Quoted: Dry firing excercises help too.

+1

Flinching is nothing to be ashamed of.  Every shooter who puts rounds downrange regularly will have to beat flinching sooner or later.  If you haven't dealt with it and beat it yet, then you can look forward to doing so sometime in the future, because its a stage that we all go through, sometimes more than once.  

Personally, I've beaten flinching twice.  I beat it once and got to the point where I was very accurate in slow fire and wanted to ramp up my speed.  Started shooting faster and faster followup shots, taking a methodical approach, and then my groupings went to hell-- the flinch was back.  Had to dial it back down and beat the flinching problem yet again.  Dry fire practice helps alot, so does having the right mentality and knowing what to focus on.

There's something to be learned from going smaller, to a .22lr, but there are also lessons to be learned from going larger.  When I bought my S&W 29 the recoil was just astounding.  I don't know why anybody wants a .454 Casull or .480 Ruger when a .44 mag kicks bad enough to hurt my wrists as it is.  But what I've learned from shooting that gun is to just let the recoil happen.  I think sometimes we have this idea that if we only held on really really tight, we could make the gun kick less.  If we pushed down and forward as we fired, we could cancel out the recoil to where it would be negligible.  Shooting a .44 mag will break you of that idea.  Its going to give you a bunch of recoil, all at once, and flip the muzzle up like crazy, no matter how hard you grab it, no matter how big a guy you are.  So just let it happen and focus on your front sight and your trigger pull, because the rest isn't up to you anyway.