Cielo Busch

It’s Never Too Late to Make Time to Be the Person You Want to Be

There is a sentence you will never hear Cielo Busch say, and that sentence is “I don’t have time.” Whether in her role as a single mom to a college bound daughter, as a business woman and entrepreneur, or as a competitive bodybuilder, Cielo finds the time for the things that matter most. What she does not have time for is excuses. She never has; not from the very beginning. 

Cielo’s beginning was a rocky one. Born to an American serviceman stationed in the Philippines and a local woman he met while stationed there, Cielo was not supposed to make it past her first few hours of life. After months in an incubator, she grew strong enough to be brought home and the fledgling family moved back to the US, but frequent separations led to an unstable home life. Cielo and her younger brother were sent to live with their grandparents before being uprooted yet again to rejoin their father and his new wife. Military moves and family tension made growing up stressful, and so Cielo found an escape through running, each step taking her further away from the kind of life she did not want. She ran track, earned straight As, was crowned Homecoming Queen and made her way to college at CSU, where she studied biomedical sciences while simultaneously earning her massage therapy certification. Soon after, Cielo fell in love and became pregnant, but the relationship ended quickly and she set about building a life for herself and her baby on her own. 

At first, survival was all she could hope for. Cielo worked long hours running programs for adults with developmental disabilities, bringing her daughter to the office when she could not arrange childcare. Supplementing her income with a massage therapy side hustle, Cielo worked tirelessly to provide. She was the last mom at childcare pick up, rushing in after a long day of work, staying up late to help with homework once Kaiya started school. As the years went by, the toll of solo parenting was beginning to show; Kaiya sometimes lashed out and Cielo realized she lacked the emotional toolkit to respond. With no role model to emulate when it came to parenting, Cielo sought out experts to guide her. 

Through an exploration of her spirituality, therapy and the study of attachment parenting, Cielo developed new skills. She learned that when there is a rupture, which could be as minor as an argument or a hostile tone, that rupture must be addressed and repaired quickly to prevent it from becoming a lasting trauma. Cielo had experienced too many unhealed ruptures in her own childhood and wanted better for Kaiya, so she learned how to repair, modeling for her daughter how to take control of her emotional responses by stepping away from heated interactions and tuning into the way our own emotional state affects our responses to those around us. 

Because a large quantity of time with her daughter was a luxury she knew she would never have, Cielo focused on making sure the time they did have was high in quality, spending Saturdays at the Farmer’s Market, sometimes followed up by treating themselves to a mani/pedi. Their bond was strong, but Cielo knew that showing up for her daughter as a provider and a mother was not enough; she also needed to model for Kaiya how to show up for herself. 

A runner since childhood, maintaining a high level of fitness was a non-negotiable, whether that meant using a headlamp to light the way while she pushed a jogging stroller after work or keeping a stack of weights next to the bed so she could exercise before starting her busy work day. Today, both her exercise routine and her work day look different. Having built a successful marketing company, Cielo has since transitioned to running the operations of a large law firm in Denver, Colorado. The hours are long, but she makes sure to find time each day to hit the gym, a necessity in order to meet her goal of continuing to compete and win in the world of professional bodybuilding.

Cielo hopes to inspire other women to follow her lead, to stop making excuses and to give themselves permission to be the person they want to be. To do that, she has started an app to help train other busy women who want to be in the best shape of their life physically, mentally, and spiritually, reminding her clients that if they have half an hour to scroll through social media, they have half an hour to do something good for themselves. It takes hard work, and there will be setbacks, but even if you have to restart again and again, you get back up and keep going, she tells them. It is that indomitable spirit that has taken Cielo from surviving to thriving, and now she wants to bring other women along with her. It is never too late to make the time to be the person you want to be.

It’s Never Too Late to Make Time to Be the Person You Want to Be.