Shooting an Elephant is among his writing at the george-orwell.org site–his works are in the public domain.

Some of my current strategies:

*I try to be on the look-out for self-deception and to cut it out when I notice. If I notice that I’m ashamed of a conversation I just had [or of whatever], I try to name why.

*Writing in my journal, keeping my room clean, and keeping my life in some kind of order (no mountains of procrastinated tasks) seems to help. I don’t whether this one is just me or what.

*I try to remember what’s at stake in the situation. If I’m thinking about how to help a friend, I try to remember that my friend matters. Usually I’ll find that I care more about my friend [or whatever’s at stake in the situation] than I do about my own ego. And once I notice that, it’s easier to let go of the “I can’t have made a mistake” thing.

*I think of mistakes as specific and changeable. It’s “I screwed up”, not “I am a total and permanent screw-up”.

*I try… this one is harder to articulate. But I try to remember what I want from life. And I don’t want my life to be glossy like a magazine cover. I want to be is in contact with my own details and with the details of the outside world. Noticing my faults and my screw-ups is a kind of pointer to what I am, so that I can have grit and texture and honesty in my life instead of glossy faux-happiness.

Anyone have some other strategies? Or thoughts on these?

For literature, I’d go with Dave Hingsburger’s pamphlet “Power Tools”.

And, yeah, being a Friend (and becoming more active in the RSoF as an adult) has helped a lot in figuring this stuff out, at least when dealing with a meeting that actually seems to live up to basic Quaker principles. (Which not all do, some of them do a sort of shadow-imitation of it that I find impossible to navigate.)

Thank you for phrasing it so succinctly and elegantly and clearly:

And it’s important not to get your sense of self-worth all tied up in whether you’re doing good things, because that actually makes it harder to do the right thing. Because it makes you want to think you’re doing the right thing even when you’re not, so that you can keep up the belief you’re a good person. And when you want to think you’re doing the right thing even when you’re not, it’s easier to just go into denial when you screw up.

A group I’m involved with has been struggling with power relationships on a variety of axes: class/wealth; race/ethnicity; male/female/other; heterosexual/queer; disabled/non-disabled (and I’ve probably forgotten some).

Guilt and shame and hurt feelings have interrupted and derailed so many productive conversations!

I was fortunate this year to learn that I can be humbled without being humiliated. That is, I can understand, yet again, that I’m a human and therefore don’t know everything and will make mistakes. Someone pointed out that I a) didn’t know something and b) had made a mistake, and (most importantly) c) was invited to learn and act differently. That was humbling. For decades I would have reacted with humiliation: shame, terror (this means nobody will love me because I’m a ‘bad person’) and so forth.

But that’s simply not necessary! In fact, the energy I was spending being humiliated could more productively go towards learning and changing my behavior.

Given my (limited) experience of the Society of Friends, I suspect that has played some part in developing this insight. In addition to your life experiences, and formidable cognition, were there other resources that helped you formulate this post?

In less abstract words: can anyone reading point me at other readings or films or music that illuminate and explain why a guilty/shameful reaction to criticism obstructs forward progress?

I mean, even the basics like “Thank you,” I can be incredibly grateful to someone but gratitude doesn’t always translate into the words “thank you”. Etc.