“Genetics could be an important factor here.  What is your ancestral makeup?”

Am ordinary question from an ordinary doctor, but one that would profoundly transform my perspective as to who I really am.

While working to discover the underlying cause of a medical condition, my doctor was trying to see if genetics was, in part, responsible.  And as much as I would have liked to help him, at the moment I couldn’t.  For you see, half of me was missing.

While I know a good deal about my father’s side, the branches of my mother’s side of the family tree are rather barren.  Orphaned at a young age in Germany during World War II, my mother knew very little about her real mother and next to nothing about her father except his name (a last name not her own, as her parents never married).

My parents met in Germany, married, and my mother moved to the U.S. when my father was released from the Army.  I grew up a good little German Lutheran girl, through and through.  My father’s heritage is also German, with a bit of the Cupp Irish thrown in for good luck.  Blonde hair, blue eyes – I was the typical corn-fed farm girl from the Midwest. 

From time to time, I’ve been curious about who the mysterious ancestors were on my mother’s side, but never enough to pursue the subject.  Now, however, the stakes were a little higher and with ancestral DNA testing, the doctor said we might find some clues.

When the results arrived, I opened the envelope pretty confident of what I’d find.  I unfolded the first lab sheet, which was a listing of my exact genetic code.  Pretty impressive, although I couldn’t tell you what it all means.

Then, I opened the certificate detailing my ancestral background.

The first statistic was predictable.  Northern European, 48%.  Yup, just as I expected.  That would cover the German and the Irish…

Wait a minute.  48%?  My eyes moved down the list.

Southeast European – 22%.  Wow… I do remember my mother saying that one of the few things she knew about her father’s family was that they came from a country in southeast Europe – Bulgaria, Albania, or Bosnia…

But that only adds up to 70%.   What’s the other 30%?

Middle Eastern.

I am of nearly one-third Middle Eastern descent.  Add that to the southeast European percentage and we’ve got 52%… the majority rules, ladies and gentlemen.

Throw religion in the mix and it’s anybody’s game.  Jewish?  Could be.  Muslim?  Very likely, combining the heavy Muslim concentration in the Middle East and Southeast Europe. 

For me, this personal revelation is fascinating; the irony being I spent 40 years of my life trying to “find myself,” and just when I thought I knew who I was, the gods tossed a new roll of the dice in my path.  What a gift.  Whether or not I’ll ever find out more about my ancestral line is a big question but it’s exciting to know there’s something bigger out there than I’d ever dreamed.

So, why would I ever reveal this to you on this blog, of all places?  Because it’s a very personal example of what Holly Buchanan and I discuss, write about and teach almost everyday.  You can’t stereotype women by their age, the way they look or by the “Soccer Mom” categories Madison Avenue has created to justify its position in the world. 

You have to get to know women from the inside out and understand that their needs and values shift with life stage and personal circumstances.  Look at me.  With one strand of DNA, my perspective on my self  has just experienced a seismic shift… and won’t settle for some time.

Want to succeed when it comes to marketing to women? Stop stereotyping and start:

• discovering what matters most to you
• creating messaging and customer touch points that reflect those values
• do everything in your power to deliver on those values in every way possible

Your best chance lies in “walking the talk” of what you believe in, and working like mad to make it resonate with those women out there who share the same values.  It’s just impossible to tell who she is on the inside by how she looks on the outside.  Take it from a corn-fed, blue-eyed blonde from the Middle East.