What If This Is Good? | The Power of Perspective During Hard Seasons

In this episode of the In Full Power podcast, Jasmine Conway talks about mindset, perspective, negative thoughts, and the stories our minds create about our lives.

Through the African folktale “This Is Good,” personal stories, and simple psychology, Jasmine explores why the brain naturally focuses on fear, worst-case scenarios, rejection, and uncertainty — and how changing your perspective can completely change the way you experience difficult seasons.

This episode covers:

•  how your thoughts shape your life 
•  negativity bias and overthinking 
•  mindset shifts during hard seasons 
•  reframing disappointment and rejection 
•  resilience and emotional growth 
•  self-talk and perspective 
•  finding meaning in painful experiences 
•  how to stop assuming the worst 
•  personal growth through uncertainty and change 

Jasmine also shares her personal practice of “auditing the magic,” where she looks back at painful moments that unexpectedly led to growth, healing, confidence, deeper relationships, and new opportunities.

If you’ve been dealing with uncertainty, heartbreak, grief, anxiety, career changes, rejection, or feeling stuck, this episode will help you rethink the stories your mind is telling you — and remind you that difficult moments are not always the end of the story.

Because sometimes the things we think are ruining our lives are actually redirecting them.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, my powerful people. This is the Info Power Podcast, and I'm your host, Jasmine Conway. Today I want to talk about your mind. Yes, I want to talk about your beautiful, powerful mind. Because your mind is not just some passive participant that's watching your life happen to you. Your mind is actually telling you a story about your life while it's happening. And it's deciding if something is good or bad, if you should be embarrassed or if you should be proud, if something is a success or a failure, if things are falling apart or if they're falling into place. And I think we underestimate just how much these thoughts matter. Because sometimes it's not just about what happened that changes us, it's the story we tell ourselves about what happened. And that's what I want to talk about today. This idea that we get to choose our mindset. And it's not because we can control everything that happens, we can't, but because we do have some choice in the thoughts that we subscribe to about our lives. And I want to start with this story. It's an old African folk tale called This Is Good. And the first time I heard it, I was able to draw so many different parallels to how we sometimes approach our own lives. So the story goes like this: there was once a king, let's call him King Seiku, who had a close friend. Let's call him Rudo. So Ruto had this habit that annoyed a lot of people because no matter what happened, he always said the same thing. This is good. Something great happened, this is good. Something terrible happened, this is good. He always had that same response. So one day, King Seikou and Ruto went hunting, and Ruto loaded King Seikou's rifle for him. But when King Seikou fired the rifle, it actually backfired and blew his thumb off. So King Seikou, he's hysterical. He's screaming, he's in a lot of pain. Everybody is scrambling and panicking. And Ruto looks at him and he says, This is good. And man, this pisses off King Seiku. He's down a thumb, and Ruto has the audacity to say that this is good. So King Seiku, he's like, No, this is not good. There is nothing good about this. And he gets so mad that he throws Ruto in jail. And so some time passes, Rudo is still in jail, and eventually King Seikou goes hunting again. But he goes by himself. And while he's out there, he gets captured by this tribe and they tie him up. They're getting ready to kill him because they're going to sacrifice him. But right before it happens, someone notices that the king is missing a thumb. And because they believed the sacrifice had to be whole with nothing missing, they actually let King Seiku go. So suddenly, King Seiku realizes that the thing that he thought ruined everything actually saved his life. So he rushes back to the jail to apologize to Ruto. And he's like, I was wrong. Losing my thumb is actually what saved my life. And I feel so bad for throwing you in jail. And Ruto says, No, this is good. And the king is like, How could this possibly be good for you? And Ruto says, Because if I wasn't in jail, I would have been hunting with you. If Ruto wasn't in jail, he would have been sacrificed. And I love that story because it shows something that we all do. We decide too early what things mean. If something happens, we immediately label it. It's bad. It's a failure. It's rejection. It's embarrassing. It's another setback. It's proof that nothing is working. But the truth is, most of the time we don't know the full story yet. We're judging the whole movie from one scene. We're creating an entire narrative of our lives based on incomplete information. And I mean, I get why we do it. We want to know: is this good or bad? Did I win or lose? Is this working or not? Am I okay or not? But life does not explain itself in real time. A lot of things only make sense later. And there's actual science behind why our minds tend to go negative first. Humans have something called negativity bias. So basically, your brain is wired to pay more attention to what could go wrong than what could go right. And I mean, that makes sense. Your brain is trying to protect you. Like way back in the day, noticing danger, it mattered more than noticing something beautiful. Like noticing that tiger was more important than noticing the sunset. So your brain, it's not naturally trying to keep you peaceful and hopeful all the time. It's trying to keep you safe, which means that if you don't train your mind, your mind may naturally drift towards fear because of that negativity bias. It might naturally drift towards worst case scenario. What if this doesn't work? What if I'm making the wrong choice? What if I never get what I want? What if this proves something bad about me? But once I learned about this negativity bias, it actually helped me. It actually helped me because I realized that just because my mind goes there, it doesn't mean that I have to stay there. Or just because I think something, it doesn't mean that it's true. Just because I have a thought, it doesn't mean that it's true. Our thoughts are not always factual. Just because my first thought is negative, it doesn't mean that it has to be my final thought. And another thing that's interesting is your brain, it tends to notice more of what you focus on. So let's say, you know, when you're thinking about buying a certain car, suddenly you see this car everywhere. The