I found these important tips while doing some research. They cover seven incredibly important thoughts about self defense and what YOU must know as a martial artist.
"If you study self defense there are seven things that you MUST know. Failure in any one of these areas can have catastrophic consequences, even if you do well in the attack:
1) You must understand the ethical and legal aspects of force. If you ignore the legal, you may be training to send yourself and your students to prison. That's not a win. If you don't explore your own ethical attitudes towards force and violence, you may well freeze.
2) You must understand violence and criminal dynamics. If you do not know how bad guys attack, you are studying solutions without knowing the problems.
3) You must teach not fighting- how to avoid likely danger; how to escape; and how to de-escalate before things get ugly.
4) You must practice a small number of highly effective techniques that work on the ambush… and you must drill them to reflex speed.
5) Even if your reflex works well, you will almost certainly freeze. You need to be able to identify a freeze (it doesn't feel like you might expect) and break out of it. That is far easier said than done, as many victims who knew what they should do can attest.
6) Then, and only then, you can deal with the fight itself, the physical actions of self-defense. Most martial arts are good here, as long as they train with respect to the dynamics of a real fight: the speed, the pain, the dynamic motion and the stress effects.
7) You and your students need to be prepared for the potential physical, legal and psychological aftermath. Bleeding out from a fight that you 'won' losing your house and savings in a court settlement or the various forms of fast and slow suicide that sometimes claim survivors are not wins.
None of these aspects can be ignored."