Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Come on a ride along with a Veteran Homicide Detective as the twists and turns of the job suddenly end his career and nearly his life; discover how something wonderful is born out of the Darkness. Embark on the journey from helping people on their worst days, to bringing life, excitement and smiles on their best days.
Murders to Music: Crime Scene to Music Scene (Streamline Events and Entertainment)
Starting Over: The Transition, Overcoming Obstacles and Finding a New You
The phone rang at 6 a.m., and the question hit hard: how do you move from a life of sirens, missions, and split-second decisions into a world of meetings, sales terms, and quiet halls without losing yourself? We pull back the curtain on that transition, naming the identity crash, the respect gap, and the unsettling silence that follows when the uniform comes off.
I share the first day shock—new walls, new language, and a body wired for urgency—then unpack how I stopped grading myself on adrenaline and started measuring impact by what actually matters now: health, family stability, and meaningful relationships. We dig into transferable skills that got me hired—integrity, crisis judgment, reading people—and why those “intangibles” are the most valuable assets in the civilian market. If you’ve ever thought, “If it’s slower, is it less important,” this conversation reframes the entire game.
We also get practical about pace and communication. High-stakes culture rewarded blunt speed; civilian teams thrive on collaboration and careful cadence. I explain how slowing down created more awareness, better results, and fewer fires. We set simple barometers to track progress—introducing yourself without the old title, feeling less frustrated week over week, stacking small wins—and talk honestly about imperfect onboarding, mentorship, and patience. Along the way, we replace comparison with growth and urgency with intention, so your mission doesn’t vanish; it evolves.
If you’re crossing from law enforcement, military, or emergency services into civilian life—or managing someone who is—this is a map for the mental and emotional terrain ahead. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review telling us the one mindset shift you’re committing to this week.
Gift For You!!! Murders to Music will be releasing "SNAPSHOTS" periodcally to keep you entertained throughout the week! Snapshots will be short, concise bonus episodes containing funny stories, tid bits of brilliance and magical moments!!! Give them a listen and keep up on the tea!
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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Murders to Music Podcast. My name is Aaron. I'm your host, and thank you guys so much for coming back. I really, really appreciate you sticking around, listening to this show, downloading, sharing it with your friends. So this week I got a phone call at 6 a.m. from a friend of mine, and he says, Hey, I've got a buddy. And my buddy came out of the military, came out of Border Patrol, and is going into the civilian world. But he's having a hard time making the adjustment or even considering making that adjustment. And he says, Aaron, I know that when you came out, you faced some difficulties, you had some challenges and struggles. And what did you do to get over that mental hurdle from where you were to where you found yourself? You know, and I spent the next 15, 20 minutes talking to my friend about this, explaining my side of the story, how I came through it, the hurdles, the obstacles, the things I had overcome. And it got me to thinking, I have jumped all around this topic of conversation in this podcast, but I haven't hit it head on. So if you are considering a career change, if you have made a career change and you're finding yourself in that unknown, uncharted territory, that rough water, turbulent seas, let me take some of the guesswork out of that for you. So that is exactly what I want to talk about tonight. Let's get into it. So when I came out of law enforcement, I came out of a type A highly driven, motivating career that focused on saving lives and things that really impacted in air quotes the world. And that is the lifestyle and the mentality that I was involved in for such a long period of time. Now, the first day out and the first day, January 3rd of 2023, is the first day that I found myself sitting behind a desk that wasn't my police officer's desk. And in that moment, I'm looking around. I don't recognize the walls around me. I don't recognize what's on the computer in front of me. I'm hearing language that I don't understand. There's other, I mean, it's like they're speaking Greek and they're talking about these things, these sales things, these things in their world. And for me, it was an uncomfortable situation. Uncomfortable so much to the point my anxiety was through the roof. My leg is going 100 miles an hour and I'm questioning my reality. And can't I just go back to what I was doing before? I mean, it probably wasn't that bad, right? I mean, the doctors say I can't, but maybe I can just give it a shot. That is where I spent a lot of my time, and that is what I want to talk to you about. So, what do you do when the thing that you used to be isn't your world anymore? You notice I said used to be, not