In the face of rejection, cancer and her child's illness, Hoda Kotb clung to hope

While a student at Virginia Tech in the '80s, Hoda Kotb had her heart set on breaking into broadcast journalism. But a professor told her quite frankly she didn’t have the look and should pivot to public relations. It’s a story Kotb tells between tapings of NBC’s “Today” and “Today with Today & Jenna.”

“I'm the kid who had the stop sign glasses and the weird name and the frizzy hair and the professor in college said, ‘It's not going to be you in this industry,’ ” recalls Kotb, 59.

But Kotb remained committed to outworking everyone else. “I also believed it was possible – those are my only two things,” she says. “I was constantly rejected. The guys didn't like me. I didn't get the job … It didn't crush me. I didn't feel devastated. I was like, ‘Oh, that’s how it goes, but also something good will happen.’ ”

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Optimism and positivity have been Kotb’s “North Star my whole life,” she says, remembering how “on the cloudiest day” her mom would acknowledge even a speck of sunlight. When Kotb’s family expanded in 2019 after the birth of her second daughter, Kotb knew without hesitation her name would be Hope.

“I didn't have to see her. I didn't have to know anything,” Kotb says. “I just knew that her name was going to be Hope. She's what I'd hoped for, what I’d hoped for for our family (which includes big sister Haley, now 7), and she came true.”

Kotb shares her sunny outlook in her new children’s book “Hope is a Rainbow” (available now), which features illustrations of Hope and Haley drawn by Chloe Dominique. Hope is “finding your smile after wearing a frown … and realizing YOU can turn things around,” Kotb writes. “It’s solving a problem and thinking it through. Anything’s possible when you believe in YOU.”

The host of the “Making Space with Hoda Kotb” podcast dedicates the book to Hope, the type to “give you her last blueberry,” the enamored mom says. “She gives her big sister the thing that’s not broken, and she'll take the other one. No matter what happens, she always goes, ‘Oh, that's OK.’ ” The book “just came from her pure, beautiful, loving heart.”

“Hope is a Rainbow” publishes about a year after Hope battled an undisclosed illness for which she was treated in the ICU and Kotb took a brief absence from “Today.” Kotb says her daughter is “doing much better” now, and that the family has learned to manage Hope’s diagnosis, which allows the toddler plenty of “laughing and playing and dancing and singing.” For Mom, the ordeal resulted in an even deeper connection: “I didn't know I could love her anymore, but I realized through this I actually can.”

Thanks to her buoyant spirit Kotb is able to find the good, even in her own breast cancer diagnosis from 2007, which emboldened her to ask to co-anchor for the fourth hour of “Today.”

“I feel like these things that came as big hammers in my life, that I felt like could have crushed me, ended up being the very thing that made me say to myself, ‘Oh, that gave me courage,’ ” Kotb says. “My illness gave me courage. My daughter's illness gave her courage, gave me courage, gave her sister courage. It's a strange thing. Whenever someone says, ‘Oh, there's a silver lining.’ You're like, ‘Wait, what?' But actually, that's what it is.”

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hoda Kotb's new children's book is inspired by resilient daughter Hope