It's almost like putting on a mask protects you from people's judgments and lets you completely flow freely, like, with all your aggression and our animosity against anything.
You can be a big fish in a small pond, but you're only going to be competing against people at that level.
I found, going to Japan, working in the dojos, brushing up on the fundamentals, that's where I really mastered what I was doing.
Ireland has always been a nation of great athletes from the past: in the nineties, we had Sonia O'Sullivan and Steve Collins.
There wasn't one defining moment that I said, 'I wanna be a wrestler.' It was just something that was always inside me.
I didn't realize how much the paint was going to affect how I moved and how I walked. And it wasn't something that consciously happened. It was because the first time I'd done it was a Tokyo Dome show, I want to say in 2013-14, and I walked out there, and I was a completely different person.
You can kind of run drills and practice, rehab behind closed doors as much as you can, but there's nothing that simulates being in front of a live audience with live TV cameras.
I always go back to my days in NXT and look at my feud with Samoa Joe. That was one of the best periods of growth for me.
When I first went to Japan, I was wrestling under my real name. The Japanese people have a great amount of difficulty with the letters f, r and l. So three out of the six letters in my first name they couldn't say. It was a bit of a mouthful for those guys.
Wrestling has a funny way of regenerating itself, and I'm sure, in the past, a lot of people have asked questions about 'Who's going to replace Sami Zayn in the locker room?' or 'Who's going to replace Kevin Owens in the locker room?' People always step in.
It's a very simple answer, how to get my abs so defined. I have a very healthy diet of a lot of laughter. If you laugh all the time, you're consistently flexing your abdominals all the time.
2010 was an incredible year for me. I won the Best of the Super Juniors, and went on to win the IWGP Junior Heavyweight title. That was an unbelievable achievement.
We're all humans living on this tiny little rock, floating through space at, like, thousands of miles an hour. We should all just get along.
Myself, Karl Anderson, and Luke Gallows are best friends. We travel together, we train together, we eat together, and we do a lot of things together.
To go from a small wrestling dojo to the Performance Center was just mind-blowing. The sheer scale - I didn't think anything like that could possibly exist.
I really believe in the power of positive thinking and the collective power of people's thoughts spawning something into becoming reality.
I was big into hip-hop as a kid, and when I was eighteen, I got into dance and rave music, which was popular in Ireland at the time.
Going through secondary school in Ireland, everyone's like, 'What are you gonna do when you finish school? Go to college? Study business? Study electronics?' I was like, 'Well I kinda love wrestling, so I don't see why I should want to study anything else except wrestling.' For me, it was a no brainer.
I'm the sort of person with a very short attention span, and I lose interest in things very quickly.
I still can't believe I'm a professional wrestler in the first place. That hasn't sunk in yet. I'm sure I'll look back when I'm 50 or 60, if I make it that far, and think about everything that's happened.
