Hoda Kotb Is Ready for Her ‘Joy’ Era

It started with a breathwork class. Hoda Kotb, veteran cohost of the Today show, was skeptical but willing to try it. Her teacher, Christine, came highly recommended from Jenna Bush Hager, and the appointment was on Zoom, so it felt low stakes. “I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Kotb says. But eight minutes in, “I explode in tears.”

Afterwards, she felt lighter. Something shifted. She was calmer, slept better than usual, felt more present with her kids. “That was my first toe in the water,” she says. Then came meditation. (“All of a sudden I’m meditating and I feel chills all over my body. I’m like, what is this crazy thing?”) She met Maria Shriver for lunch, who brought up something called the Hoffman Institute. Kotb recalls Shriver saying: “I’ve done all the things. I’ve lived with nuns. I walked with the Dalai Lama…. This one retreat, I would trade my Georgetown degree for.” So Kotb goes to Hoffman, a weeklong program that focuses on “healing negative patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving,” according to its website. And then, in her words: “I was a different person.”

It was the doorway into a new chapter of Kotb’s life. It was 2024 and she had been on Today since 2007, at NBC since 1998, and working the grueling hours of a broadcast reporter since 1986. In 2017, she adopted her first child, Haley Joy, followed by her second, Hope Catherine, in 2019. She was doing it all but met with the reality that, in her words, “You cannot have it all.” Something had to give.

Kotb never expected to find balance in work and family. “I just thought to be really good at something, you’re probably out of whack,” she says. “I interviewed so many athletes—Olympic athletes, like Simone Biles, and she had no life because she was doing one thing.” Kotb sees the value in this—identifies with it, even—but realized work didn’t need to be her “one thing” forever. Was there a world in which she could devote a little more of the “pie,” as she calls it, to being a mom?

“My career did ride sidecar most of my life, and I think I had an epiphany about it,” she says. “I remember just thinking to myself, Is this how I want it to go? David Brooks says there’s the résumé-you and the eulogy-you. The résumé-you is all the stuff that people say about you when you’re alive. But what’s the eulogy-you? What are they saying when they’re in the pews? ‘She was at work a lot and she got some awards?’ Is that really what we want?”

Meanwhile, her appetite for feeling better was insatiable. Kotb had long been an avid runner and mindful eater, but she yearned for the sense of peace she had only found in practices she describes as more “woo-woo.” She hosted a Today show retreat in October 2024, bringing happiness experts, business thought leaders, and wellness practitioners together at Miraval Spa in Austin—complete with a live taping of Today with Hoda & Jenna, of course. The weekend felt like a light bulb moment. “Retreats have got to be the cornerstone of it,” Kotb realized at the time, unsure of what “it” exactly was, loosely conjuring up her next endeavor. She also wanted to curate virtual events and courses—“I felt like we needed the retreat in your pocket.”

So she decided to turn the page. In September of last year, Kotb told the higher-ups at NBC she would be stepping down from her role on Today. She asked Libby Leist, the executive vice president overseeing the show, to meet, and she set the mood in her office accordingly. “I was playing ‘Both Sides Now’ on my phone, and I had a candle lit, and [Libby] goes, ‘Oh God. Oh shit.’” Kotb’s conversations with cohosts Savannah Guthrie and Bush Hager and Today showrunner Talia Parkinson-Jones were emotional, but everyone was rooting for her. “It’s never going to get better than right now,” Kotb recalls saying at the time. “I’m on the top, man. I said, the view is insane. But it’s also the reason that I’m going to try something new.”

Where Kotb landed was Joy 101—which, as she aptly described above, is like a retreat in your pocket. Kotb’s new venture is an app that tackles wellness from all angles. Using short, instructional video and audio snippets led by Hoda’s personal favorite practitioners, you can listen to a guided meditation, do five minutes of sun salutations to improve your mobility, or work on developing a more positive mindset. Members receive a personalized Joy Plan and have the opportunity to join exclusive live chats with Hoda and her friends. Soothing lullabies will lull you to sleep, and in the morning you can do it all again. Welcome to Hoda’s world.

Yes, running a wellness company—an app, nonetheless—is quite different from enjoying a glass of white wine at 10 a.m. with your gals and interviewing celebrities on national television. But that’s exactly the point. “I feel like I’m a beginner again,” she says, “and that’s kind of cool.”

This isn’t the first time Kotb’s amassed the courage to shake things up. At 43, in 2007, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. “It scared me to death, and it made my life snap into focus quickly,” she says. “If someone told you your life might be over in a couple of years, maybe sooner, it’s like, What would I change?” Well, she decided, a lot. Kotb ended her marriage to Burzis Kanga (“I made that decision in no time,” she says) and asked her boss at NBC for the promotion that changed her career trajectory—to be the inaugural anchor for the newly announced fourth hour of Today. “I was a hard worker who never raised her hand for credit or to ask for something else,” Kotb says. “I assumed that people would see me working and give me a shot at whatever the next thing was. And it didn’t really work that way.”

There were difficult parts of her illness—namely, that her course of treatment meant she wouldn’t be able to carry her own children. And Kotb says she cringes at the “cancer gave me all of these gifts” metaphor—but she does credit it with giving her a whole new perspective. “You’ve broken up a relationship, you have cancer, and your job isn’t what you think it should be. And that was my 40s,” she says. “I was thinking, What does this mean? Is this my life now? It just shows you how different your life can be from your 40s to your 50s.”

Kotb’s 50s, of course, are what gave her Haley, now eight, and Catherine, five. “[Cancer] took away the ability for me to have kids, but it gave me the courage to realize and to speak aloud that I still wanted kids anyway,” she says. “I remember calling Robin Roberts and saying, ‘Can you believe I’m 52 and I have a baby?” And she goes, ‘You know what that baby is?’ And I was like, ‘What?’ She goes, ‘That baby is right on time.’”

She’ll speak more about making “wow” out of “yuck,” as she tells me, in her next book, aptly titled Jump and Find Joy, out in September. Clearly, there’s a through line in all of this—joy—and as we wrap up our conversation, I ask Kotb why. What does that word really mean to her? She describes babies laughing on a swing and children making snow angels—that’s the feeling she wants to arise in others. “I feel like sometimes that gets buried under a lot of grown-up stuff, and it’s still in there,” she says, pointing to her chest.

Now Kotb is 60. She recently left the city for life as a suburban mom: She walks her daughters to school in the morning and is setting up an office for Joy 101 in the center of town, across the street from a sandwich shop. “Joanna Gaines is helping trick it out,” she grins. Her sister and other close friends are helping her build the wellness platform—putting together programming and bringing world-renowned experts on board. “It’s just fun,” Kotb says. “For me, success is we’re making people feel better.”

We get up to say goodbye, chatting about the Manhattan neighborhood where she raised her children before leaving the city—just down the block from where I live with mine. Is suburban life all it’s cracked up to be? I ask. Are your daughters happy?

“The very first day when I was home, Haley ran down the stairs,” Kotb says. “I was working in my office, just scribbling and thinking about life because I couldn’t sleep. And she goes, ‘Oh, you really are here.’” Kotb cried and hugged her daughter. Yes, it seems Kotb jumped—and found joy.

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