A former FBI hostage negotiator's advice for getting what you want

One time I was on the phone with a customer service Airlines person, and that's got to be a tough job because those people get yelled at all day long, every day. Nobody calls customer service unless they're unhappy. Clearly, she'd been yelled at 50 times during the day, and she was not interested in staying on the phone with me a moment longer than she had to.

She had me on hold. I remember saying, you know, I guarantee you this woman right now is thinking, she's saying to her colleagues, "You know this guy's lucky I'm talking to him on a phone at all." So I was thinking about the negative of that, and then I was thinking about the flip side.

In her view, if she thinks I'm lucky to be talking to her on the phone, then the flip side of that is she's actually being generous in her mind. In her world, she came back on a phone and I said to her, "You know what? I really appreciate how generous you've been with your time."

I could tell immediately her frame of mind changed. She put me back on hold for about a minute and a half after that. When she came back on the phone, she'd given me a full refund on my ticket.