Hoda Kotb sat on the white couch on the TODAY set this morning with all of her co-hosts, holding Savannah Guthrie’s hand and made a stunning announcement. She is stepping down from the show after the first of the year.

Her voice began to shake in her first sentence as she said, “I have been doing the math and I have spent 26 years at NBC,” before stopping herself to, in her typical fashion, making a joke to lighten the mood, snapping her fingers and saying “be cool, be cool.”

She continued as she spoke about her long tenure at the network but that her recent milestone birthday really made her stop, reflect, and evaluate her life. “I started thinking about that decade. What is it going to mean? What is it going to hold for me?”

“I realized that it was time for me to turn the page at 60, and to try something new,” she said. “I remembered standing outside looking at these beautiful bunch of people with these gorgeous signs, and I thought, ‘This is what the top of the wave feels like for me.’ And I thought it can’t get better, and I decided that this is the right time for me to kind of move on.”

She also mentioned her daughters, saying that she had her children later in life and she thinks that “they deserve a bigger piece of my time pie that I have. I feel like we only have a finite amount of time.”

Kotb then began to cry as it’s visible her colleagues are emotional as well as she said this was the hardest decision to make. She noted that the group of them are a family as well and that “you don’t leave family.”

Guthrie said, “It’s complicated, we don’t want you to leave, we love you so much…but I am so proud of you, for someone to leave at the top of their game…to leave something they love, but to say I dream even bigger. You have so much guts, you inspire me.”

Kotb will remain on air on TODAY through the start of the new year and will remain with the NBC family.