Overcoming Self-Doubt..Why I Almost Didn't Start

On grief, doubt, and finding out who I really am.

I come from a long line of builders.

Innovators, entrepreneurs, people who saw what didn't exist yet and made it real. In my family, ambition wasn't unusual — it was the water we swam in. One of my uncles is said to hold one of the highest IQs ever recorded. The story I grew up inside was one of brilliance and possibility, generations of people who did remarkable things. For a long time, I assumed that was simply who we were. Who I was.

And then my dad died.

I was twenty-six. And grief did something I never saw coming — it didn't just take him. It took my sense of myself. The confident girl who thought she knew who she was and where she came from suddenly felt lost, scared, and small. The legacy that had always felt like a birthright now felt like a question I wasn't sure I could answer: Who am I, really, without him? Without the certainty I used to have?

That's when the self-doubt arrived — a kind I'd never known before. A quiet voice that asked, every time I dreamed of something bigger: Who do you think you are?

So when the idea for Sōl first came to me — born out of my own hardest moments — that voice was right there waiting. You're not an engineer. You're not a tech founder. You're a grieving single mom still learning to walk again. Who are you to build a company? Just leave it as a nice idea and move on.

I almost did—more than once.

But here's what I slowly learned in the years after losing my dad — the years of grieving, of raising my children, of rebuilding myself piece by piece: the self-doubt was never the truth. It was just the grief talking. The lostness was never permanent. It was a season, not a sentence.

And somewhere in the long, slow work of putting myself back together, the scared twenty-six-year-old became someone else. Someone who has been knocked down — by loss, by injury, by doubt — and gotten back up every single time. Someone who finally understands that the people I come from weren't extraordinary because of some magic in the blood. They were extraordinary because they refused to quit. And that — that I have. That was always mine.

I don't believe in luck or birthright anymore. I believe in something I had to earn the hard way: that anything is possible with enough hard work and enough passion. I'm living proof. Because the woman building Sōl today is not the lost girl I was at twenty-six. She's who that girl became because of everything that tried to break her.

So, I started—doubt and all. I filed the patent with shaking hands. I built the brand. I'm building the product. Not because the fear ever fully went away — but because I finally decided it didn't get to make my decisions anymore.

If you've ever felt lost — if grief or fear or doubt ever made you forget who you are — I want you to know what I had to learn the slow way: you are not the voice that doubts you. You are the one who keeps going anyway.

Sōl was born from that truth. And I'm just getting started.

Your body knows the storm. Sōl brings the calm.

Join our founding members at solmovement.co

— Kristin, Founder of Sōl

The man who taught me where I came from — and whose loss taught me who I really am.