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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.
Ireland has always been a nation of great athletes from the past: in the nineties, we had Sonia O'Sullivan and Steve Collins.
I started playing soccer when I was 6 years old and started lifting weights when I was 16, so it's not like I never exercised.
NXT is its own kind of animal, and you're never quite sure how much of that transfers over into WWE and into Monday Night Raw.
As a kid growing up, I was a huge gamer - The NES, SuperNES, N64, GameCube - and I had a GameBoy, which went everywhere with me.
Every child has played video games growing up and played WWE games. To be part of a video game, it's an unbelievable experience.
I found, going to Japan, working in the dojos, brushing up on the fundamentals, that's where I really mastered what I was doing.
I heard Samoans have hard heads, but it turns out what Enzo Amore told me about Samoa Joe's head was true. His head is S-A-W-F-T.
I've been put into a lot of situations that could be stressful. That's really helped me mature, both as a performer and as a man.
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.
I really believe in the power of positive thinking and the collective power of people's thoughts spawning something into becoming reality.
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.
I grew up watching wrestling my whole life, so to get the chance to step in the ring that I've watched on TV so many times is a dream come true.
How I feel as a person and what I support as a person always remains the same, and that is continuing to support LGBT communities around the world.
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.
I think everybody in WWE and NXT want to be involved in WrestleMania. I can huff and puff and push all I want, but that's something you just can't rush.
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 spent two years at NXT and a lot of times questioned, 'When is this going to happen?' or 'Is this actually going to happen? Am I going to make it to 'Raw?''
I think Finn Balor is more about confidence, a smarter version of Prince Devitt. Otherwise, they have the same core values, same techniques, and the same heart.
The whole Demon character was designed for people to hate me more and to be scared of me, and it kind of backfired in the sense that people kind of like it now.
I do enjoy a level of intensity that I bring when I'm the Demon, but it's a mindset that takes a couple of days to get into; it's not something I can do every day.
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.
When you go out there, and you're in the ring, honestly, half the time you forget what city you're even in because you're so focused on what you're doing and the task at hand.
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 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 spent a lot of time in Japan. To me, I felt like my career was kind of marooned out there. I didn't realize the extent of the reach that New Japan had in America and around the world.
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.
For a long time, we had Raw and SmackDown, and there wasn't really anything else. The NXT Universe kinda opened up channels for wrestlers to come in from the independent circuits, like myself.
The dojo system in Japan is something very unique. It prepared me not only for wrestling in the States and around the world, but it also prepared me for how to handle myself as an adult in the real world.
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.
I've seen a lot of different training schools and dojos, and the sheer level of professionalism at the Performance Center and the state-of-the-art facility just knocked me for a six. It really blew me away.
The Demon character is something I draw on occasion. It's something that requires a lot of focus to tap into and really requires the right situation for me to sort of draw on that darker side of my personality.
If I'm going to draw something, I don't know the day before what I'm going to draw. It's just very much an interpretation of how I'm feeling that day and what I think is the coolest thing in my brain at that very moment.
With regards to the paint, I'm normally quite introverted and shy. I keep myself to myself, and I find that when I hide behind the paint, so to speak, I'm able to let myself go more and move more freely than I can without it.
I was six years old watching wrestling on TV. I was eight years old watching Ultimate Warrior run to the ring at WrestleMania. I was eighteen years old starting out on a journey in the U.K. wanting to be a professional wrestler.
I often find out, once people have trained, you can never really re-train. When you get trained, you learn to lock up; you learn a wrist lock and, okay, onto the next thing, onto the next thing. You never really go back to the fundamentals.
When kids tune in and see Jordan Devlin, Trent Seven, Pete Dunne, Wolfgang on the WWE Network, and then they see a poster at the town hall for their local wrestling show, they're gonna say, 'Oh my God, that's Pete Dunne. I wanna go see him.'
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.
I've been in opening matches of pay-per-views. I've been in main events of pay-per-views, and the same mentality is applied to both, and that is, 'To this point, this is the biggest match of my life, and I'm gonna go out there and give it everything I have.'
I came up in the U.K., which is a very catch-as-catch-can style, and then I somehow ended up in Japan and spent eight years there learning strong style. I got to spend some time in Mexico learning the lucha libre style, and the WWE is a hybrid style of everything mixed together.
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.
If you ever have a question or a problem, if you approach Triple H, he might say the most-obvious thing, but it was the last thing you were thinking. As soon as he says it, you're thinking, 'Oh my, why didn't I think of that?' He's very smart, and we're very lucky to have him at our disposal in NXT.
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.