This might be an unusual one as it’s from when I was a child. Maybe it’s a good sign that I can’t think of demotivating experiences from my university years?
When I was pretty young I went to piano lessons, and had a piano teacher who used to stick stickers on the pages of the songbook, to rate how well students were doing. For instance, if you learned something really well, she’d put a gold star sticker on it. She had several other colour stars, plus an orange circle, for if it was really bad.
This in itself was already demotivating. I was young, but not young enough for stickers, and I found it condescending. But I wasn’t outspoken enough to tell her I was too old for this, and it wasn’t a big deal, after all, so I just felt irritated and a bit insulted every time she stuck a sticker in my book.
I was pretty slack about piano practice and usually only remembered to do it at the last minute. I still tended to get pretty good ratings from the teacher. One week though, I spontaneously decided to work really hard, on a song that I liked. Once I’d started practicing it hard I was motivated to keep going, because I thought I’d do unusually well this week — I expected that the teacher would be amazed at my progress. But instead, when I played it, she said something like “hmm, that needs work, doesn’t it” and stuck an orange circle sticker on the page. I was shocked! I thought I’d learned it really well! What had I done wrong? I wanted to ask, but I was upset (and pretty young), and I didn’t think I could ask without showing that I was upset, and I felt like it would sound like I was upset about the sticker itself — which would be really childish! So I couldn’t bring myself to object or ask any questions.
It may sound silly, but this put me off piano for a long time!
Firstly I’d got a much worse result than usual when I’d worked unusually hard, which was pretty effective in taking away motivation to practice. But what really made the difference was the way the feedback was delivered, which was condescending and made it hard for me to engage with it at all. If I’d been younger, I think the teacher’s approach would have been fine.