K. Todd Houston

K. Todd Houston, Ph.D., is a Professor of Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Akron (Akron, OH USA), Listening & Spoken Language Specialist (LSLS), Certified Auditory-Verbal Therapist (Cert. AVT), Strategic Life Coach, and consultant whose career has been devoted to a single question: how do helping professionals do their best work and stay in it?

That question began in the clinical world. With more than three decades of experience spanning early intervention, school-based practice, university training programs, and private practice, Houston built a reputation as a thought leader at the frontier of how clinicians and educators deliver services. His first book with Plural Publishing, Telepractice in Speech-Language Pathology (2014), was among the first comprehensive professional texts on technology-mediated service delivery in the field — arriving just as telepractice was beginning to transform how SLPs reached the patients who needed them most.

A year later, he co-edited Assessing Listening and Spoken Language in Children with Hearing Loss (2015) with Tamala S. Bradham — a clinical reference for the audiologists, speech-language pathologists, and early interventionists working with one of the most complex pediatric populations in either profession. In 2016, he extended the telepractice conversation across disciplines, co-editing Telepractice in Audiology with Emma Rushbrooke — establishing him as one of the few professionals writing authoritatively at the intersection of audiology and speech-language pathology and at the frontier of how both fields were being transformed by technology.

Throughout those years of writing about service delivery, something else was becoming clear. The professionals he was training, writing for, and consulting with were not just trying to master new methods. They were exhausted. Overextended. Running on default scripts that sounded like dedication but functioned like erosion. The question he had been asking about how helping professionals do their work began to shift toward a more urgent one: how do they survive doing it — and not just survive, but stay genuinely effective, boundaried, and present across a full career?

Tiny Scripts, Big Shifts: How Clinicians & Educators Talk Themselves Out of Burnout is his answer. Drawing on cognitive behavioral therapy, self-talk research, motivational interviewing, mindset science, and more than three decades of clinical and professional development experience, Houston presents the SOS Model and Micro-Script Method — a practical, evidence-informed framework for changing the sentences that drive professional burnout, one interaction at a time. This is not a book about surviving the field. It is a book about building a professional life that is as carefully designed as the clinical practices it supports.

Houston is the founder of Sunburst Coaching & Consulting, LLC, where he works with helping professionals and organizations through individual coaching, group programs, organizational consulting, and professional development. He is based in Medina, Ohio, and works with clients across the United States.