1  In my opinion I feel three main characteristics an effective counselor should have is Acceptance, Genuineness, Cultural Competence. Because these are all able to cater to a wide variety of people given that counselors are working with people that sometimes are very different to them in every aspect of life. weather is be race, culture and even orentation, a counselor must be able to accept the person entirely and be genuine when working with them and also accepting of their ways of viewing life and how their culture may play a role in the reasons the client is there to begin with. Once a counselor is able to see the client for who they are they can build a relationship with client. 

My previous supervisor at a counseling office held these characteristics because she never worked with one type of community. it was a variety of races and all the families felt welcomed by her in every situation. She saw them for who they were and never judged. This built such a strong connection for her with the community that even years after she left this office she was able to come back to the community but directly throught the schools and already had relationships with the parents. 

2. Its hard to just choose three for they are all good characteristics for a counselor to be a good one but since I have to choose I'd pick patience, trust, and communication skills. Patience because your going to come across shy or difficult clients in your profession and it will take patience and work and time for them to completely open up to you about their issues. Trust because people aren't going to confide in someone they can't trust. And communication skills because your going to have to know how to reach different types of people from all different types of back grounds and being able to communicate helps them feel more in tune to wanting to communicate back to you. I don't think you can be an effective counselor missing these traits because it takes all of them in counseling to help a person open up and feel comfortable being that exposed to someone. My cousin is a nurse and she has to have all these characteristics and then some because she also deals more with the possibility of losing her patients to. She has to have patience with the medicines and difficult patients, she has to have trust since shes poking and proding at her paitents, and she has to have communication skills to pass along her findings and diagnoises.