- Elisabeth Hasselbeck has been a contestant on "Survivor" and a co-host on "The View."
- She also was a co-host at "Fox & Friends" before moving to Nashville with her family in 2016.
- "Nashville is a city that has eyes that see other people, the space for kindness and the hands to lift someone up when they need it," she said.
The alarm went off at 2:30 every morning —about three hours after she drifted off to sleep.
Elisabeth Hasselbeck, co-host of Fox News'popular morning show "Fox & Friends," often stayed up until after 11 p.m. to prep herself for the next day’s show.
After a year of that grueling schedule, Hasselbeck was a mess.
“I was at my worst physical, personal and spiritual place,” she told The Tennessean.
“I had lost my natural state of enjoying and playing withthe kids.I felt like a mom zombie floating through the rest of the day.”
At Fox News' 2014 Christmas party, Hasselbeck bumped into a TV talent booker from Nashville. The booker, George Uribe, asked her if she’d consider hosting the annual K-LOVE Christian music awards show in Music City.
That invitation gave Hasselbeck her life back.
She did the gig, fell in love with Nashville and realized that’s where she and her family belonged. The move broke her free from the hell of sleep deprivation and self-doubt she brought to a job she loved.
“Something needed to change. (God)was so generous to give me Nashville as a destination. He turned my doubt into direction.”
'The point of exhaustion'
The direction was veering away from a TV career that Hasselbeck, 41, launched in 2001 when she appeared on the CBS reality show "Survivor."
After a two-year run at the E! network, Hasselbeck started a 10-year stint as the lone conservative voice on ABC’s "The View," a daytime talk show with an all-female panel launched by broadcast veteran Barbara Walters. Show producers decided to replace Hasselbeck in 2013.
Soon after, Hasselbeck emailed then-Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, who’d met Hasselbeck one time and mentioned he’d have a spot at Fox should she ever want one.
(Ailes, who died in 2017, left Fox in 2016 while facing allegations of sexual misconduct. Hasselbeck said she never observed Ailes acting inappropriately, adding, “Mr. Ailes was always kind to me.”)
'The View':Elisabeth Hasselbeck: 'The View' offered me my chair back
Hasselbeck started on "Fox & Friends" in the fall of 2013 —and she had some doubts about being on a news show, or one newsier than "The View," anyway.
So she studied and read and made note cards, and she found herself doing that for hours after her three children went to bed. Hasselbeck often stayed up until nearly midnight, knowing her alarm would ring less than three hours later.
“When I feel under qualified I tend to overcompensate,” she said. “And I’m a workhorse, (but)I was at the point of exhaustion.”
The stories they discussed on the air affected Hasselbeck emotionally as well.
“That year was a really difficult news year —beheadings, attacks, missing planes, officers shot in their car streets from where we are. It overwhelmed me.”
During those times, she’d watch her kids play basketball in the driveway, too tired to join in as she had for years.
Hasselbeck often fell asleep at the kitchen table at night.
In the middle of that exhaustion, she got the invitation to host the K-LOVE radio chain’s Christian music awards show, and Hasselbeck was intrigued at first. She liked contemporary Christian music, especially TobyMac, and she’d recently taken her local K-LOVE radio station’s 30-day challenge to listen only to Christian or spiritual music.
But then she thought she had no energy for such a gig. Still, she kept talking to the awards show's producersand eventually felt led to say yes.
A simple conversation
Hasselbeck brought her kids and her husband, former NFL quarterback and ESPN personality Tim Hasselbeck, for a weekend of Nashvilleactivities, including a 5K run and a concert.
On the night of the show, she saw TobyMac backstage and reached out right away —"Will you come and pray with me and my family?”
During the show, one of the performers, Francesca Battistelli, sang a song of surrender that moved Hasselbeck.
On the plane ride home, Hasselbeck turned to her husband: “Do you think we’re supposed to move to Nashville?”
“I do,” he said.
And that simple conversation launched the family’s move to Nashville —and away from her job on "Fox& Friends."
“It didn’t make a lick of sense. And it was startling, in a good way, that we both felt the same thing,” she said.
Hasselbeck had been to Nashville before, to see her brother-in-law, Matt, play QB for the Tennessee Titans. But she had no friends and few acquaintances in Middle Tennessee, just a feeling she felt came from God to move there.
Hasselbeck decided to go back to Nashville for a “no fun Tuesday” —no concerts, no great food, no events. Just a normal day of pulling into and out of a school, buying something at TJ Maxx and returning it later, goingfor a run through a neighborhood.
On that plane ride home, the Hasselbecks were sure they were coming back for good. At some point.
Then, just a few months later, Hasselbeck saidshe hit a breaking point with the pressure she put on herself because of her job.
But she still felt conflicted about leaving before her contract was up.
“I felt truly accepted and a part of the 'Fox & Friends' team. I really felt like I was on their team. I knew the difficult thing for me was how to leave this team. But I realized unless I was a teammate at home, I couldn’t be a great teammate anywhere else.
“They were getting, at Fox, the best of me, and my family was getting the rest of me."
In November 2015, Hasselbeck announced on air that she would leave the show at year’s end, and she and her family moved to Belle Meadesix months later.
Since arriving, Hasselbeck has thrown herself into the city, going to Titans games and tossing up "fang fingers" at Predators games, though she’s still hesitant to join the crowd in yelling “You suck!” at opposing goalies after the Preds score.
She has joined with Titans’ wives to do service work helping drug-addicted women at residential treatment programs like The Next Door and Mending Hearts. And Hasselbeck and her daughter have been to Haiti with a Nashville group to help impoverished residents there.
She loves Nashville, not just as an awesome entertainment destination but for its sense of selflessness.
"It feels like a soulmate city to me here.Yes, there’s great food and music in Nashville, but there’s permission to be who you are and to put others first.
"Nashville is a city that has eyes that see other people, the space for kindness and the hands to lift someone up when they need it. It's a place that sees other people, knows they matter and does something about it."
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Do you know someone else who felt led to move to Nashville? Reach Brad Schmitt at brad@tennessean.com or 615-259-8384 andon Twitter @bradschmitt.
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Girls Night Out with Elisabeth Hasselbeck
What: A "Girls Night Out" event called Refocusing Our Point of View Together with Elisabeth Hasselbeck, aconversation with the former TV host about her new book, "Point of View."
When: 7 p.m. Thursday, April 4
Where: Church of the City, 828 Murfreesboro Road, Franklin
Tickets: $25, which includes a copy of Hasselbeck's book "Point of View", or $30 for two people and one book
