The People Behind Hard Empathy
Two voices. One framework. Built for the conversations most people avoid until they break.
Davie Holt
Dad. Entrepreneur. Survivor of his own bad advice. Builder of things that work.
Davie believes empathy should be direct, intentional, and free of fluff. Hard Empathy is the framework he built from decades of leading teams, navigating a divorce, co-parenting across households, and rebuilding a life from the ground up.
Two years ago, Davie hit rock bottom, a marriage that ended, a life that unraveled, and a moment so dark he almost didn’t make it through. What came out of that wreckage wasn’t self-pity. It was a system. A way of showing up to the hardest conversations in life with honesty, accountability, and care, without losing yourself in the process.
Dad & Family
Davie is a dad to David and Elijah and a partner in a blended family with his wonderful partner Rebecca. Family is where Hard Empathy started, learning to show up with honesty and care for the people who matter most.
Entrepreneur
Davie started his first company right out of college and never stopped building. He helps people and businesses tighten operations, adopt practical AI, and ship real results. Direct. Intentional. No fluff.
Want to bring Hard Empathy to your team or relationship?
Siri Shelstad
Co-founder. Writer. Relational thinker. Devoted to one small, scaredy cat.
Siri came to this work through a lifetime of paying close attention to language, to people, to what’s being said and what isn’t. That combination of literary training, relational intelligence, and years of client-facing work is exactly what Hard Empathy needed on the strategy and content side.
Hard Empathy isn’t theory. It’s what happens when someone decides that the skills they built to survive, reading people, managing chaos, staying calm under fire, can be redirected toward truth instead of appeasement.
Her academic background in English, comparative literature, and gender and women’s studies gave her precision with ideas and a sharp eye for how power moves through relationships. Her professional life in insurance and account management gave her something just as useful: an understanding of what happens in real conversations, with real stakes, when people don’t have the right tools.
The Hard Empathy Story
It started as a personal survival mechanism and became a system that works for anyone willing to do the uncomfortable work. It serves two audiences: leaders and managers who need to have high-stakes conversations without destroying trust, and couples who want to repair conflict without losing themselves.
The book is in active draft. The workshops are ready to deploy the moment the audience is ready. The mission is simple: teach people to tell the truth, hold boundaries, and stay connected, in that order. Join the Empathy Cult to be first in →