Hoda Kotb recalls moving moment when Kathie Lee Gifford chose her as her co-host

When Kathie Lee Gifford first joined TODAY in 2008, she apparently had no doubts about whom she wanted to sit beside her as co-host.

“Kathie Lee said … ‘If it’s not Hoda, I’m not going to do it,’” Hoda Kotb recalled during a recent interview on iHeartRadio’s “Just B with Bethenny Frankel” podcast.

Hoda said Kathie Lee picked her after they spent just “one hosting day” together, so it sounds like their chemistry was clear from the outset.

The duo went on to co-host TODAY’s fourth hour for 11 years.

“She chose me and I am forever grateful,” Hoda said.

She also recalled some words of wisdom shared by Kathie Lee’s late husband, Frank Gifford, about working with his wife.

“He said, ‘I’m going to tell you how this is going to work, if this is going to work for you and my wife,’” Hoda recalled.

“He said, ‘You have to trust someone to catch you when you fall, and she’s the most trustworthy person I’ve ever known in my life. And if you are like that at all, it will work, because she’ll catch you,’” Hoda continued. “And you know what, she did. Over and over again.”

Hoda added that when she co-hosted with Kathie Lee, things simply clicked — in a way they didn’t when she worked on hard-hitting news stories.

“When I sat with Kathie Lee, I was happy. And when I was in those scary places, I was putting a circle in a square,” Hoda told Frankel. “I was trying to be a war correspondent, I was trying to be the person who interviewed all these different kinds of people. … But deep down, that was not hitting for me.”

Hoda said she realized “when you’re happy, everything in life is better,” and when she embraced what truly made her happy, everything changed.

“I felt like I’d been swimming upstream my whole life, and suddenly I was riding a wave. And I didn’t even know what riding a wave felt like,” she said. “I thought life was always swimming upstream. I thought it was supposed to be a struggle.

“I thought I was supposed to have knots in my stomach. I thought I was supposed to be scared, am I going to do it? I thought I was always supposed to feel that way, because when you do something that’s meaningful, it must be hard. Well, that’s not true.”

This article was originally published on TODAY.com