Quick now– what do Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Bruce Jenner, Jimmy Connors, Arthur Ashe, etc etc have in common??
They visualize.
And not just “Oh I hope I’m gonna win” kinda visualization…
we’re talking systematic, strategic, detailed, intricate, point-by-point visualization. Tiger even admits to visualizing his complete swing, from beginning to end, multiple times before he even lays hands on the club.
Or how about your average church-goer? Praying for what they want, & if the [few] churches I’ve attended are any indicator, there’s often feedback “Please pray for the sick of our parish” & kudos for who’s shown recovery from last week (I prefer Fr. Michael’s joke, “what about the sick of the parish?”).
It’s clear that, if nothing else, belief via visualization &/or prayer is actively done by myriad very successful top performers, if not weekly church-goers. So the question is, how did all this get systematically categorized as ‘myth’, & the term “magical thinking” loosely translate as “bullsh*t”.
Somewhere in the last few years (perhaps synchronized w/ Bush 2′s presidency?) there has been a systematic attack on anything not deemed kosher by churches… eg, evolution, ‘secular humanism’, & that immense whipping-generation of the far right: “the 60′s”.
And yet, ask any down-in-the-trenches scientist, often called ‘technicians’ (because they gain their living actually doing the work rather than publishing papers about it), & they agree– postulates determine the conclusion. An immense number of ‘common sense’ & ‘widely known’ scientific “laws” aren’t so ‘eternal’ & self-evident, you know– not too long ago, “everybody knew” the world was flat & the sun orbited us… & ppl were tortured (or ridiculed, refused publishing, etc) for believing otherwise. Or how about all the “absolutely wrong” claims about meridians in the body, how the blood has ‘tides’ in sync with the moon just as the oceans do, or that open-skull (let-alone open-heart) surgery can be done with only a few accupuncture needles? All these were “hogwash” to scientific journals up to mid 20th Century… and yet are accepted “scientific fact” now.
Now, did the occurrences change? Nope. So why are they suddenly “true”? Actually, they always were true; just the Authorities hadn’t decided to Believe them yet.
So let’s explore what ‘Belief’ means. “Belief”, according to top philosopher W.V. Quine, is knowledge unquestioned, which has attained that status after rigorous testing, a la scientific method (hypothesis, deduction, experiment, etc). Which sounds pretty rigorous, and Quine is careful to show how this works in ‘normal’ people too, not just scientists. And yet, funny how Quine’s ultimate summation in The Web of Belief was this: “knowledge turns into [unquestioned] belief when the grounds of satisfaction are realized”.
So even a master philosopher, whose books are unparalleled in the field, recognizes the point– all of our scientific method, of building & testing hypotheses, still turn on a single, non-objective process: “are we satisfied”.
And so yes, it’s currently fashionable to slam “magical thinking” as thoughts, actions, beliefs about the outcome of an event, which have nothing to do and/or no effect on that outcome.
All I ask are two things:
…b/c if nothing else, you might experience something you haven’t expected, ie something ‘new’, which is always a blast. The thrill of discovery is the hallmark of a mind that is able to learn.
…& more-importantly, by not “knowing that the outcome will be false”, perhaps you’ll avoid employing some ‘magical thinking’ (ironically enough) of your own 
.
Check out every single tennis, golf, etc “how-to” book. They all employ visualization. Scroll-up & re-read that list of top performers… they all swear by visualization. So why not try it, & see if it makes any difference to your own attempts to train behavior.
Oh & btw– of the many experiences I’ve had with the “power of visualization”, let me list one: after shattering my tibia, I was told in no uncertain terms by two different doctors: “thigh-high cast for 6 weeks, & then ankle cast for another 6 weeks”. I didn’t like this scenario, & visualized up a storm, using techniques from “Zen in the Martial Arts“… & was walking, sans cast, in 5 weeks.
Call it “magical thinking”, if you will… I like the doctor’s version: “how the heck did you do that?”
Dunno. It Just Works.