used to do, because we as men find our identities in our career. Whatever that career may be, that's where we find our identities and our purpose. What happens when what we used to be isn't our world anymore? Well, we find ourselves lost. We find ourselves lost at sea. We find ourselves on this open ocean not knowing where to go, and literally allowing the waves just to take us from point A to point B, and we're adrift and afloat. Now, we're not used to living that way. I wasn't. Maybe you're not. No matter what career you're in, I wasn't used to living that way. I was used to controlling the narrative, putting myself on the trajectory and succeeding. That's what I got used to doing. So for my buddy's friend who was military, type A driven, mission-oriented, border patrol, type A mission-oriented, driven, purpose-driven, impacting the United States of America. Now he finds himself coming out of that, thinking about going into a sales role or something in the civilian world. Well, that loss of identity doesn't only come with the loss of identity, but we have gained a level of respect in whatever world we were in. And oftentimes people talk about the identity crisis, but what is parallel to that and almost intertwined with that is the role-based respect that we once had. I was respected for the professional that I was in my world, living my identity. Now I find myself in a world where I have no respect. And it's not that I have no respect because it's a negative thing or they're looking down upon me. It's that I have no respect because I can't even spell whatever the job is that I'm working at. I don't know the ins and the outs. I can't find the break room or the snack drawer or the water cooler. That is the world that I'm in. That is putting myself back into that elementary school role, back into that kindergarten role where I don't know anything. And all I do is I look around for people to glom onto that I could maybe mirror or learn something or be a sponge and soak something up, that information, that knowledge that's out there. So hopefully I can start to piece my way through this thing called my new life and my new world. That is where I found myself. And I think that I'm not alone in that. I believe that other people who are experiencing this transition, especially from a type A career, law enforcement, military, firefighters, paramedic, fighter jet, whatever it may be, a highly specialized career into something that might on the forefront be seen as more mundane. But if it is seen as more mundane, is that necessarily a bad thing? And I I don't know that it is. I think that it could actually be good. So when we go from making high-stakes decisions and having high-stake tasks that feel basic to us, when we pull ourselves out of that world and we put ourselves into some other position, for example, sales in my case, I was pointless. Like I didn't have a purpose or a sense of identity, or I didn't have a mission to complete. Well, I think that is a common emotional and psychological hurdle that a lot of people feel or experience during that transition. I felt like I was behind. I felt like I was late to the game. I felt like I didn't have anything to offer or couldn't be a part of a conversation. What I didn't recognize is they hired me for who I was, knowing that I didn't have a whole lot to bring to the table when it came to the specifics of the new career. What I did have was a lot of skills and attributes that I could bring to that table, that honesty, integrity. And I've mentioned this stuff in previous podcasts. But this time I want to change the focus. I want to look at it from a different filter and hit this thing head on. You see, I made the mistake of believing that my job, because it was less urgent, less emergent, that it was less important. And I felt that way for a long time, for a couple of years, literally. And slowly I started to allow that feeling to fade away. But it was in the background. It was like, man, I'm what I'm doing is less important than what I did. And I was in that, that terrible place, that comparison game from yesterday to today. And I started feeling the guilt. Why do I miss the stress so much? Why do I miss this high-pace lifestyle that I used to be in? And I knew that was going to kill me. That lifestyle is literally what nearly put me in my grave. Yet I miss that. And what I'm doing today is so slow. That's the way that I felt. Now I can tell you, let's fast forward to the end. I am totally blessed to be where I am and I love it. So you can get there. But the transition between where you were and where you're going, that transition is going to be a challenge or difficult because it your mind isn't going to operate and function the same way that it used to. Now, we are used to working not alone in these different career fields, these high stress career fields. Usually we're surrounded by a team or a tribe of people and we're used to having people at our backs and supporting us and supporting our mission. And oftentimes when we come out into the real world or the civilian world, we may feel like we're at this alone or we don't know what our peers are. And sometimes if you get into a sales role or something where it's cutthroat or it's competitive or there's commission based, you may find that environment where you find yourself working