Want to reach your goals? Pretend you’re a dog.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s a good time to reflect on the past year, celebrate your accomplishments, and consider changes for next year. This practice applies not just to your personal or professional life, but also your financial life. Many financial goals take months or even years to accomplish. Building a six month emergency fund, saving for a down payment on a home, or becoming financially independent don’t happen overnight. It can be easy to lose sight of these long-term goals and feel like you’re not making progress. So it’s important to find a way to keep yourself motivated to continue doing the things that bring you closer to those goals.

So how do you motivate yourself? Pretend you’re a dog.

How do you reinforce good behavior in a dog? You give the dog a treat when he does something good. This treat reinforces the positive behavior, and the dog continues the good behavior in order to get more treats. Guess what. The same method works on humans. Research shows that rewards are responsible for three-quarters of why you do things. Gretchen Rubin, an influential writer on habits and author of New York Times bestseller Better Than Before, explains it like this.

When we give ourselves plenty of healthy treats, we don’t feel deprived. And when we don’t feel deprived, we don’t feel entitled to break our good habits. It’s a Secret of Adulthood for Habits: When we give more to ourselves, we can expect more from ourselves.

To keep yourself motivated, it’s healthy to give yourself treats along the way. You’ll be reinforcing the good financial habit, and it will be easier to stay on track to reach your goals.

Break up your larger goal into smaller “mini-goals” and reward yourself more frequently for staying on the path to achieving your goals. For example, when you have a goal of saving $100,000 for a down payment over 5 years, maybe you reward yourself every time your down payment savings goes up $5,000. Or if you’re paying off $80,000 in student loans, reward yourself when the balance hits $70,000, $60,000, $50,000, and so on. The reward doesn’t need to be monetary or spending more money. It just has to be something you enjoy and will give you the positive reinforcement for continuing to make progress on your goals. Check out these ideas for ways to reward yourself.

What were your goals this year? Did you accomplish them or move closer to reaching them? Celebrate that, and reward yourself. You deserve it. And for next year, plan on rewarding yourself more regularly by setting up some intermediate goals. The positive reinforcement will help you stay on track to reaching your long-term goals.