Characteristics of effective counsellors include attitudinal skills like respecting clients and being non-judgemental. Effective counsellors also demonstrate empathy, unconditional positive regard, listening skills, verbal communication skills, and providing leads. Experience is important for counsellor effectiveness, as is establishing the right type of relationship with clients. Effective counsellors also have traits like self-awareness, maturity, and ability to maintain emotional distance. Counsellors face challenges like remaining impartial, setting relationship boundaries, navigating disjointed mental health systems, and managing their own mental health needs.

1. Characteristics of effective counsellors
Difference between effective and ineffective counsellors
counsellor competence-beyond micro skills (Ivey)
concerns and challenges faced by a counsellor

2. Characteristics of effective counsellors
 Counsellor help people with physical, emotional, and mental
health issues to improve their sense of well being, alternative
feelings of distress and resolve it.
 characteristics of an effective counsellor are:
1. Attitudinal skills: there is probably nothing which has a impact
on the outcome of counselling session than the counsellor’s
attitude.
 Respect , prising the client's individuality and structuring
the counselling to the needs, capacities and resources of the
individual.
 Counsellor must non judgemental.

3. • A client must feel comfortable, safe and confident that
confidentiality will be maintained at all times
 congruence : it is also consistency or harmony between what the
counsellor says, and what hear is. This condition reflects honestly
transparency and trust.
 A counsellor should agreeable and act appropriately to provide the
client with a comfortable foundation for the counselling
relationship.
 use appropriate body language such as avoid threatening posture
while maintain eye contact and respect the clients personal space.
 maintain a reassuring and comforting way of speech- the
tone of voice, speed of speech and style of delivery.

4. Empathy
 Empathic understanding is the ability to see thing from
the client’s perspective.
 Without empathy a counsellor will be unable to
comprehend a problem, experience, thought and feeling
of other person and will not be able to offer clients the
level of supportive understanding that they will be
required.

5. Unconditional positive regard
 The counsellor demonstrate a positive, unconditional
regard for the wellbeing of a client.
 Confrontation
 which uses the client’s behaviour or words to point out
inconsistencies between what is said and what they do

6. 2. Listening skills
 listening to the client is not just a matter of receiving
what they say it, but also receiving how they say it.
3. verbal communication skills
 The use of words in counselling is a skill in which, like
any other skill, requires practice to master, verbal
communication takes place first in the literal or content
phase.
 if using inappropriate vocabulary is used, rapport and
understanding will be hindered.

7.  In addition to the verbal phase, there is emotional phase.
This refers to other attributes involved in vocal
interactions such as volume.
 counselor must be sensitive to both the literal and
emotional phase of verbal communication
4. Giving leads
leads may be defined as statements that counselors use in
communication with the clients.

8. Lead have been classified into categories of techniques:
 Restatement of content: attempts to convey understanding
by repeating or rephrasing the communication.
 Questioning : seeks further information and asks the person
counselled to elaborate a point.
 Reflection of feelings: understanding from the point of
view and communicating that understanding.
 Reassurance : serves as a reward or reinforcing agent.
 Interpretation: explains meaning behind the client’s
statements.

9. Difference between effective and ineffective
counsellors
 There are three dimensions to distinguishing the
characteristics of effective and ineffective counsellors.
Experience
Type of relationship established
Non-intellective factors

10. Experience
 There are substantial evidence that experience is an important
variable in counsellor effectiveness.
 Fielder's investigations indicated that:
(1) Better trained therapists of varying therapy orientations
agreed more highly with each other in their concept of an
ideal therapeutic relationship than they agreed with the less
well trained therapist.
(2) The therapeutic relationship created by experts and non
experts, Non experienced experts counterparts were more
successful in communicating those conditions to their client.

11. Types of counselling relationship
 study by fielder(December 1950,1951), see man Parloff
and rogers suggest that effective counselling is related to
the type of relationship a counsellor establishes with his
client.
 Fielder’s classic studies indicates that there common
characteristics in the counselling relationships achieved
by experienced counsellors regardless, differ from non
experts in their ability to:
 (1) communicate with and understand their patients
 (2) maintain an appropriate distance
 (3) Divert themselves of status concerns in regard to
their patients.

12. Seeman(1954) demonstrated that success in psychotherapy is
closely related to the emotional quality of relationship
 Parloff’s study of group therapeutic relationship and outcome
of treatment indicated that clients who established better
relationships with their therapist tend to show greater
improvement than those whose relationships with the same
therapist are not as good.

13. Non intellective factors
 Studies of the relationship between effective counsellors and
personality show that effective counsellors in regards to self
concept, motivation, values, feelings about others and perceptual
organizations.
 Further counsellors effectiveness is associated with tolerance for
ambiguity, understanding of the client, maturity, ability to maintain
an appropriate emotional distance from the client and ability to
establish good social relationships with non clients.

14. Counsellor competence-beyond micro skills (Ivey)
 According to Ivey and Ivey (2007), the aim of counseling is
personal and social development.
 They have described a hierarchy of micro counseling skills
that define what the counselor does in an interview to achieve
specific results.
 The hierarchy rests on a foundation of attending behaviors
and basic listening skills.
 The list of skills presented here is based on Ivey and Ivey’s
model, with additional information taken from Cormier and
colleagues (1997) and Egan (2007).

16. Description
Attitudinal skills
Eye contact
Attentive body language
Distance awareness of
personal space
Verbal tracking Attending to
client’s story
Intermittent yet frequent looking into the eyes of
the client
Having a comfortable, relaxed, open posture
distance appropriate from client
may involve selective attention
Active listening skills
Observing nonverbal
Verbal behaviour
Minimal encouragers
Noting physiological changes, facial expressions,
body language
Noticing key words, topic changes, topic
exclusions, Incongruities
Head nodding, “um-hmm,” interested facial
expressions

17. Paraphrase Rephrasing the content of the client’s message
Summarization Restating overall meaning from a long period of
conversation
Reflection of
feelings
Accurately recognizing and communicating the client’s
emotions
Questions Using open-ended questions beginning with what and how
Concreteness Helping to make feelings, experiences, and behaviors more
specific
Advanced Skills
Advanced Empathy Communicating a deeper underlying meaning of client’s
experiences
Self-disclosure Sharing personal information for specific reasons, such as
modeling
Confrontation Communicating to the client his or her discrepancies or
mixed messages
Immediacy Discussing what is happening in the moment or the “here
and now”

18. Concerns and challenges faced by the counsellors
1. Putting personal judgements aside
some times counsellors are asses client’s on their own terms. The counsellor
must respect their clients point if view, cultural norms and religious beliefs.
2. Setting relationship limits
It is important that to make a limits control over the relationships with
the client.
3. Dealing with a disjointed system
unfortunately in the U.S and many other countries, there’s no streamed, constant set
of services for people who need mental health care.
Schools, hospitals, criminal justice system all offer different kind of therapy with
different standards. As a result a client had plenty of conflicting advice and many
types of treatment over the years.

19.  4. Needing a counsellor yourself
Counsellors sometimes neglect their own mental health needs. But
they will suffer from fatigue just like others. Indeed listening to clients
they share truly painful experiences, if the counsellor often feel sad or
listless, it can negatively affect the quality of their work.
 5. Novice counsellors having more challenges than others, Counter
transference management problems, getting too emotionally
involved, confidentiality are some of them.

20. Thank you