as a lone ranger. But in reality, a lot of the careers that we find ourselves going into, whether it's an investigative role or insurance role or sales role or whatever it may be, we find that if we look around, we have a team that wants to support us, especially in a smaller company and uh by smaller 45, 50 people or less, where it's more of a family environment and everybody knows everybody, they hired you not for your good looks, but they hired you for your skill set and they want to see you succeed. The point I'm making, you can get in your own way and build reasons and excuses why this environment may not fit you or it may not work or you may not succeed. But once you get out of your way, then you can find your new value. And you have to find your new value by reframing it. You have those superpowers that they hired you for, whether it was discipline or crisis management or situational awareness, decision making under pressure, whatever it was, learning how to read people, learning how to interview people, learning how to speak to people. Those are some of the ones that they hired me for. I didn't know anything about commercial plumbing when they hired me. I didn't even know what I didn't know. I didn't know how deep to dig. And frankly, I still don't. I had a two and a half hour conversation with my boss today, and we spoke about the next steps in professional development. And there were things that came to the table that were like, man, this is hiding right in front of me. This is in plain sight. And I didn't even know it. I couldn't even think about it because I didn't know what I didn't know. And it's not that you're starting from zero, not that I started from zero in this career. I didn't, or they wouldn't have hired me. It's that I'm starting with assets that civilians rarely have. And by that I mean a lot of civilians don't know how to read rooms, crisis management, decision making, reading people, et cetera. They don't know how to do those things. Those are things they have to learn. And there's some of those things I'm here to tell you cannot be taught. You can understand, you can learn any widget out there, you can learn any system out there, but it's the things inside of us that cannot be taught that seem to be the most valuable for employees. And in today's job market, there are so many people and so many companies looking for good humans and to work alongside of. And those are the things you bring to the table. So while you may not know anything about commercial plumbing or you may not know anything about Company X that you're going to work for, don't believe that you're starting with zero. You come with a bunch of assets that people rarely possess in the civilian world. That is why you got hired. Focusing on why you got hired and focusing on what you're going to do next, it's not your mission is gone. A lot of our high-stakes careers are mission-driven. We go out, we execute a mission, we return home, we debrief, we rinse, repeat, we do it again. It's not that our mission is gone. It's that our mission is changing. And instead of, in my case, protecting the public or protecting a country, I am doing things like protecting my family's stability. I am protecting my health by lowering the stress. I am building something new. I am taking care of myself and taking care of my family in a new way. And it's easy to say that. And it's easy to be like, yeah, I'm totally good with that. I'm down. But the reality is when you find yourself in that, we are so type A driven that it's very easy to know that, but on the other side, slip back into this terrible habit or pattern of believing that we are less than or we are unimportant or our mission doesn't matter. And that is truly not the case. The mission of taking care of you and your family should be number one. And we lose sight of that in these careers, like law enforcement, first responders, military, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We lose sight of the fact that we are number one and we're so used to taking care of everybody else that we allow our own health and our own family to crumble underneath us while we are out there saving the world. And that is something that when we move over into the civilian world, whatever your next career move is outside of, you know, where you started, that is something that we need to redefine our importance. We need our importance is no longer measured by urgency or emergent situations or saving the world. Our importance now equals what impact are we having to those around us? What personal and professional growth am I experiencing? What growth am I experiencing for the movement of this company? Where is my peace level? Where is my internal peace level in my barometer? Am I happier? Am I healthier? Am I compensated well enough to take care of my family? We have control over our own lives. It's not somebody else's responsibility to make sure that we are happy. They can put us into that situation. We need to make our sure that we are happy based on how we are processing, reframing, and redefining these new roles that we find in our life. And that is what I think is super important. It was hard for me to get over. It was hard for me to redefine, reframe my new role. And once I did that, things came a whole lot easier for me. You know, I got into the trap, like