Our Story – how an online test anxiety and study skills program came to be

Like many others, we have first-hand experienced not only the pain and stress of worries, but also the joy of truly overcoming your fears. With over twenty years of helping people with all sorts of anxiety issues, we call it our “business for good” – the pleasure of helping others put anxiety in its place. This is our brief story.

Our story

My wife (Janet Summers) and I (Reed Smith) have been specializing in anxiety disorders in our private counseling practice for some two decades now. We have loved the feeling of reward, helping students and professionals overcome their fears and move forward with their lives. Like all people in the helping professions, we also have our personal reasons for our “professional interests”. We both have suffered the intense fear, humiliation and deep discouragement resulting from nasty afflictions like anxiety disorders, and experienced the joy of coming through and seeing our lives open up and get bigger. We have first hand learned to appreciate what “overcoming anxiety” truly means. Dr. David Burns calls anxiety  “the great con” – like the grand foreboding Wizard of Oz, anxiety puts on a big show, while hiding behind a curtain of smokes and mirrors. In truth, years of research shows it’s mechanics are surprisingly simple and can often be countered with a few essential skills. Pulling down the proverbial curtain can be dramatically helpful in overcoming your fears. After working with many students and professionals over the years, we have wanted to make this information both more available and affordable. And so, five years ago, we opened up the first Word document and began designing what would today become WisdomOfLearning.com – an online program for overcoming test-taking anxiety. At first, even though the use of the  internet seemed ideal, we were skeptical if an online-based program could be effective enough to meet our hopes. However, our ongoing research about the different possibilities was very encouraging, and even a little humbling – other internet interventions of anxiety were showing surprising success in the various studies, sometime even more effective than well trained professionals in  face-to-face meetings. Assuaging our anxiety about the program (pun not intended!), we finally managed to complete the website with interactive, feedback-driven and multi-media rich functionality. We are proud to present to you the finished product, and eager to hear your thoughts. We have been in your shoes, so let us help you pull down the curtain behind your anxiety and see the truth for yourself!

A word of caution

As much as we enjoy helping people directly, WisdomOfLearning.com is not a replacement for real person-to-person help with a professional. We are just offering the education and skills that we have found most effective in reducing suffering while improving performance quality and joy in the lives of many of our clients in the past two decades. Please keep in mind that, sometimes, there are other reasons for the feeling of anxiety you may be experiencing, such as an underlying medical condition or a more unusual mental health problem. That is why the first step is to check with your doctor and rule these out. Confirming that your fears stem from study and test-related stress will let you focus on getting the right kind of help and making the best use of our program. Test anxiety is something you can often get rapid help with, once you know what is causing your challenges!