“Wellness may be ‘woo woo,’ but it’s also ‘woooo,'” said Hoda Kotb.
Backstage at her “Making Space” event in Brooklyn on Tuesday for Today’s Fan Fest, between conversations with Suleika Jaouad and Alicia Keys, the former “Today” cohost spoke to WWD about her mission to destigmatize wellness and make it more approachable through her new app, Joy 101.
Released back in May, Joy 101 is a daily wellness platform offering personalized plans and expert-led seminars on a range of subjects, from brain health to breathwork, as well as guided meditations, affirmations, words of wisdom, sleep support, movement exercises and twice-monthly livestreams hosted by Kotb and her friends, including Jenna Bush Hager and Savannah Guthrie. While the app was designed for cross-generational consumers, Kotb said her team is zeroing in on the effervescent college student right now.
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“I have a niece who’s a freshman at Virginia Tech and she’s like, ‘Aunt Hodie, we need this stuff,” Kotb told WWD. “So, we’re looking at college kids because I feel like those kids need it like crazy. Kids need clarity to take tests; they need energy because they’re tired. All of these things (in Joy 101) help even without a cup of coffee. So, we’re looking to expand in that way.”
Opposite to the speed of student life, Kotb’s day-to-day has slowed since she resigned from “Today” in January. Now, she has time to “breathe” without having to jam everything into tiny windows. “I can get up, work out, walk my kids to school, come home and then I have a good hour and change that I get to do the things that I wanted to do. I used to start off the day saying we’re late because we always were; everything was a rush,” she explained.
Leaving her post at “Today” also opened her eyes to a harsh reality: she can’t control people. This rings true for her colleagues, friends, family, and of course, children. “I think I thought if I just said it’s so, it’s so, but there is something about learning that they’re their own individual, and I have to talk to them differently,” she candidly said.
While Kotb’s had to learn how to relinquish control in this respect, she won’t allow anyone but herself to decide what each decade of her life will look like. “If you don’t decide what you want that decade to look like, your life decides for you,” Kotb declared to the room. “I’m 61, and I’m starting my life over.”
Later on Tuesday, the 17-time Grammy winner spoke to Kotb about having a penchant for “pleasing” people and the impact of stress on her skin in her late teens and early 20s, long after she’d gotten her first record deal at 14.
“I was not ready for that,” Keys said. “It was a whole experience that there was no way to prepare for. I also put a lot of pressure on myself, and obviously all of the moving and the movement and the touring and flights and all of the things. I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m 18, you’re not supposed to have this much acne at 18.’ It was crazy. It was a lot, and I felt insecure.”
The “No One” vocalist’s years-long battle with acne ultimately inspired her beauty line, Keys Soulcare. Through the trial and error process of creating her own products, she discovered the link between the external and internal pressures on the skin.
“Part of that it was I learned how meditation and the eliminating of negativity or claiming of my own personal space, whatever that was, started to change my skin, along with these, these different formulations that were clean,” Keys noted. “But it was really an internal process.”