I mentioned a minute ago, of comparing my new role to my old role. And I found that every single time I did that, I lost the comparison. It is true. What I am doing today does not match what I did yesterday in the level of urgency and impact to individuals and humans and literally saving lives. It doesn't. But what I'm doing today does matter, and it does matter to people. And if I can help people solve those problems, then I am still impacting people in a very good way. How many relationships? I'm going to talk to law enforcement out there, our firefighters. How many true relationships did you actually make on the job that impacted you, that changed your heart, that moved you in a whole new level because of this impactful relationship that you met? Probably very few. We find our time running around, putting out these fires, impacting people in a very short period of time. It's very ephemeral. It's here today, it's gone tomorrow. And before you know it, we don't even remember their names. Yet that's the relationship building that we have and that we crave, and that impact that we have on people. If we impacted people truly the way that we felt that we do, then we would know them longer than the call takes to go away and to refresh our brains. But the fact is, there's so much of it, and there's so many calls, and the frequency of these encounters are so intense and so brief that they fade away in the background. Now, to look forward to a new career where you can actually impact people's lives and make family friends, make friends that you'll invite into your home and friends that will travel across the country to go on vacation with you, that is something that's new and amazing and exciting for me. And those are impactful relationships. One thing I still struggle with is comparing. And sometimes when I introduce myself, I'll be like, hey, my name is Aaron. This is what I do. Uh before this, I was a cop for, you know, however many years, and I was a homicide detective. And I, you know, I don't know, commercial plumbing, I'm learning, but I know dead bodies really, really well. Blah, blah, blah. And then everybody laughs. And then I move on. And I do that, um, you know, when I really think about it and break it down, I probably do that because I'm still holding on to that identity piece. And I need to cognitively let that go and release that. Uh, I need to stand on my own two feet for who I am today, be judged on who I am today. And that is something that is hard. And I expect that you and I will stumble as we make this transition from the old world to the new world where we want to be known. And that comes back to what I said a few minutes ago. This is not only losing identity, but it is losing the respect and the respect role that we had in our previous life. People may not recognize me for being three years in the commercial plumbing world, but they might respect and recognize 21 years in law enforcement and a homicide detective. That they might be able to wrap their mind around, be like, oh shit, this guy, you know, he's got some background there. And it and it lets me live that old persona. But I I see myself doing it less and less. And now that I've understand that I'm holding on to that identity piece, I'm going to start doing even less and less because I've thought this through and I figured this whole thing out. I haven't figured it all out, but I've at least figured out that piece that I'm holding on to identity of my past life, and I need to stand on my own two feet for my new life. In this new life that I have, I, you know, up until about uh three or four months ago, I found myself going really, really hard all the time, like always doing stuff, sometimes just running in circles, bouncing off the walls, not knowing what I was doing, and maybe not even accomplishing anything. But I was used to that fast pace speed. And I found that civilians don't run at a code three pace like I did. And I needed to slow down. And one of my bosses kept telling me, Aaron, you're supposed to go slow in this role. This is slow. This is stress-free. Slow down and heal and repair. And I found myself getting frustrated because I wasn't accomplishing or I wasn't doing or I wasn't meeting the matrix like my partner was, or whatever it may be. And I found myself getting frustrated. Once I understood and recognized that I don't have to go a thousand miles an hour, that if I slow down and I take the slow approach to it, I can see a lot more, I can process a lot more, I can be a lot more effective in my current role. It's no different than being that new cop out in the street that wants to drive 100 miles an hour to the robbery in progress. Then the old cop drives at about 12 miles an hour, novites and sirens, takes in his surroundings and finds the suspect as they flee away. Now, that suspect drove right past the cop that was running hot into the call. The older, slower cop caught them because his eyes were opened and he was going at a slower pace and he could process the things around him. When I started doing that six, eight months ago, six months ago, whatever it was, I found myself absorbing more and learning more and not being as stressed out or frustrated in my role, which was good. Literally, I had to get out of my own way. I had to get out of my own way and I had to allow myself to