Totally is, as part of "use your hands more... but not too much more... but also don't rest them at your sides!" stuff. The steeple thing is an improvement for people who aren't good at public speaking, but awkward as hell compared to someone who's actually-good (they may do it too, but you won't notice because it'll seem natural, and they probably won't do it nearly as much)
At this point it may actually have come around such that the awkward-steeple is a desirable signal of some kind, just because every corporations seems to have done the exact same training, so that doing it, even awkwardly, gives off a "this is official" vibe.
I've had a couple public speaking classes but when I first started shooting some video of myself (long before COVID) and looked at the result I was "Jesus, I wave my hands around a lot. Need to calm things down." It's easier with just upper body video though because you can just drop your hands out of the frame.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...
Somehow it upsets me that they call it a "triangle of power" when it is clearly a rhombus.
Salespeople are taught that if the sales prospect makes a pejorative or other remark that absolutely must be be overcome to close a sale, they should steeple their hands, engage the prospect, but never overtly disagree or argue.
https://www.psychmechanics.com/body-language-steepling-hands...
It's called chironomia and it has a very long history - there are even dictionaries of gesture, with systems of notation.
Sometimes I do it to annoy my partner, when I should be giving a thumbs-up I'll do this instead.
It is fairly useless if you’ve already had to give presentations at university, or trade shows.
Most of us should probably do proper dress rehearsals more. I always mentally walkthrough a presentation a few times but I often don't do an actual run-through--except those times when I miss switching the video on for a recorded presentation :-) And it really does help. I always make some changes if I'm giving a presentation more than once.
Record yourself. We all have both speech and physical tics.
That said, I've done this a lot. And the bar to getting materially better was probably a bunch of professional voice coaching and speaker training years ago.
Kind of a "you shouldn't trust me" pose...