The Old Baseline Is Gone So Now What

The scariest part of a major life change is rarely the moment it happens. It’s what comes after, when the paperwork is signed, the job ends, the house is quiet, or the future you counted on vanishes and you’re left staring into the distance thinking, “now what?” I’m Danny DeJesus, and I’m naming that space for what it is: a transition, not a personal failure.

In this episode, we break down a distinction that instantly changes how you may read your own story: an event is a date on the calendar, but a transition is a process that unfolds over time. That process can take weeks, months, even years, and it comes with roller-coaster emotions, identity shifts, and the temptation to confuse “moving forward” with trying to get the old version of life back. We talk about divorce recovery, career change, moving to a new city, parenting shifts, and retirement as real-world examples of how your baseline gets disrupted and why “getting back to normal” can keep you stuck.

Then we pivot to what actually helps: trading recovery for creation. When the old baseline is gone, the goal becomes building a new routine, a new identity, and new expectations that fit your current reality. I also introduce the C2R2E transition framework (collapse, confrontation, realignment, reclamation, elevation) that we’ll unpack over a 16-week series, plus three reflection questions you can use today to get traction.

If this hits home, subscribe for the next part, share it with someone in a season of change, and leave a review so more people can find the support they didn’t know they needed. What’s the biggest transition you’re facing right now?

Transcript

The “Now What” Moment

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Have you ever sat with yourself and stared just out into the distance, out into space, and you asked yourself just one question, one very introspective question, and that is this question of now what? And it's not necessarily because you don't know where you're going per se, or that you don't have any options, or how hard you need to work, and not because you necessarily giving up on yourself or life per se. But what you have noticed is that something in your life has changed and that you're going through some sort of transitionary period. And here's the thing: you're potentially not even entirely sure who you're supposed to be on the other side of that change. Perhaps you're in a situation right now where a marriage or a relationship just ended for you. Perhaps maybe you're going through a career or job transition where you spent years building your identity around whatever it would, whatever it was that you were doing. And for those parents out there, maybe you have a child now or a couple children that are now growing up and transitioning themselves, and now they don't need you as as much as they once did. You know, maybe you went through a move and you're starting over in a new city and a new place that you've never been before, or you're contemplating about a move. Or perhaps, you know, maybe a future you were counting on that you thought was going to happen for you all of a sudden was uprooted from you, like almost overnight, in a split second, all disappeared. So whatever it is, whatever life now looks like for you, you know that it's different than before. And if you've ever been through something where you know that things are changing, you know, you you probably noticed a few things. You know, one in particular is that the event itself that has triggered change and transition, it happened. But that struggle, that struggle is not necessarily the event itself, but rather it's that that struggle is only beginning. And that is where I think this journey to reaching your next baseline, I think, starts to actually begin.

Welcome To The Next Baseline

SPEAKER_01 2:45

So with that, I want to welcome you back to another episode of the next baseline. I am your podcast host, Danny DeJesus. And as always, this podcast is where we explore one central question, one key question. And that is, what do we build now in order to reach our next baseline? Because sooner or later, every one of us as human beings is going to experience a moment when life stops looking the way that we expected it to look like. And when that happens, nobody hands us a blueprint to how to get through this through through this change. No one is going to tell us, for example, how to rebuild after a divorce, or how to navigate a career change, or how to adjust when our children see us differently and need us, needs us differently. Or even how to move forward when a future that we spent years planning and investing in all of a sudden disappears. And then most of us are then left trying to figure out anything. You know, we're we're trying to figure this thing as we go. It's almost like trying to build a car as you're trying to drive

Introducing The C2R2E Framework

SPEAKER_01 3:58

it. And that is what this series that I'm about to introduce is going to be about. So we're looking over the next 16 weeks here. So over the next 16 weeks, we're going to have 16 episodes where we're going to be exploring a methodology that I've developed that if this is the first time you're tuning into this podcast, I call this C2R2E. And what C2R2E is, it stands for collapse, confrontation, realignment, reclamation, and elevation. And what this is, what C2R2E is, it's a framework for understanding how people move through life's biggest transitions. So think of it in terms of life transition management. But before we talk about the framework, you know, I think we need to answer a more important question. Why do transitions feel so hard and so difficult in the first place? Because when I look back and think about the biggest transitions in my own life, and I've been through many. I'm 39 years old, and I've been active duty for almost my whole adult life since 2005, when I turned 18. So my late teen years and all of my adult life, I spent my time in the military, been through divorces myself, child custody battles, been lived in different areas. And so, with that, as I look back at my own life in terms of transitions, and then also at the transitions that I've watched other people having to navigate, you know, I noticed, I've noticed some interesting things. And

