You just praise the kid personally for displaying values that are healthy and helpful to internalize and base an identity on, while for other behaviors (mostly

You just praise the kid personally for displaying values that are healthy and helpful to internalize and base an identity on, while for other behaviors (mostly negative ones), you express disappointment (or some other emotion) about the behavior not the person. Looking at it that way it seems pretty intuitive to me. Try and minimize the amount of therapy the kid's going to need as an adult. It's fine to make occasional mistakes, but if you find yourself constantly wanting to put your kid down or praise them for innate but effortless strengths, maybe you're not being quite fair to them and need to reexamine how you approach the relationship. But for most people (and a lot of good parents already), I'd think that most of these prescriptions are pretty natural and mostly effortless.