Damian Priest On His Progress As a Talent Since His ROH Days, Constantly Adding New Ideas To His Ring Work

– Damian Priest was a guest on this week’s X-Pac 12360 and spoke about how much he’s improved in NXT since his days in ROH, plus more. Priest spoke with Sean Waltman and the show’s other hosts about how important it is to add new ideas to his ring work and staying creative in the business. Highlights and the full video are below:

On the progress he made between ROH and now: “Dude, I look at myself sometimes and I’m astonished, you know? Because yeah, I agree with you. I can tell just watching old matches and matches now, and just saying my demeanor. It’s just completely different, and that’s obviously — it’s a lot easier to perform well when you’re surrounded by the people that we’re surrounded with. You know, with Shawn Michaels and Hunter, and everybody else in-between. I don’t want to leave any names out, but the amount of knowledge that’s around us on a full-time basis. If you can’t get better here, you just don’t belong in the business.”

Adding new moves and sequences into his repertoire: “Oh, it’s extremely important nowadays. People have that short-term memory and they want more and more. So for us, we — again, it goes back to challenging ourselves, and can we be more creative the next time out without spoiling everything too much. So yeah, it’s definitely something I do on purpose, you know. And I put thought process into where I want to be better than I was the last time, and how can I be innovative with my own style, and incorporate things that either are original or I’m taking from some type of inspiration from somebody from the past or even present where I can make it into my own. That’s always a process that I go through on a regular basis where I’ll be — let’s say I take a trip to the Performance Center and I’ll work in a ring with some of the newer guys. But I’m also working on things for me to come up with for future matches for myself so that I can always be surprising, and nothing gets too stale, so to speak.”

If you use any of the quotes in this article, please credit X-Pac 12360 with a h/t to 411mania.com for the transcription.