be who I am, where I am, when I was there, and stop comparing and stop judging and stop giving, I had to give myself some grace. And I expect that anybody doing that transition is going to find themselves in positions where they're frustrated with themselves or their roles or whatever it is. And at the end of the day, take a Step back, take a deep breath, give yourself an ounce of grace, recognize and understand you came from one place into another. And that transition is hard. You've lost identity, you've lost the respect, you're in a whole new world, you're in a strange, a whole new world, you're in a whole new world that you don't even understand where you are. And that's okay. Just get out of your own way, relax, and allow yourself to be present. Another thing I had to think about and learn is management styles. Management styles in a civilian world are different than in the world I'm used to. In a civilian world, everybody's more passive. I got angry with one of my bosses early on, and I don't want to say I scared him, but I definitely, you know, he's not used to that kind of conversation or that tone. And in my world, that was my every single day. So I didn't understand or recognize the impact that my conversation was having on my supervisor, on the boss. I didn't understand the impact that I was having because that is what I was used to. That style of communication is what I knew best. And I just thought everybody did. And that was the way life was. But I had to understand that's not the case. In the civilian world, people are more collaborative. They're at a slower pace, they think slower. The demands are not as high and not as critical to execute. So therefore, there's more time. I'm coming into that world and learning it. So I'm having to go from 100 miles an hour down to 10 miles an hour. They have been living in a 10 mile an hour world. So when we come in, we're high energy and we upset the Apple cart. Not because we mean to, but just because that is the way that we have been functioning. And that transition from 100 down to 10 miles an hour is difficult for us. So know that is going to be out there, but understand that it can be done when you make that transition. One of the things as I consider that transition and slowing down, I have to look. I want to give myself some barometers or I want to give myself some matrix to look at to see how am I doing? And in I don't know this all. Okay. So I'm not pretending that I got this whole thing figured out because every day is a transition for me. And some days are better than others. But one of the things I want to look at is am I less frustrated today than I was yesterday? Am I less frustrated in this environment than I was in my previous environment? And if the answer is yes, then I'm on the right path. One of the things that I just spoke about is I want I want to try to introduce myself as Aaron, the factory rep, not Aaron the former cop. And that is something that I need to work on. And it's hard for me because I feel lost without that piece of my identity. But it's something that I need to work on. So the more times that I can introduce myself without bringing in my past, that is just to check on that barometer as to how the transition is going. And if you are new into your transition world, this stuff is may not make sense to you today because you haven't experienced. But I guarantee you, when you move out of that world and you find yourself into the slower pace of a civilian world and you're in your role and you're in your groove and you're confident and confident in your role, looking back, all this stuff is going to come to play. And you're going to be like, man, I remember that day. I remember the day that I was super frustrated. And I remember when I used to introduce myself as the, you know, ex-fighter pilot or whatever it may be. One thing that has helped me is understanding what my new mission is, what my new role is. And, you know, I'm still discovering that for myself. And I can tell you that sometimes companies, um, when you come into them, they may or may not have a good training process or a good onboarding process. And it's not necessarily their fault or anybody's fault. It's just the way life is. So when you're trying to figure out what your new mission is, expect that to be different and expect it to change. When you come into the role, you may have very small missions or goals or achievements that they want you to make. And then as time progresses, you may see that, okay, I have stopped a lot of taillights. I can stop a taillight and I can write a traffic ticket for a broken taillight, and I want to get into something bigger. I want to start chasing some drugs. I want to start catching the armed robbers. I want to start investigating homicides. But those things come in time. And my partner told me last week, he's like, Aaron, he said, You've got three years on the job, and I've got, you know, 27 with this company and 47 in this industry. He's like, of course my relationships are going to be deeper. Of course, the things that I deal with are going to be bigger. Yours will get there too. You just have to give it time and have patience. And hearing him, um, it made so much sense. And it just, you know, we we get caught up. Sometimes we can make, and I said, you know, something similar last week, but