Goal Difficulty
It's important to find the 'sweet spot' when setting goals, as goals that are too easy or too difficult, can have a negative impact on your motivation. Coasting your way to an easy goal will rob you of the chance of reaching your full potential, whereas a goal that is too difficult can lead to frustration, as you fail to make acceptable progress.
However, the recommendation is to err on the side of setting moderately difficult goals. Mento, Steel, and Karren (1987) completed a meta-analytic study looking at research conducted between 1966 and 1984 on goal difficulty and performance, and found strong support for the setting of moderately difficult goals over easy goals.
So goals should be moderately difficult but do they need to be realistic? For short term goals - certainly, for long term goals - perhaps not so much!
A common doctrine from the goal setting literature is that you must make your goals realistic; it's included in the very well-known SMART goal setting acronym! But, I personally have a problem with this advice, and I will tell you for why.
If a golfer has a long-term goal/dream to play on the European or USPGA Tour, this by definition is an unrealistic goal, as the chances of being good enough to play on tour, statistically are tiny. But what is wrong with setting this goal?
Research conducted by Locke (1982) showed that there was no drop in performance for participants who were given impossible goals, as long as they worked towards getting as close as possible to their intended target. In the study, participants were tasked with inventing as many uses as they could for a wire coat hanger within 1 minute. Each participant was assigned a goal beforehand, e.g. the goal was to create 4, 6, 8, etc., up to an impossible 28 uses. Even when participants were given the impossible task of creating 20+ uses, their performance never dropped. Now, it may be a stretch to extrapolate these findings to the practical world of sport, but I love the concept.
So, dream big if you want to. Even if you set a goal that is too difficult, the tendency is to review and reset your goals as opposed to responding with a large drop in effort (Burton and Naylor, 2002). Set long term unrealistic goals, and shoot for the stars. For long-term goals, you don't have to constrain yourself with a time-frame. If you don't make it, you don't make it, but enjoy finding out how close you get nevertheless. Just make sure your short term goals (the stepping stones), are realistic and time-framed, and see where that takes you.
MODULE GOAL SETTING
Goal setting guidelines
References
Burton, D., & Naylor, S. (2002). The Jekyll/Hyde nature of goals: Revisiting and updating goal-setting in sport. In T. Horn (Ed.), Advances in SportPsychology (pp. 459-499). Human Kinetics, Champaign, IL.
Locke, E.A. (1982). Relation of Goal Level to Performance With a Short Work Period and Multiple Goal Levels. Journal of Applied Psychology, 67 (4), 512-515.
Mento, A.J., Steel, R.P., & Karren, R.J. (1987). A meta-analytic study of the effects of goal setting on task performance: 1966 - 1984, Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, 39, 52-83.