Why Transitions Feel So Hard

SPEAKER_01 5:50

one of the things I've noticed is that I think most people, when it comes down to change and transition, I think most people think that they're actually struggling with the event. And my perspective at this point, as I begin to think about change and transition, I don't think the struggle itself is the event that we encounter when change and transition happens. Rather, I think people struggle with what exactly the event itself has changed and is about to change. And so there's a difference in that. For example, a divorce, the the divorce itself, when your your spouse goes, I want a divorce, that's an event. Okay. Now learning how to build a life after divorce, that is the transition. Changing careers, for example, that's an event. Figuring out who you are after spending maybe 15 or 20 years doing something else, that's a transition. So, for example, you know, I'm coming up on my 21st year in the military, and I'm um going through the process of thinking about retirement. And so the act of retirement, that's just the event itself, who I become after and how long it takes me. That is a transitionary period. I would say that is more scarier than the act or the event of retirement. Also, you know, when we move to a new city, a new place, somewhere unfamiliar, that's an event. And creating sense of belonging, you know, plugging yourself into a community, that that in itself is a transition. The here's the thing when we think about events versus transitions, the event itself happens on a particular date and time in your life. But the transition itself unfolds over time. And that time could be weeks, months, sometimes even years. So once I started seeing that distinction, I think for me, a lot of things, I just started seeing things differently. Because events, when I think about them, they can happen very, very fast. Here's the thing: the paperwork, especially for divorce, that's going to get signed very quickly. The moving truck leaves, the old child, the old job that you have, that you had all of a sudden ends. A new chapter begins. But the internal adjustment, the change that has to take place over a period of time, that is going to feel a lot slower. And sometimes much slower than we even anticipate. And I think this is where people tend to get blindsided or they underestimate this process. Because we expect the event itself that we go through and encounter, you know, to be difficult. And here's the thing I'm not downplaying the events of our lives, especially those difficult moments, because a lot of times those can be a gut punch. But that pales in comparison to the transition that that takes place and the feelings and the ups and downs and the roller coaster feelings that takes a while to get through. And so we don't, I think sometimes when we think about the the events of our lives that we encounter, that we don't expect the transition to take as long as it does. And so six months can go by, a year can go by, and sometimes even longer than that. And we start asking ourselves sometimes in the process of this transition, sometimes we ask ourselves, why are we still thinking about this? Why are we still struggling? Why can't we move on? And those questions can be frustrating because they make, they make it sound like we're we're failing at something when we're not, or that we're we're not passing some test that we thought we're supposed to pass as if there is a correct amount of time to adjust at following a major life change or a major event. And, you know, we we don't struggle through these things because I think we're weak people or because we're broken. I mean, we can feel broken for sure. We can feel weak weak at times. You know, we we what we're trying to do, especially in the moment when an event happens, we're trying to solve a problem for ourselves. You know, and sometimes moving forward is very, very difficult. Because a lot of times through the process of trying to move forward, a lot of times I think we get confused moving forward with wanting the old version of your life back. We want things to feel normal versus embracing a new normal. We want life to make sense versus embracing the shift that's happening to make new meaning that will then make new sense. We want to go back to a point in time where things just fit the way we thought they needed to fit. We want things to go back to feeling routine and predictable. And yes, that's very