sometimes we can make five minutes feel like an eternity. And when we're in this world during this transition period, and we are going through all of these things in our head, and we're fighting all these battles and we're these struggles and these identity changes, and you know, who am I now versus who was I yesterday? That can really make things feel like they're dragging on. It can really make things feel like three years feels like 30 years. But in reality, it's three very short years. So I have to learn that my time will come and it doesn't have to be today. Because if it did, my stress level would be much higher because I'm not even prepared to attack or achieve the things that some of my coworkers or peers are doing. I need to learn to celebrate the small wins because the small wins will build success and confidence, and that will lead to the big wins for me. When I came out of law enforcement and transitioned into the new world, I had to learn how to stop the comparison and the performance-driven behavior that I was so used to that made me successful in my last career. I had to make a mental shift to recognize that I can take all of the good from my previous life, learn the new widgets of this new life, and use all the good from yesterday into today's society, function, career, civilian world, whatever that may be. I had to understand that I was now in a different world. And acceptance of that was very, very hard. Sometimes, like I said a moment ago, sometimes I regress and I slip back, but I have to remember the truth. And the truth is that I am where I am supposed to be right now. I can be impactful in this world, maybe as much as I was in my previous world, and I can definitely build deeper relationships if I open my eyes to it and I pay attention and understand that everybody around you, everybody around me, wants to help further me and develop me and make me a better person. You know, this last weekend we had a Christmas party with my job, and I left there thinking, man, I work with a ton of really good people. There was about 40 people in the room, husbands, spouses, all that, wives, spouses, whatever. And out of those 40 people, I mean, everybody is just a good human being. I didn't have that. I don't have four friends from law enforcement because we were all trying to eat each other, we were all stabbing each other in the back. It's just a different world and you have to get used to it. I know what you were used to was you seemed like home. It seemed like the place to be, and it seemed like that was just where you were gonna be forever. But circumstances have changed for whatever reason, inside or outside of your control, you find yourself in this new world. Know that those people that you're gonna surround yourself with can be awesome human beings and can really lift you up. Um, so just focus on the good stuff as it comes out. I just want to say that once I got out of my own way, once I understood that I needed to stop the comparison, and once I opened my eyes to the world in front of me and the possibilities, it made life so much easier. It made things flow smoothly. It made me understand the role that I was in. It it cleared the way in my little brain. It gave me the bandwidth to understand and process what I need to do in this new role because I cleared off all the cobwebs of yesterday. I don't know if this helped anybody, but I guarantee you there's somebody out there that is leaving that high-stake career or considering it, or you know somebody that has, or maybe you're the employer that picked up the military guy or the former cop, and you're like, man, I just don't connect. I don't understand why they're doing this or why they're acting this way. Maybe this podcast today will help you recognize a little bit more as to what maybe they're going through on the former type A career side. And if you're former type A, maybe it'll help you understand some of the things that you're gonna face and have to experience and focus on for the future. Now, this podcast is designed to be educational, entertaining, provide value. I'm hoping that I can provide value to somebody out there. I've done podcasts in the back in the past about um, you know, career changes and the skills that you have and you bring to the table, those are all out there. You can listen to them. But tonight I just want to focus on the question that was asked to me. When you made the transition from law enforcement into the civilian world, Aaron, I know you struggled. You over you had a hard time overcoming some of those barriers. What finally got you on the other side of that? What finally got you to a place where you're peaceful and you're happy and you're healthy? And the the response to that is I had to get out of my own way. Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to take a few minutes to share that with you. And hopefully you got something out of it. And uh, you guys know what? I absolutely love the fact that you come back here every week. I love the fact that you give me an opportunity to chat with you and just listen to whatever this guy's got to say and this microphone, and hopefully it helps you and it can help move your needle forward. That's what I'm all about. I really just want to help people in this world. Ladies and gentlemen, that is a Murders to Music Podcast.
