Magic involves taking a possibility and increasing the chances that it will become a reality. There are different processes for making this act occur, but it all boils down to turning possibility into reality. However, for a possibility to become reality, a person has to also already be doing something to realize that possibility. For example, two people I know were doing job hunting. They utilized magic as part of their job hunting effort, but realized that they needed to actually be doing job hunting to make their magical work effective. In one case, the person creating a job hunting entity that would help her network and get interviews for a specific type of job with a specific income range. She was already doing job hunting for this type of job (and had been for four months), but shortly after she created the entity, she landed her first interview. Although she didn't land that job, shortly after she landed a position that allowed her to network with people that would be her potential superiors if another position opened up. Approximately six weeks after the creation of the entity, another similar position opened up and she was interviewed and got the job. Was the magical acts alone responsible for her getting the job? No...but magic increased the possibility that she would get the job she was looking for.
In the second case, another person was also looking for a job due to being notified that he would be laid off. He did a working to Bune, who gave him advice that essentially told him to get his life, in general, in order. In turn Bune would provide him the job he wanted. This person took Bune's advice and got his life in order both at home and at work, consequently showing his employer why they needed to keep him on. A couple of weeks after the working, He was told that his current employer had decided to keep him on and they would provide him the training he needed. Was the magical act alone responsible for him getting a job? No, but it did motivate him to take some necessary actions and seemed to push a situation more into his favor.
The causal aspects of magic focus on influence...It's like rolling dice, but the difference is the magic weighs the dice in order to improve the manifestation of specific possibilities into reality. That's one way to look at it anyway, but I also think there's something to be said for recognizing how much a person's perspective or belief about a particular situation influences his/her awareness of opportunity in that situation. Magic, if nothing else, is a process for opening a person's perspective and allowing him/her to see and utilize opportunities that s/he was otherwise ignoring.
In different situations in my life, the application of magic has helped bring about specific results that I wanted to obtain. Whether those same results would've occurred without utilizing magic is a moot point, because what I have always found is that when I've utilized magic, the results occurred shortly thereafter, which indicates a causal relationship. Whet6her it's all in my head, or a very real force, the fact that I can obtain results consistently speaks to the efficacy of magic and its role in my life.