"What have been the most powerful prompts or questions in your life so far?"

This question turned up as a topic thread on the coaching network. It intrigued me. Many of the responses to the thread quoted very coachy questions - like "Where do you give away your power?" and "What's the thing you want me to dare you to do?"

All no doubt valid questions, and powerful in their way, when you've hired a coach to make you think and give you a new perspective.

And while I can remember asking people questions like this when I've been "performing" as a coach, they didn't really sound like the kind of questions I have experienced in my own life as mould-breaking or delusion-shattering. I started to get curious about what those questions and comments have been, the ones that incited me to something, and that still resonate with meaning for me today.

I came up with a little list. Some of them are questions I asked myself, others aren't even questions but observations made by others. The circumstances of my hearing them are still very clear in my mind. Each one evokes the room where I was sitting, or the dress my teacher was wearing, the rain lashing, or the sunlight glinting on the fruit punch bowl in the Munro Room.

These are pivotal moments, containing information which mines deep and well.

"Why don't people just listen?" I asked as a frustrated eight-year-old, afraid of having my truest account of myself dismissed. I was standing next to my guinea-pig's cage at the time - the smell of damp, soiled saw-dust still comes to mind.

This has become such a mantra for me in recent years: the importance of listening to each other, especially to children, who have their own channels of wisdom and so much to teach us about ourselves.

These days I can turn this question into something meaningful, which stops me in my tracks and makes me think again - "What if I just listened?"

"I'd like to see the outcome of that little venture," spat my French teacher, in her knitted pink tube dress with a cowl neck, when I announced I wanted to go to Cambridge and do languages. I so wanted to ridicule her sarcasm and prove her doubts totally unfounded. I did.

These days I ask myself "What will I prove someone wrong about?"

"You are a diamond in the rough and you will go far." I wrote to my former university supervisor about 8 years ago to thank him for this comment he made 10 years before. We were making small talk at the linguists lunch after finals. I struggled to attribute any kind of sympathetic personality to this man whom I considered to be no more than an enormous brain, so at the time the comment didn't hit home. I'm sure the fruit punch didn't help. Years later I felt a great surge of gratitude for his generosity, so I wrote to him. He wrote back and told me that my letter had meant more to him than all the accolades he had received during his academic career.

These days I want to know "How am I shining and where am I going?"

"Do you want to come to a Quireboys concert?" Little did I know that the rugby yob striding towards me through the rain outside the porter's lodge was destined one day to become my husband. He'd chased me - unsuccessfully - for months, usually plucking up courage to speak to me only after consuming an inordinate amount of alcohol down the Mill on a Thursday night. But this was a Tuesday. He found himself asking the question, and I found myself replying "OK".

These days I ask myself "What new opportunity will I find myself taking today?"

"Will you marry me?" This question came exactly 5 years and 7 days after our trip to the Corn Exchange to see the Quireboys. He smuggled chilled champagne and 2 flutes into the anniversary suite at the hotel, then was irked when I switched on the TV to catch up with Neighbours immediately on arrival. But eventually he got my attention and went down on one knee. There was no ring - he wanted us to choose it together - but I remember lying in a bath full of bubbles sipping champagne and allowing myself to imagine the most beautiful wedding ever. I was committed, and blissfully happy.

These days I ask myself "What am I committed to?"

"So if you want to be a writer, write!" I was in awe of the woman from Logistics Planning. Not only did she know about warehouse picking and haulage companies, she'd just been telling me that what she really wanted to be was a novelist. She was working up a few ideas and had actually made a start on her book. I was probably salivating, hanging on her every word, hoping that some of her drive and ambition might rub off on me. I was probably wibbling about how I really wanted to be a writer, how that was a real childhood dream, that I'd even receieved a commendation in the WH Smith Young Writers' Competition when I was 11. And now here I was a Management Traine at WH Smith instead. Then she asked me what I was writing currently. And I probably mumbled "nothing really". At which point she uttered the line which still has the power to make me pick up my pen and write morning pages at the absolute minimum.

These days I just say "Bloody Well Write!" Sometimes there's no room for reflection. Sometimes you've just got to get into action. These are the most powerful kicks up the backside I can remember.