Every morning, my kids and I play Magic FM’s ‘The Reflex’ quiz. It is a simple game: 5 simple questions need to be answered in 10 one-word answers all beginning with the same letter. If you can answer all 5 questions you win £500. But is a Blue Moon when people win.

The other day, the letter was ‘M’. In other words, every one-word answer needed to begin with an ‘M’. For example: Parent? The answer would be: Mother. But this week, one question was: ‘The Christmas Man’.

And I was stumped. And the difficulty is that as soon as you have to think, you’ve lost. (Needless to say very few people win).

The Christmas Man? I was thinking Santa, Father Christmas and obviously neither answer began with ‘M’. Obviously some of you will already have got it, the answer was Michael Buble. Give me strength! Yes he is synonymous with Christmas but I hadn’t labelled him as ‘The Christmas Man’.

As we know, labels are a shorthand device for our brain to mentally categorise a person or item. And labels can mean different things to different people especially when we use a prefix. For example, if we prefix parent, partner or colleague with the word ‘good’.

Let’s take ‘the good colleague’. For some, this might be a person who works autonomously and never speaks unless there is a crisis. For others a good colleague might be someone who engages in office banter. Rather like ‘The Reflex’ it’s almost impossible to win. We cannot live up to other people’s labels because it’s rare we know what that means. Instead, I’d recommend living up to yourself. Pleasing everyone else is impossible.