You sharpened the iron. You set the plane. Now you have to push it across a board without ruining anything.
This is where most people go wrong.
Not because the motion is complicated. Because nobody told them that the two hands on a bench plane have different jobs. The front hand, on the knob, presses down at the start of the stroke. That downward pressure is what keeps the plane from diving off the near edge. The rear hand, on the tote, drives the plane forward through the cut. At the exit, the front hand releases and the rear hand takes over. Miss this handoff and you'll round over the ends of every board you touch. This is a common mistake.
Read the board before you pick up the plane. Grain rises in one direction and falls in the other. You want to plane with the falling grain, so the blade slices fibers that are lying flat. Plane into rising grain and the blade catches under a fiber, lifts it, and rips it out. On flat-sawn lumber you can usually see which way to go from the figure. On quartersawn stock, or anything with reversing grain like Bigleaf Maple, you won't know until you take a pass on scrap. That's the whole point of a scrap check.
Now watch the shavings. They're telling you things your eyes haven't caught yet.
A clean ribbon curling out of the mouth means everything is working. Dusty powder means the iron needs honing. Broken chips in one spot, with clean shavings everywhere else, means the grain is reversing there. Not a dull edge. Just a difficult board. The shaving is your best diagnostic instrument, and most people blow it off the bench without looking at it.
Full-length passes remove material evenly. That's your default when you're trying to get a face flat. Work overlapping strokes until the surface reads true under winding sticks. Short, targeted strokes over a specific area remove local high spots. If you're correcting twist or knocking down a hump, target it first, confirm with the sticks, then go back to full-length passes to unify everything. Don't just keep hitting the high spot. Check your work.
One more thing. On difficult species, lift the plane before it exits the board. Cherry is the most punishing here. A pass that rides over the trailing corner will bruise the end grain, and you won't get that bruise out without removing more material than you wanted to lose. Stop half an inch short on those boards and clean the corners separately with a block plane or a chisel. It takes ten seconds and saves you twenty minutes of damage control.
The pass is where everything upstream gets tested. Sharp iron, clean shaving. Cap iron set right, tearout stays controlled instead of catastrophic. Grain read correctly, the board gets better with every stroke. You can't fix a dull edge with technique. You can't fix bad grain-reading with a sharper iron. The pass just shows you what's true.
One note: everything above assumes a bevel-down bench plane, which is what most people are using. Bevel-up planes use the same body mechanics, same grip, same weight transfer. But tearout control works differently. No cap iron to adjust. You're controlling tearout through mouth tightening and skew angle instead. If that's your setup, the cap iron guidance doesn't apply. The rest does.