Hall of Famer Shawn Michaels has been open about his attitude problems in the past, and now he’s using that experience to help the next generation.
The Heartbreak Kid – who and will be back on Monday Night Raw tonight to celebrate the – admitted he’s ‘well suited’ to reflects on his own choices as a way of managing his own roster of rising stars.
He exclusively told Metro.co.uk: ‘I always tell talent that they’re not going to have an emotion or a thought that didn’t once travel through my head, and I’m not gonna judge you.
‘I’ll do what I can to help them, to correct them but I cannot throw stones as everybody knows. But again, I can certainly give them hopefully the wisdom to not make the mistakes I made.
‘Like anyone, I try to use the positives and the negatives and I do the best to teach that while having compassion and understanding.’
Michaels, who is highly regarded as , noted he’ll still ‘hold people accountable’ when necessary, but he knows he has a balance to strike.
‘That’s one of the things that hopefully lets me be a big part of NXT here, doing my best to hold people accountable but at the same time, understand second chances,’ he explained.
‘And at least understand that whatever it is they’re feeling, I wanna make sure that I validate that and help them work through it to the best of their ability.’
The 57-year-old star never ‘in a million years’ expected to be in the role and he does take that job incredibly seriously, particularly as the senior vice president of talent development creative alongside his friend and now-WWE boss Triple H.
And Michaels – who will front 2023’s NXT Europe launch – also learned a lot from , and he described the former boss as ‘collaborative’, which has inspired his own management style, along with the likes of Pat Patterson and Michael Hayes.
‘I’d never consider one way having to be the right away,’ he pondered. ‘I just feel like this business is always evolving and changing – yes, we did things a certain way, that doesn’t mean it has to be the right way.’
He insisted he doesn’t like to make snap judgements about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ with the stars as they’ve developing, instead helping them discover themselves as people and characters rather than looking for instant perfection.
He added: ‘We take risks, we take chances, we see what works, what does not work. That’s what I enjoy because I was given the liberty as a talent – at one time, in this company – to find who I was going to be, who that Heartbreak kid character was going to be
‘I was allowed to find that, it wasn’t put on me. That’s something that we try to do here, and I enjoy that process with the talent. And I think that I’ve found that they enjoy that process as well.’
HBK doesn’t want his roster getting too stressed if they have an off night, because there’s always another show, and plenty of performers like and are proving that even getting released isn’t necessarily the end of the line.
‘If it didn’t go great tonight, we’ve got two hours next week to correct it. No matter how seriously you take this, the world won’t end, the sun will rise tomorrow and you’ll have another chance,’ he said.
‘That’s the thing, I know it sounds overly philosophical but you never know what tomorrow will bring. This business changes on a dime, all the time – and so you just can’t ever give up.
‘I’ve seen one, two, five chances, we’ve seen people get released and come back. You never know what tomorrow brings. This is WWE, and anything can happen!’
WWE Raw (Mondays), NXT (Tuesdays) and SmackDown (Fridays) air at 1am on BT Sport 1.
