Know yourself and flaunt your strengths.
Cleopatra was a woman. She was a woman ruler, a pharaoh, and had to conduct business with people from her own country as well as others. Needless to say, they were all men. Yet, here she was, a woman, controlling the world. She had to assert herself, and show these people that her gender had nothing to do with her capability to rule them. If anything, she used her gender (what people thought was a weakness in politics) and it was, more often than not her greatest strength.