Accepting A New Baseline

SPEAKER_01 11:30

understandable. But we all have to eventually embrace what I call a new baseline. You know, a baseline in of itself. It's something where something tends to feel familiar. A baseline could be based on a routine, it can be based surrounded uh around your responsibilities, your relationships, the role that you see yourself. And then generally speaking, you you you know what tomorrow is going to bring and what it's going to look like. But then all of a sudden something changes and something disappears and and something is just not sitting right anymore. And suddenly that baseline looks start starts to look very unclear and very cloudy. And not because you wanted it to, and not because you necessarily chose to, although in some cases, sometimes we do choose, deliberately choose things. But what life has taught me is that any new baseline that have I have usually reached hasn't become hasn't not been because I chose it. Okay. But really because life moved in some way, sometimes and a lot of times in a way I was never prepared for. And when life moves, most of us as human beings, we tend to do the same thing. We try to restore what was, we try to recreate what was, we try to get back to what was. And for a while, you know, that work towards getting back to what we were familiar with. It may feel like work and progress and forward movement, but realistically speaking, you know, that version of life is gone for us. You know, it's it's not damaged, it's not temporarily, temporarily unavailable. That version of life is gone. It's gone, it's dead, it's not coming back. And I think that's going to be one of the hardest truths that people face during a life transition following an event. Because if the old baseline is gone, then the goal can't ever be about getting back to what was. The goal has to become something else. And that is where I believe, where I feel, you know, this question started following me around. Because I saw it a lot in different coaching conversations that I've had, or whether I I've been through it as I was navigating divorce or watching other people navigating divorce, people going through career changes and transitions, you know, and I saw a lot of this even in myself, as I mentioned. And the question is this simple. What if people are not stuck because they don't know how to move forward? But rather, what if they're stuck because they're still trying to to move backwards to reclaim something that is no longer reclaimable? Because you know, one of the things that I think during a transition we need to embrace is is where our focus is. We have to focus away from recovery, and we have to be able to move towards a mindset of creation. We were as human beings, we are created to create. Okay, we are creative beings, all right. You know, we need to embrace the fact when we go through these transitionary moments in our lives, we need to move away from what was lost, from what no longer exists, and we need to move towards now what comes next, away from getting back and moving towards building forward. And and and perhaps for you, for me, that's where the the real work of a transition begins. Not recreating the life that you had, but building the life that now fits the reality that you're now living in. And that's going to be a new routine, potentially a new identity, a new set of expectations, a new direction,

From Recovery To Creation

SPEAKER_01 15:40

a new baseline. So when I start looking at transitions through that lens, you know, there's other things that I noticed too, is that people who eventually move forward, the people that succeeded that I seen succeeding in their lives, to include some of the things I've seen within myself, they weren't doing things that that were random. You know, there was a pattern, you know, not a perfect or identical pattern, but there was one that I would say that was definitely recognizable. And certain struggles repeated, certain breakthroughs showed up repeatedly, and certain obstacles also showed up repeatedly. And over time, that pattern is what eventually birthed what I now call C2R2E. And so, in these upcoming several weeks, over the course of several episodes, we're going to be unpacking this framework together. So, but before we do that, I want to leave you with one possibility. Perhaps you're not really failing. And you're not behind, and you're not broken. But perhaps really what you're experiencing within yourself, and to give you just a different perspective on how to see what you're going through is that maybe you're in the middle of a transition. And if that's true, then the question should not be, how do I get back? But perhaps the question, the new question you need to embrace for yourself is what do I now build to reach my my next baseline?

Three Reflection Questions

SPEAKER_01 17:12

So before we close this episode, I like I would like for you to take some time and reflect on three questions that I'm going to give you. And the first question is what's the biggest transition that you're facing right now? The second question is, what part of your old life are you still trying to hold on to? And then the last question is what would happen if you stopped focusing on getting back to what you had and instead start focusing on now what comes next. And here's what I want you to do. Pause this if you need to. Sit with those questions for a bit, write some notes, think about what comes to mind, and write those down. Because here's the thing, you might be surprised by those answers that you're going to find, and you're going to have a conversation with you. And the only person you need to be honest with is yourself. And if there's one thing I hope you can take away from today's episode, it's going to be this. The event that you're experiencing or have experienced, that event has changed your circumstances. And that transition that you're about to experience or experiencing is actively changing you. And what I want to say is those are not the same thing. Remember, an event is a date, a transition is a process.

Key Distinction And Next Episode

SPEAKER_01 18:43

So with that, I'm Danny De Jesus, and this has been another episode of the next baseline. The links across the Elevatus ecosystem are going to be in the description of this episode. And so before I go, you know, just want to give you a quick sneak peek to the next episode. And what we're going to do on the following episode is we're going to dive in even deeper and we're going to explore why some people seem to go through change pretty well while others remain stuck. And how that ultimately led that process where where how people go through change while others remain stuck, how how that ultimately led to the development of the C2R2E framework. So with that, until then, what I want you to keep asking is a central question What do you build now to reach your next baseline? Take care.