we do in terms of the assignment. He was my first tutor who asked me to stay in touch and let him know how it went. I think your organisation is lucky to have someone like that on board.”

As you might imagine, I was pretty happy with this feedback. The first thing I did (after sharing it with my wife) was to save it into my personal brag file or personal creds deck. The next time I take a career stumble, I can easily find it and give my bruised ego a stroke.

How do you keep a record of the feedback you receive? Have you got a personal creds deck or brag file?

To balance this great feedback out, I also received a comment on my podcast this week…

I love your podcast, Andy. I always listen to it at night as it helps me go to sleep.

I genuinely believe this was meant to be positive feedback.

It made me laugh; in some ways, it’s positive, but I’m not looking to send people off into dreamland with my marketing podcast.

I must try to inject some more energy into the next episodes.