THE PRACTICE BEHIND THE NAME
About
"Our professional life is changing faster than the stories we use to explain it."
Work is changing in ways that reward speed and automation while quietly demanding more human judgment, creativity, and responsibility.
At the same time, there has never been more opportunity to shape your own direction. To step beyond mediocrity. To elevate your work, your voice, and the way you contribute — not by competing with machines, but by leaning into what makes you human.
In the decade ahead, owning your story will be less about keeping up, and more about redefining what it means to work and live well. It will be about curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, and relationship-building, grounded in congruence between who you are, what you do, and how you show up.
"OYS works with high-agency founders and visionary experts who want to live and work as authors of their own direction — not as passengers of systems, trends, or expectations."
Our vision is a world where experts, leaders and founders take responsibility for how they think, decide, and contribute — and where work becomes a meaningful expression of who they are, not a role they outgrow or perform.
Over the years, Own Your Story has been shaped through deep work with founders, experts, and leaders navigating visibility, responsibility, and long-term relevance. The practice has evolved through real decisions, real transitions, and real stakes — not theory alone.
While much of this work happens in focused programs, Own Your Story also lives beyond them: in keynotes, advisory work, writing, and collaborations with organisations that want to strengthen thinking, narrative, and human leadership.
At the heart of Own Your Story sits a simple but demanding practice: to O.W.N® your story by developing ownership, wisdom, and narrative in how you live and work.
Ownership
Full responsibility for your direction, your decisions, and how you are known.
Wisdom
Judgment accumulated across phases — the most durable part of what you build.
Narrative
A coherent, durable story that travels with you — across reinventions, across decades.
Why Own Your Story exists
“A life achievement is not built in a single chapter. It is authored across all of them.”
Read: What Does Owning Your Story Mean? →"Owning Your Story is not tied to a single role, title, or outcome."
The O.W.N® practice can be applied across different domains of life and work — wherever people need to take responsibility for direction, meaning, and contribution.
Today, OYS applies this practice primarily to public authority. The work focuses on how experts, founders, and leaders develop authority that is coherent, durable, and grounded in who they are — not dependent on constant visibility, performance, or borrowed credibility.
Other domains, such as critical thinking, career and portfolio development, follow the same foundation and are in development.
A small company, by design
OYS is intentionally built as a small, focused company.
Not to limit its reach, but to protect quality, coherence, and human judgment as the work scales. We use technology and AI where they meaningfully support research, preparation, and execution — allowing the work to move faster without becoming automated or impersonal.
By keeping the company compact and method-led, Own Your Story can operate across borders and contexts without losing control, clarity, or human connection.
Scale follows clarity — not the other way around.
Authority Architect & Founder
ianka fleerackers
For over three decades, ianka built what is now called a portfolio career — long before the word existed. Nominated for Best Actress in theatre. Roles in television series that drew over a million weekly viewers in a country of eleven million — including an iconic role in Kulderzipken, a series rebroadcast for thirty years. A role in the Oscar-nominated film Iedereen Beroemd. Presenter on radio and television. Columnist. Journalist. Author of nine books. Publisher. She understood storytelling from the inside, across every medium that carries it.
She walked away from a red carpet life to fully live that portfolio — on her own terms, by her own design, as an entrepreneur. That decision became the philosophical seed of Own Your Story.
The O.W.N® practice was not theorised from the outside. It was lived first.
Today, inside the practice, ianka works as an Authority Architect — the role she defined for the structural work of designing the foundation of a professional's public authority, upstream of branding, coaching and communications.
Read the full story: What Does Owning Your Story Mean?
→ iankafleerackers.comReady to see where you fit?