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Hoda Kotb<\/a> is back in the dating game! Days after the <\/span>Today\u00a0<\/span><\/i>show personality revealed that <\/span>she’d gone on her first date in two years<\/a>, ET’s Rachel Smith got an update on Kotb’s brewing romance.<\/span><\/p>\n Kotb told ET that she met the man in question through her colleague and pal, <\/span>Jenna Bush Hager<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n “Jenna is like, ‘How did I do?’ because she wants to go to Heaven. Apparently, if you match three people up [you get to go],” Kotb quipped, before praising Hager as “a great picker.”<\/span><\/p>\n “I had a great time… I had a great time on our date. I loved it,” she gushed. “There has been a second one already. Hey, that’s how it goes…\u00a0We’ll have our third coming up. It’s really fun.”<\/span><\/p>\n Kotb, who <\/span>split from her longtime love<\/a>,\u00a0Joel Schiffman, in January 2022, explained why she was ready to get back out there.<\/span><\/p>\n “Life is beautiful. Try things, go out, get out of your house and your apartment. I feel like life is meant to be experienced and [you should] step out into it,” she said. “I love it.”<\/span><\/p>\n It’s not just romantic love that Kotb is passionate about, but love of life in general, something she hopes to remember in the years ahead.<\/span><\/p>\n “I am hoping that I keep growing. I feel like life is about repotting. I feel like I’ve repotted so many times in my life. When you’re picking up, it’s like, ‘Oh my God.’ Roots are up in the air. I’m like, ‘Am I dying?’ And then you get submerged into fertile ground,” she said. “… It happened when I went from this job, or this relationship, or this family situation. You’re constantly doing it.”<\/span><\/p>\n “I just hope and pray in my lifetime I’m that way into my 90s. Repotting should be something that we’re doing all the time,” Kotb continued. “The other thing we should be doing all the time is falling in love with everything. A puppy, a restaurant, a book, a scent, it doesn’t matter. My mom did that… That’s what life is about to me.”<\/span><\/p>\n Life is also about friendship, something she has with Hager and their other\u00a0<\/span>Today\u00a0<\/span><\/em>colleague, <\/span>Savannah Guthrie<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n “We love each other and everybody is unique in their own lane,” Kotb said. “Savannah’s brilliant. She’ll be like, ‘Read this. It’s just some silly thing in my journal.’ I go, ‘This isn’t a silly journal thing. If I had this I’d print it today’… Jenna will come to me, and she’ll say, ‘OK, I’m at this weird position. I don’t know what to do.’ The three of us have a little tribe, and it’s a tribe of trust and love… I feel blessed to have that at work. I mean, who has that?”<\/span><\/p>\n Kotb, who was honored by the Hudson River Park Friends on Friday, is also blessed by her daughters, Hailey and Hope. After <\/span>her youngest daughter’s health scare<\/a>, Kotb decided to pen her latest children’s book,\u00a0<\/span>Hope Is a Rainbow<\/span><\/em>, in her honor.<\/span><\/p>\n “I wrote this for Hope, but it’s for anybody who’s seeking hope,” she said of the book, which is out now. “I feel like no matter what you’re going through in your life, no matter how deep a hole you feel in, no matter how impossible your task feels, if in your heart you do have hope you’re fine. You are fine if you have that. It will come if you have that.”<\/span><\/p>\n “Once you lose hope, that’s where things get a little bit scary,” Kotb added, “so that’s when you gotta have your group, your friends, your faith to kind of lift you up and go, ‘No, no, no sweetie, let’s all get it in sync here,’ because it will happen.”<\/span><\/p>\n