The ABCs of Self Love: A Self Love Primer and Workbook … (2024)

★★★★★ “It's changed my life for the better and I'd recommend it more than any other book or product. I didn't know books or journals could even have this much of an impact on one's life. If you're considering purchasing, make the jump, it's worth much more than its price point.” Hope J., Verified Purchaser Written by Self Love Philosopher and founder of global Self Love Movement Fred and Far, The ABCs of Self Love is designed to answer the what is self love, and how do I love myself?

In this “class on self love,” Melody takes the traditional idea of an ABCs book and applies it to self love, where each letter of the alphabet represents a different tenet of self love, including authenticity, boundaries, forgiveness, gratitude, manifestation, rest, surrender, vulnerability and trust.

Through a unique style that incorporates poetry, memoir and self-love journal exercises that transform abstract concepts into concrete actions, Melody empowers the reader to finally understand self love and self care and practice them daily in simple, yet meaningful ways. An intentionally concise read, each of this self-love workbook’s 100 pages packs a heartfelt punch. Whether you do one chapter a day, or ready the entire book at once, it will leave you feeling uplifted, understood, and energized to reclaim your joy. Unlike other self help books that are dense, difficult to read and impossible to implement, The ABCs of Self Love is clear, intuitive and actionable. It speaks not just to your mind, but to your heart and soul.

The ABCs of Self Love provides much-needed guidance for women who are ready to shed the weight of shame, guilt, regret, fear and self-doubt and feel the lightness of being and loving their true selves.
“So many years of education, yet nobody taught us how to love ourselves and why it's so important.” That stops now. Join the thousands of women around the world who make up Melody’s Self Love Movement, Fred and Far, on Instagram @fredandfar and at www.fredandfar.com. Make sure to also check out Melody’s latest book, Self Love Poetry for Thinkers and Feelers, an Amazon October 2020 top new release and #1 bestseller.

Excerpts from The ABCs of Self Love
Emotional Empowerment “All the ways we try to avoid our pain when the only way through is to feel it.”
Two of the phrases we hear most often as babies and children are, “Don’t cry” and “You’re okay.” And so, we’re raised to believe that painful feelings shouldn’t be expressed or felt. We all know what follows— a lifetime of buried feelings like shame, guilt, pain, anger, frustration and sadness— that isolate and debilitate us. Instead of feeling our “unapproved” feelings and allowing them to show us the root causes of our discomfort, we do everything we can to avoid them. We carry them around like our shadows.
Emotional empowerment is about feeling all of our emotions and inviting them to transform our lives. It is about practicing complete self-acceptance so that no feeling is off limits. Once we feel what needs to be felt, we can decide how we want to think and act next. Think of your feelings as a teacher instead of a burden, and let feeling everything become as natural as breathing. Because once you feel, you can explore, release and move on, and motion is the root of life, growth, and of course, self-love.
SELF-LOVE IN Spend the day feeling your feelings and getting curious about them. As emotions come up, create space for them (instead of burying or judging them), and then ask yourself, “How come?” Follow the “how comes” until you get to the root issue, and then see if there’s anything you can do to change it. If not, see how you can shift your perspective to create peace of mind and acceptance.

Thank you so much to everyone who nominated The Shift for a Choice Award! Please make sure to vote in Round One now through 11/27 and help me advance to the finals!

Self Love Philosopher Melody Godfred is a poet, author and speaker who is passionate about empowering people to love themselves and transform their lives.

Melody started her career as a litigation attorney, but soon realized a disconnect between her work and essence, so she left a prestigious position at a top law firm to launch Write In Color, her personal branding and career development company. She quickly established her reputation as a leader in the career development space. Through her work as a coach exploring the narratives of hundreds of women, and after undergoing several life transitions herself -- including motherhood -- Melody discovered a common trend: in their quest to fuel their careers and relationships, women were increasingly sacrificing their authentic selves, happiness and well-being.

Melody needed a reminder to choose herself each and every day and believed that other women did too, so she created the Self Love Pinky Ring, a self-commitment ring for women, and launched Fred and Far, her self love movement and community. Her ring and community instantly went viral around the world (Vogue, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, and more), and started a global conversation around self love.

In 2020, Melody published Self Love Poetry: For Thinkers & Feelers, a collection of 200 poems that instantly became and remains a bestseller. One of her poems (“I thought 2020 would be the year I got everything I wanted. Now I know 2020 is the year I appreciate everything I have.”) was shared on social media by Oprah Magazine just before the Thanksgiving Holiday, quickly going viral and eventually reaching hundreds of millions of people, in addition to earning a feature on Today with Hoda and Jenna. In early 2021, Melody signed a three-book deal with Andrews McMeel Publishing, re-releasing Self Love Poetry and publishing her second book, The ABCs of Self Love, an illustrated guided journal that joyfully shares the foundational concepts of self love and makes them an actionable part of daily life. The ABCs of Self Love was recently featured by Hudson Booksellers at over 300 airports across the United States.

Melody is a trusted thought leader on women's empowerment, positive parenting and career development, whose advice has been featured on Inc., Forbes, Huff Post, Bustle, PayScale, Motherly, Mashable, The Muse, and Fairygodboss, among others. Melody was a featured speaker at the Teen Vogue Summit, The Massachusetts Conference for Women, Freelancing Females Reignite Conference and Entity Magazine Love Yourself Conference, and has led personal branding and operational workshops for Farfetch, Murad, The YWCA, The Actors Fund, Electronic Arts, The Magic Castle, and more. She received her law degree from Loyola Law School with honors.

Melody lives in Los Angeles, CA with her husband Aaron Godfred and three kids, twin daughters Stella and Violet and son Teddy.

Her latest book, The Shift: Poetry for a New Perspective was released on September 27, 2022 (Andrews McMeel Publishing) and is a Goodreads Choice Award nominee for Best Poetry Book of 2022.