car was already on the road. People already own this car. It's your attention that changed. And the same thing happens in life. If you keep focusing on rejection, your mind is gonna find more rejection. If you keep focusing on what's missing, your mind will find more of what you lack. If you keep telling yourself that nothing ever works out for you, your mind is gonna start looking for proof that nothing ever works out for you. And that's the thing. We don't just experience pain and disappointment. A lot of times we decide that it's evidence or proof that we're not enough, that life is against us, that nothing is ever gonna change, that we shouldn't have any more hope. But if you start asking, well, what else could be true here? Your mind starts looking at things differently. It starts noticing possibilities and opportunities, support, ideas, lessons. Not because you know your life magically becomes perfect, but because your mind stops only searching for evidence of what is bad. And this is something that I've had to practice in my own life because naturally, my mind, it can absolutely go to fear. It can go to worst-case scenario, it can start building up this whole dramatic storyline off of one piece of information. Like give my mind one confusing text message or one delayed response, one unexpected, expected change, or a closed door. And I literally have to consciously work to not turn it into a catastrophe in my mind. So one thing I started doing is something that I call auditing the magic. And basically, that means I look back at situations in my life that felt painful or disappointing or confusing or unfair, but it later worked out for me in ways that I could have never imagined. Because I realized that my mind was very good at remembering what hurt, but it wasn't always as good at remembering what came from that. So I started naming it. I started naming it and putting pencil to paper and documenting it and auditing these magic things. I got laid off a couple years ago, and at the time it felt scary and it felt unfair and humbling, and not humbling in a good way either. I really didn't know what was next for me. But if that had not happened, I probably would have never moved out of the country by myself for the first time. Being laid off gave me the freedom to experience life in a way that I had dreamt of for a while. And that experience, it changed me. It gave me so much adventure. It gave me really, really deep friendships and confidence and proof that I could take care of myself in places that I had never been before. So some self-assurance came from that. And honestly, I'm a different person today because of that experience or heartbreak. There was there was a breakup in my life that completely broke me open at the time. But that breakup became the reason I wrote and published my first book. And grief, grief is what got me into therapy for the first time. And therapy has taught me so much about myself, things that I probably wouldn't have learned otherwise. Now, if you had asked me in the middle of those moments, is this good? I would have said, absolutely not immediately. No, this is not good. But life, it kept unfolding, and that's the part that we forget. The moment will keep going, the story will keep moving, more will get revealed. And sometimes what looks like loss is actually the catalyst. Sometimes what looks like rejection is actually protection. Sometimes what looks like delay is actually preparation. And sometimes what looks like everything falling apart is your life making room. Now, let me be clear. I'm not saying that everything feels good. I'm not saying you should pretend to be fine. I'm not saying smile through pain or or force yourself to be grateful for things that hurt. No, no, this is not about toxic posity. Some things hurt, some things are unfair, some things are disappointing. There are some losses that you have to grieve. But there's a difference between saying I'm disappointed and saying nothing good can come from this. There's a difference between saying, I don't like where I am right now, and saying that this is proof that I'll never get where I'm going. And I think a lot of us we mix these things together. We feel pain and then we add a story on top of that pain. We don't just say, this didn't work out. We say nothing ever works out for me. We don't just say this person didn't choose me. We say, I'm never chosen. We don't just say this season is hard. We say my life is behind. And that extra story, it matters. It does because your mind can either help you keep going or convince you to stop looking. The the this is good, folks hell, it's not about pretending. It's about staying open. It's about saying, I don't know how this works out yet. I don't know what's gonna happen. I don't know what this is making room for yet. I don't know what I'm gonna learn from this. But I refuse to decide too early that this is the end of the story. I refuse to subscribe to the belief that this cannot work out for me in unexpected and good ways because your mind matters. The way you talk to yourself matters. The story you keep repeating, it matters. And if you are not careful, your life can get smaller because of a story that your mind decided was true. So this week, I want you to try something. Okay. I want you to audit the magic. Yes, I want you to take that beautiful, powerful brain of yours and audit the magic. I want you to look back at your life and ask, what are some things that I thought were terrible at the time that actually worked out for me? Or what did that ending make room for? What did that disappointment teach me? What did that delay protect me from? What did that hard season grow in me? And this is not to erase the pain. It's not to pretend that it was easy, but to remind your mind that you have been here before, you have survived hard things before, you've seen things work out in ways that you couldn't predict before. Maybe this is not the whole story. Maybe this is just one scene, one chapter, one doorway. Some of the most powerful and important moments in your life might show up looking like loss, like delay, like rejection, like uncertainty, like an ending. And if you decide too early about what it means, you might miss what it came to do. So train your mind, train your mind to look for more than what stings. Train it to look for what's possible, train it to ask what if this is still working? What if this is still becoming something? What if this is not the end of the story? And maybe one day you will look back at something that you once cried over, something that you once questioned, something that you thought was bad, and realize, oh, this was good. If this resonated with you, share with another powerful person who needs to hear it. I'm Jasmine Conway. This is the Info Power Podcast. I'll talk to you next time.