In Magical Identity, I wrote about how my approach to magic shifted to an ontological model, which recognized identity as a principle of magic. One of the key realizations I had about magic is that a lot of it is reactive, done to solve a problem. The problem with a reactive approach is that you are waiting for things to happen to you before you do something. Another problem is that the focus of the magician is on the world to the exclusion of recognizing the role the magician plays as well. A shift to identity recognizes that the internal work the magician does has as much value as any other magical work being done. More importantly it recognizes that to manifest the result in the world around you, first you need to become the result.
When I do magical work, one of the key parts of the process is that I take the result and internalize it, making it part of my identity. I live as if the result is a reality in my life. It may not be a manifested reality in the world around me, but within my internal reality it is. In doing this I align my identity with the result and make it part of my life. By making the result part of my life, I live it. Living it makes the mundane actions I do bring the possibility into reality because it's something that is part of the actions. The actions come from my identity, are an extension of my identity, a proactive change of reality, instead of a reaction to whatever is happening.
I sometimes hear that magician struggle with results and what I usually discover is that they haven't made the result part of their reality. They aren't living the result and they haven't made sure that the result aligns with their internal values. If the result they want doesn't align with the identity of the magician, the magician will find a way to sabotage it. They may not be consciously aware of the sabotage (often they aren't) but it will happen nonetheless. The sabotage is a blind spot that occurs because the magician isn't integrating identity into the magical process.
I've often said that the problems a person has in their life has one thing in common: The person. The same is true of the results in your life. You, more than anything else, define the success or lack thereof of your magical work. When you look at a magical working and you aren't satisfied with how it worked, then look to yourself first and ask yourself how your identity does or doesn't align with the working. The majority of the time you'll find its a sabotage within you, because you haven't created the necessary agreement with your identity and the result you want to manifest. The rest of the time, it's a problem with the process and you need to take that apart in order to figure out what didn't work and then get it fixed.
When you don't have agreement between your identity and your result, you need to examine why that is and either determine if you can create alignment between your identity and the result or if you need to drop the result. The way I handle it is by making the result part of my life, turning it into a reality within me, which is manifested in the world around me through the actions I take. And I pay close attention to whatever comes up that feels resistant and make sure to address the resistance before doing anything else. Taking this approach has consistently yielded results because I've made sure that what I want to manifest is in alignment with my identity, instead of working against it.