With more experience, the number of potentially relevant elements that the learner is able to recognize becomes overwhelming. At this point, since a sense of what is important in any particular situation is missing, performance becomes nerve-wracking and exhausting, and the student may well wonder how anyone ever masters the skill.

To cope with this overload and to achieve competence, people learn through instruction or experience, to devise a plan or choose a perspective. The perspective then determines which elements of the situation should be treated as important and which ones can be ignored. By restricting attention to only a few of the vast number of possibly relevant features and aspects, such a choice of a perspective makes decision making easier. The competent performer thus seeks new rules and reasoning procedures to decide upon a plan or perspective. But such rules are not as easy to come by as are the rules and maxims given beginners. There are just too many situations differing from each other in subtle, nuanced ways. More, in fact, than can be named or precisely defined, so no one can prepare for the learner a list of what to do in each possible situation. Competent performers, therefore, must decide for themselves in each situation what plan to choose and when to choose it without being sure that it will be appropriate in that particular situation.

Coping thus becomes frightening rather than exhausting. Prior to this stage, if the learned rules didn't work out, the performer could rationalize that he hadn't been given adequate rules rather than feel remorse because of his mistake. Now, however, the learner feels responsible for disasters. Of course, often at this stage, things work out well, and the competent performer experiences a kind of elation unknown to the beginner. Thus, learners find themselves on an emotional roller coaster.

A competent driver leaving the freeway on an off-ramp curve, after taking into account speed, surface condition, criticality of time, etc., may decide he is going too fast. He then has to decide whether to let up on the accelerator, remove his foot altogether, or step on the brake and precisely when to do so. He is relieved if he gets through the curve without being honked at and shaken if he begins to go into a skid.

The class A chess player, here classed as competent, may decide after studying a position that her opponent has weakened his king's defenses so that an attack against the king is a viable goal. If she chooses to attack, she can ignore features involving weaknesses in her own position created by the attack as well as the loss of pieces not essential to the attack. Pieces defending the enemy king become salient and their removal is all that matters. Successful plans induce euphoria, while mistakes are felt in the pit of the stomach.

As the competent performer become more and more emotionally involved in his tasks, it becomes increasingly difficult to draw back and to adopt the detached rule-following stance of the beginner. While it might seem that this involvement would interfere with detached rule-testing and so would inhibit further skill development, in fact just the opposite seems to be the case. As we shall soon see, if the detached rule-following stance of the novice and advanced beginner is replaced by involvement, one is set for further advancement, while resistance to the acceptance of risk and responsibility can lead to stagnation and ultimately to boredom and regression. [Patricia Benners work.]

[For example, a competent driver no longer merely follows rules designed to enable him or her to operate a vehicle safely and courteously, but begins a trip by selecting a goal. If a driver wishes to get somewhere very quickly, for example, comfort and courtesy play a diminished role in the selection of maneuvers and slightly greater risks might be accepted. Driving in this manner, the driver feels pride if the trip is completed quickly and uneventfully, and remorse follows arrest or near collision. Should the trip involve, say, an incident in which the driver passes another car dangerously so that only quick action by the other driver prevents an accident, the competent driver can respond to this experience in one of two qualitatively different ways. One response would be for the driver to decide that one should never rush and so the driver would modify the rule used to decide to hurry. Or, perhaps, the frightened driver would modify the rule for conditions for safe passing so that the driver only passes under exceedingly safe circumstances. These would be the approaches of the driver doomed to timidity and fear, and, by our definition, to competence. Or, responding quite differently, the driver might accept the deeply felt consequences of the act but not detachedly ask himself what went wrong and, especially, why. If one does this, it is likely that one won't be quite so likely to hurry in the future or to pass in similar situations, but one has a much better chance of ultimately becoming, with enough frightening or, preferably, rewarding experiences, a relaxed and expert driver.]